Rift: Planes of Telara

[raydeen]

Gravelord. Sold. (as long as it's like the Diablo 2 Necromancer....)

[Mrbloodworth]

For many years, the only thing anyone knew about Trion Worlds was that they had raised a lot of money. At E3 2009, the company finally revealed their first major MMO project, an epic fantasy game called Heroes of Talara.

“At its heart, Heroes of Talara is about making heroes,” said Chris Mancil, the game’s Director of Community Management.

It’s a line many games have used, but Trion has a new idea on how to achieve it. On top of regular MMO quests, one core feature of the game is dynamic quests where players should have a chance to change the world and get recognition for it.

For example, in the demonstration they presented, imps and demons began to attack a town that the character had just left. There, was essentially a giant quest open to everyone in the area, regardless of level. There were groups of imps and they had lit the town on fire. The quest was not instanced at all and the town was significantly different. On the fly, Trion was able to swap out the buildings for ruined, burning structures without so much as a loading screen.

Both lower and higher level characters could contribute to the quest in their own way. Even if a character was brand new, they could help out through fire fighting while higher level players tried to take down the demonic invaders.

Eventually, once enough demons were killed, a giant demon appeared. Whoever killed it (or did the most damage) gets recognition across the server as a Hero of Talara.

Once the demon had been taken down, immediately fireworks began to go off and the townspeople returned to the city to cheer their new hero. The fires were out, the buildings restored to their former glory, ready for another day. However, while the snap was sudden, Mancil did point out that had no one saved the village, it would have been destroyed, which could unveil a new line of quests, just as its rescue could.

While the version we saw was abbreviated, Mancil said that the eventual goal is to make this style of content accessible to hundreds of players simultaneously and that even the players who do not necessarily kill the demon get some kind of recognition for their contribution.

These kinds of quests happen in three ways. They’re not live events, in that GMs would need to enter the world and play the demon. Instead, they can either be triggered through a timer, a trigger in the world or the random decisions of the Trion team.

“Every time you login, something is new,” explained Mancil. They want to create a world that goes beyond the regular day-to-day MMO experience and encourages players to react and take on world altering events.

They also are giving the players a lot of flexibility in how they approach these events. Rather than make new characters each time someone wants to try a new class, a single character is capable of being any of the game’s traditional fantasy RPG classes. At any point while in town, they can simply swap with the click of the button. Each class, though, has its own level. It’s not as if players can jump from level 50 Cleric to Level 50 Rogue, even if they had not levelled up that far as a Rogue. They need to level each individually. During the swap, they also automatically change gear, although exactly what happens with inventories between classes is not yet decided.

On top of this, the game focuses heavily on subclasses. The best loot in the game is subclass cards. These can be employed on the fly, regardless of time or location to alter the core of the class to suit the group or encounter at hand. For example, a Warrior is generally more of a tank type, but when alone, he can turn himself into a Berserker to fight multiple monsters at once. Then, later on, when fighting the epic demon, he changed into a Summoner type to bring in multiple skeletons after it became apparent that melee wasn’t going to cut it.

The theme of heroism returns in the way combat happens in Talara. There are two major differences from the average MMO. First, the NPCs are rarely if never wandering around aimlessly, waiting to be killed. They have their own goals and motivations. Players tend to find bandits skirmishing with guards, not sitting around a camp fire. The second is that as each player wants to be a hero, they better damn well fight like it. The combat is one vs. many, as players take on many monsters at a time. In our demonstration, the warrior would knock back multiple enemies with a giant, stylized staff. Beyond this, though, the combat is intended to be very familiar to fans of MMOs. It uses special abilities and hotbars.

Artistically, the game makes a lot of nice strides forward. Humanoid enemies have expressions on their faces that actually change. No longer do they look like wax figures as they blindly smack players. The game’s artistic style is stylized, but “realistically rendered.” The effect is a very detailed, high-fantasy world that looks full of life. When they say stylized, they don’t mean cartoony or World of Warcraft. This is a much gritter artistic vision.

The game also has a very deep draw distance for scenery on the horizon, all of which is able to be explored. When something is visible over the hill, players can actually walk there. For example, they showed us another zone, which seemed to have its own theme, but was only distantly visible.

Trion is also very proud of their server technology, which enables them to do things like swap out entire towns for burning ones on the fly. It also has dynamic load distribution, which means that if one player is in one are and 100 are in another, their servers will react and provide the area with 100 players more processing power, which should improve their performance.

Heroes of Talara is scheduled to enter Beta testing very soon and Trion hopes to launch it in 2010.

Link.

[Ghambit]

I like the multiclass and subclass card idea.  Essentially, all it is is a way to pull up an alt w/o having to create and logon/off an entirely new character (you still have to level up each class though).  One mechanic you have to do in town, another you can just summon anywhere on-the-fly.  Metagaming the subclass cards (the on-the-fly version) was a smart move as well.

So what do we have for 2010 western-style High Fantasy so far?  Copernicus and Telara?

[Draegan]

Subclass cards are loot.  I kinda dig it.

[Brogarn]

Subclass cards are loot.  I kinda dig it.

Same here. Beyond that, I'm still "meh" though.

[schild]

Subclass cards are loot.  I kinda dig it.

They got that from Granado Espada afaik. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if Granado got it from some console game.

[sam, an eggplant]

From what I hear, their "revolutionary intelligent resource sharing server" is all HP/windows/SQL server/.NET. I can't think of any other MMOs with MS stack backends. Flat files, linux, oracle, and MySQL are all pretty common, but not windows. Is this a first?

[Lantyssa]

And last?

[bhodi]

EvE runs on windows and MSSQL, I believe, with stackless python as the application layer.

[Mrbloodworth]

I'm thinking the world server is just a cluster. And GM's have the ability to swap things at will, coupled with a asset streaming.

[Hartsman]

From what I hear, their "revolutionary intelligent resource sharing server" is all HP/windows/SQL server/.NET. I can't think of any other MMOs with MS stack backends. Flat files, linux, oracle, and MySQL are all pretty common, but not windows. Is this a first?

EQ originally ran NT4 (on a myriad of different hardware that first started with desktop boxes).

[sam, an eggplant]

Neat. They probably nicked the tanarus server code. It was developed for the MS gaming zone back when linux really sucked rocks. Like, before the 2.0 kernel.

I didn't know about EVE. Weird choice.

[WindupAtheist]

stuff

Fuck it, I changed my mind. This has me interested. That "demons wrecking the village" bit snagged me. Especially compared to the whole "Let's just make some totally unworldy little instances with a lobby and call it an MMO so we can collect a fee!" strategy that's going around lately.

Bonus points for their not screaming about their game all over the interwebs years before beta.

[Draegan]

It can still be years before beta.

[WindupAtheist]

Not intending to scream all over the interweb years before beta, then.  

I mean, what the hell. If the western subscription MMO market is ever going to become anything but a one-horse race, it's more likely to be due to some newcomers with bags of investment money coming in out of left field than it is the usual suspects ever getting their shit together. I don't know if these guys are going to be those newcomers, but they're a more interesting contender than... I dunno, Funcom or Turbine shitting out another flop.

[Jerrith]

Don't know if it has changed at all, but when I worked on Vanguard, it ran on Windows servers (except perhaps for some SOE support servers).  Of course, having Microsoft as a publisher at one point kinda encouraged that.   As for the database - I've worked with MS SQL Server, Postgres, mySQL, Oracle, and believe it or not, MS SQL Server was the easiest to use from a developer's point of view.  You get good tools for everyone (not just DBAs) in the box.  As for the others, I've only been impressed by tools for Oracle, but they come at a ~$2,000 per seat additional cost - non-DBAs are stuck with the (not so good) basics.

[Malakili]

“Every time you login, something is new,” explained Mancil. They want to create a world that goes beyond the regular day-to-day MMO experience and encourages players to react and take on world altering events.

If this is legit, I will play this game.  Of course, I'm not holding my breath.

[Hawkbit]

“Every time you login, something is new,” explained Mancil. They want to create a world that goes beyond the regular day-to-day MMO experience and encourages players to react and take on world altering events.

If this is legit, I will play this game.  Of course, I'm not holding my breath.

Even if it fails as an experiment, I'd really like to see someone attempt a dynamic, changing world.  Seasonal changes, political changes, environmental changes.  I know it's tough.  But it's got to be tried. 

[Ratman_tf]

Even if it fails as an experiment, I'd really like to see someone attempt a dynamic, changing world.  Seasonal changes, political changes, environmental changes.  I know it's tough.  But it's got to be tried. 

Yeah... We'll see how many of these features survive public testing. Assuming they get that far, that is.

[UnSub]

Seasonal changes

I can see it now: "Winter is too cold! Summer is too hot! Spring and Autumn are too boring!".

[WindupAtheist]

Eh, we'll see. Fresh faces, unusual ideas, big pile of money. It's a more interesting proposition than any I've heard lately, though obviously I wouldn't bet anything I couldn't afford to lose on it turning out awesome.

[Sobelius]

Just noticed this title via MMO news/site hopping: Heroes of Telara

More information is in the articles written about it than on the official site:
PCIGN
1UP

"The class system and dynamic events, on the other hand, are intriguing as hell, recalling the job system of Final Fantasy XI, only without the pain-in-the-assery of having to trek back to your house to switch professions. It should make both grouping and soloing a less time intensive process"

Anyone heard/seen anything else about it?

[Ard]

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=17033.0

[NiX]

Merged.

[Sobelius]

Ah - so I'm fashionably late to the party.

I wonder if their game acronym (HoT) was deliberate?

Well, given that there is very little about this title out there, this interview with Russ Brown (Trion VP Development for HoT) may make you smile or cringe...

[Nonentity]

Any media that shows dudes and/or ladies running around with giant polearms makes me irrationally giggly. If they made a World of Polearms Online Forever, I would be the happiest little boy.

Yeah, I dunno. We'll see if they can pull off these bold claims.

[JWIV]

Any media that shows dudes and/or ladies running around with giant polearms makes me irrationally giggly. If they made a World of Polearms Online Forever, I would be the happiest little boy.

Yeah, I dunno. We'll see if they can pull off these bold claims.

I have to admit I'm much the same way.  It's why I play an Arms war in WoW and will be trying to go polearms in Demon's Souls.

[Lantyssa]

Demon babes wielding polearms?  Yeah, that's why I'm at least watching from afar.

[Severian]

Batch of job openings at Trion from a couple weeks ago.

    * Design Development Manager. San Diego, CA. (USA)
    * Senior UI Artist. San Diego, CA. (USA)
    * Senior UI Programmer. San Diego, CA. (USA)
    * Terrain Arist. San Diego, CA. (USA)
    * Content Designer. Redwood City, CA. (USA)
    * Senior Content Designer. Redwood City, CA. (USA)
    * Senior Gameplay Programmer. Redwood City, CA. (USA)
    * Senior Tools Programmer. Redwood City, CA. (USA)
    * Senior Tools Programmer – Patching. Redwood City, CA. (USA)
    * Senior Producer – Beta. Redwood City, CA. (USA)
    * Audio Implementor. Redwood City, CA. (USA)
    * Environmental Artist. San Diego, CA. (USA)
    * Senior Systems Designer. Redwood City, CA. (USA)
    * Senior PS3 Programmer. Austin, TX. (USA)

[Kovacs]

Did I mis it or has Bill Trost really not come up yet?

[NiX]

Did I mis it or has Bill Trost really not come up yet?

Worked on EQ. And?

[Kovacs]

Is still working on the game (as an answer to "who the fuck are these guys," pg.1) with at least one guy with a decent F13 post count.  So that's something.

http://www.trionworld.com/news21.php

[schild]

Not just some guy. It's Scott Motherfucking Hartsman.

[Hawkbit]

Wow.  That made this a bit more interesting for me.

[Soln]

Not just some guy. It's Scott Motherfucking Hartsman.