Richard Garriott has received the Industry Legend award on Wednesday, July 25 at the Develop Industry Excellence Awards. Congratulations Richard!

NCsoft Executive Producer and Creative Director Richard Garriott today provided the opening keynote address at the Develop Conference and Expo taking place in Brighton, UK. Garriott discussed the challenges within the MMO genre and detailed how his Destination Games development team is creating ways to answer those challenges in the soon-to-be-released Tabula Rasa.

The details of Garriotts talk :

MMO design has not changed in a decade

NCsofts Richard Garriott has opened the main two-day Develop conference with a speech dissecting the MMO genre he helped build, saying games developers have failed to add anything new to online game design since the release of his first game Ultima Online in 1997.

He said: "Game design has not changed over 10 years. Fundamentally the gameplay is unchanged."

"Worse yet," he added was that many of those fundamentals h borrowed from Ultima Online and contemporaries such as EverQuest have become standards that "undersell" the potential of the genre to consumers.

"We owe it to consumers to provide new kinds of gameplay," he added.

Combat systems, character leveling that caused players to obsesses over grinding and the misassumption that AI can be replace by player-controlled characters were the features he dismantled and accused MMO developers of being overly reliant on.