Richard Garriott on the Logos

In an interview with GameDaily, Richard Garriott talks about the development of the gameworld of NCsoft‘s upcoming MMO Tabula Rasa.

Garriott informs that he believes that designers need to know a lot about the history of a universe, its people, its science, its culture, and its language, because this comes out directly in the telling of the story. This Tolkien-esque style of developing has lead to the creation of the languages he has used in Ultima Online – the runic language – and the new logogrammatic Logos language featured in Tabula Rasa.

He adds that while the runic language was very useful for Ultima Online in that runes work Greek for English speaking westerners and stay in theme with the world, for Tabula Rasa he needed something different. He needed it to be still easily decipherable yet he needed something that would hold true regardless of your country of origin and your original spoken language.

In Tabula Rasa the pictographic “logogrammatic” language, known as the Logos, is left through out the universe by an advanced alien race for all civilizations with developed enough language skills to read.

Oh, and just in case you’re planning to use this info to help you in that translation contest that NCsoft has up, just keep in mind that the language is not a word for word to English language. Keep in mind that when translating into English or any other language, the idea of the symbol is more important than the exact English word.

For the whole interview, feel free to use our “read” link below.

In an interview with GameDaily, Richard Garriott talks about the development of the gameworld of NCsoft‘s upcoming MMO Tabula Rasa.

Garriott informs that he believes that designers need to know a lot about the history of a universe, its people, its science, its culture, and its language, because this comes out directly in the telling of the story. This Tolkien-esque style of developing has lead to the creation of the languages he has used in Ultima Online – the runic language – and the new logogrammatic Logos language featured in Tabula Rasa.

He adds that while the runic language was very useful for Ultima Online in that runes work Greek for English speaking westerners and stay in theme with the world, for Tabula Rasa he needed something different. He needed it to be still easily decipherable yet he needed something that would hold true regardless of your country of origin and your original spoken language.

In Tabula Rasa the pictographic “logogrammatic” language, known as the Logos, is left through out the universe by an advanced alien race for all civilizations with developed enough language skills to read.

Oh, and just in case you’re planning to use this info to help you in that translation contest that NCsoft has up, just keep in mind that the language is not a word for word to English language. Keep in mind that when translating into English or any other language, the idea of the symbol is more important than the exact English word.

For the whole interview, feel free to use our “read” link below.