Spotlight on - Rift: Planes of Telara

Previously, GameSpot brought you 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo coverage of Trion's massively multiplayer game Heroes of Telara. The developers of this fantasy-themed game described it as one that would stand out from other online role-playing games by offering server-side updates that let the content team change the world dynamically on a regular basis. It would also offer a free-form character advancement system that let you change your character's class more or less freely from one class to the other, and back again.

Since then, the development team has changed course somewhat and decided to incorporate the dynamic, server-side changes afforded by the technology into the game's fiction. Whereas Heroes of Telara was a fantasy-themed massively multiplayer game with a somewhat distinct look, Rift: Planes of Telara is now a slightly more offbeat fantasy game where the colorful world of Telara now exists as a nexus between various planes of existence. The different planes are now encroaching into Telara in the form of "rifts"--interdimensional gaps through which horrendous monsters have begun to emerge. As a result, the land has split into two factions. The "guardians" believe the old ways are best and that the rifts should be sealed in accordance with the wishes of Telara's gods. The "defiants," however, prefer to try seizing whatever power they can get their hands on, including from the dimensional rifts.

We watched a demonstration run through numerous areas, including huge, bustling towns where non-player characters went about their business based not on tight, hardcoded scripting, but rather, on quest triggers for the numerous in-game events that the company plans. We then skipped ahead to an instance in a fairy glade, where the power of the Fae King's will changed the climates in different parts of this huge outdoor instance. For example, the initial entry area was a forest in spring, but it later changed to a summer glade, then to an autumnal dell, and finally to a wintry wasteland.

Among other things, this instance demonstrated that Telara will have numerous outdoor instances (rather than being limited to indoor caves and dungeons, as in most other games of this sort). In this area, we were also able to observe some of the game's different types of quests, such as "heroic challenges," which are essentially miniature raid bosses that appear in instances and immediately act as quest goals. This new type of encounter is intended to remedy the typical problem of games that have quests tied to certain instances. In some cases, some members of your party may have an instance quest active, while other people haven't taken that quest on yet and won't be able to reap the rewards. Instead, heroic challenges will offer all the challenge and rewards of longer term quests without having those initial strings attached.

The same goes for the game's "timed challenges," which can take the form of dimensional rifts that, when activated, spawn invading creatures from another dimension. This changes the appearance of the world, as well as offers you and any nearby characters a shared quest not unlike Warhammer Online's public quests. Essentially, once the rift is activated, all nearby players will get quest pop-ups that keep track of how many specific types of rift monsters have been defeated. If everyone in the area can cut down the specified monsters in time, they'll receive rewards and unlock the next tier of critters. And unlike the public quests of Warhammer Online, participants will still receive rewards...even if they happen to die while fighting the rift monsters. This particular rift summoned an enormous plant monster whose giant vines and leaves planted themselves into the ground below. This changed the bright forest into a darker, wooded vale and spawned various weird, plantlike critters, as well as certain environmental aids. These included magic mushrooms that briefly stunned the rift monsters and berry bushes that healed their users over time.

In addition to instances, you'll find numerous quests in the shared world of Telara, as well as plenty of monsters to fight and other activities to explore. The game's monsters will even have their own set behaviors, rather than always appearing in the exact same place at the exact same time. In fact, some monsters may actually hate other monsters and be in the process of beating the daylights out of each other by the time you encounter them. This included the field of trolls we passed through (in which the bulky brutes were almost too busy beating each other over the head to pay attention to us) on our way to the next town, which housed a dimensional "tear." Tears, like rifts, are essentially gaps between worlds that can also be activated to summon a challenging encounter. In this case, a giant tree monster immediately spawned right into the shared world. According to the developers, the idea behind dimensional tears is to let even casual players see "cool stuff" like raiding boss-class monsters, rather than restricting this kind of content to hardcore players who regularly go on raids with their guilds.

While we did get a good look at the game's colorful fantasy world, we came away with no real details about the revamp of the character class system, which, sadly, will no longer allow for the free-form multiclassing that was proposed at last year's E3. However, the team assures us that it has something even more interesting in mind for the character system that keeps the "spirit" of the original design's flexible system and that details will be forthcoming later. Rift: Planes of Telara is scheduled for launch next year.