Rift Previews: Demoing Rift
MMORPG.com's Bill Murphy recently traveled to the Trion offices and sat in on a presentation and demo for Rift: Planes of Telara.
By William Murphy on April 30, 2010
After spending ample time with the developers of End of Nations at the recent Trion Worlds event in San Francisco, I made my way over to one of the kiosks featuring Trion's own self-developed MMORPG Rift: Planes of Telara. Scott Hartsman had just presented us with the game's premier trailer and told us a bit about the rift sytem and the look and feel of the game, but it was Simon Finch (Design Director) and Morgan Lockhart (Lore Lead) that took control of one of the game's Clerics to show me around the world of Telara. What I came away with that evening is that Rift may be a very traditional MMORPG at its core, but the innovations the game is attempting to present should be more than enough to differentiate this fantasy title from the rest of the pack when it hits store shelves in 2011.
First and foremost Simon and Morgan treated us to a brief explanation about the game's two factions. If you didn't read our previous article on the game with a new name, it goes something like this: The Guardians are the people of Telara who want to uphold the Vigil (a collection of five gods of Telara) and believe that the gods have not abandoned the world but instead are busy planning for the final battle of good versus evil. In their absence the Guardians seek to uphold all that is sacred and right and true in Telara. Meanwhile the Defiant are sort of the rebels and agnostics of the world. They don't care whether the Vigil even actually exists. They see the world being torn asunder by the Rifts and instead of praying for a miracle are bent on actually making one happen through force and the use of the powers available to them. It takes cracking a few eggs to make an omelet and all that. Neither side is "Good" or "Bad", and while the Defiant certainly look darker in tone, both have noble intentions.
For the purposes of our demo Morgan loaded up a level 20 Mathosian (think Human) Cleric to play around with. Only she told us she had taken the character down the path of Inquisitor. As stated on the game's newly launched official website an Inquisitor mixes life and death magics to heal allies and drain enemies. It's a pretty standard D&D iconic class, as were most of the other choices we saw on the character select screen. It made me wonder if the game's multi-classing system was still in place, to which Simon would only say, "We're going to talk about Rifts today."
"Yeah, but is there something like that still in place?" I asked.
"We're talking Rifts today." he said again.
"So we're talking Rifts, then?"
"Rifts. Yes."
I took that, along with Scott Hartsman's brief mention of ascended souls, to mean they've got something up their sleeves. Even the website for the game makes mention of the thousands of class possibilities present in the game without going into detail, so it looks like we're just going to have to wait and see what Trion has planned for that part of the game. In the meantime, I got to see plenty of the Inquisitor kicking some monster tail as we roamed one of the game's earlier zones.
Back on the character creation screen however, Morgan and Simon showed us how the team is aiming for a truly diverse yet simple way of making sure each character can look different. There is a triangle filled with hundreds of different "morph targets" which the player need only drag the mouse around to alter the face of their character in so many different ways. Each race looks different and unique in the game, but the team made the careful choice of ensuring that no matter where you put the reticule in the triangle your character will look handsome or pretty or badass or all three if you'd prefer. Some folks might find it sad that they can't make a character that looks like Rocky Dennis but I prefer my avatar to be tolerable to the eyes if I'm going to invest hundreds of hours into it.
Once we had seen the character creation Morgan loaded us into the proper world and I immediately became slack-jawed at the artwork. The screenshots simply don't do the game's beauty justice. You can really see that the company has hired a top-notch art team to create a distinct and gorgeous looking world for the game. People mill about an NPC camp with believable weight to their movements, each person looks different, and I can't stop staring at a short clergyman of sorts with a very squared and tall hat. He reminds me of a fatter version of the priest from The Princess Bride and I catch myself chuckling each time Morgan steers her Inquisitor past the little guy.
So I wasn't expecting anything when I was reading this article. Now I can say I'm fairly intrigued with the game. Good Article, and I'll be following Rift closely.
#K
My excitement levels just increased even further from reading that article
"We didn't have time to explore it too deeply but the Spring Terrace is a PvE instance set up for groups of five. Simon informed us there will be action available for raids of 10 and 20 people as well."
That turns me off a little.
Why is everybody going the personal instance way when daoc already had huge dungeons with mobs that scaled to the number of people in it. Doing an 6 hour raid with 90 people every now and then felt so much more epic than doing the same 10 people instance 3 times a day. But I think it worked out because of the pvp focus of the game. Endgame mostyl consisted of RvR and every now and then you would do those epic raids. It just depended on your server if those raids happened regularly or every few weekends but that was fine for me.
But don't get me wrong! I will still try out Rift. It might have other qualities (e.g. Rifts) which could make the game huge fun even though the biggest instance seems to be for 20 people according to this interview.
I Also hope it features decent PvP/RvR. Does anyone know how important PvP will be in RIFT? Are there any official statements on that?
"I took that... to mean they've got something up their sleeves."
Or they're simply trying to direct journalistic attention away from things their team has talked about in the past but which are no longer part of the release feature set. Never seen that before, uh-unh.
Do want.
This looks interesting and I plan on keeping my eyes and ears opne on this one. ^_^
I agree and wish there was some scaling done in this regard, but at least it looks like the Rifts will have some content to fill this sort of requirement possibly. Since the game is quite a while off, who knows what tweaks or changes will happen in the mean time...
This looks like an interesting title. It should be fun to watch as development progresses.
Good article.
Ehh....
ugh....
Simon pointed out to us how each character that takes part in an encounter gains loot as they participate in the Rift. No stopping to loot corpses, it all goes into a sort of personal sack that you can check out once the fighting's done. The longer you participate and the more you actually do during the encounter, the better you'll be rewarded. But this system ensures that everyone will get something for helping.
This game looks interesting and I like the sound of the above.
Rewarding players for participating, but not forcing them to compete against each other (like in Champions Online) is a good system for this sort of thing.
Good lord, I get more and more giddy by the instant! This game is shaping up to be a hell of an intrigue. I am already in love with the style of the world, and now they tell me that there is a full custimization system that will make the entire population quite unique looking to each other. Brilliant moves by Trion, The finding quests for a dungeon within a dungeon, is a good plan for the most part as I hate having to share and hunt down quests when all I really want to do is have an amazing dungeon crawl. I love that rifts are so random and that they climax so well. I love that you can see a rift opening from miles away and say, "Ohhh shit.." Good stuff!
Interesting concept, especially the part where you don't need to care about making sure you've looted every foe you have looting rights for, or that you're paying attention for the dice rolls that will come up. I wonder if that will harm the immersion feeling though, this is a hit-or-miss but it certainly is more convenient.
Regarding true randomness of appearances and types, I have yet to see a system like that in action that won't eventually become predictable.
Yeah I really liked their idea of automatically dishing out the relevant quests when you enter each dungeon as well. Having to share quests highlights how daft it is for everyone to even have the same quests in the first place. This system does a better job of hiding it. I can easily imagine lots of people moaning about it though. Those would be the ones that say no to all forms of fast travelling as it "hurts the world feel", no to loot appearing in their bags as more effort = more fun and so on........the types that want pain in their game basicly.
Being able to see rifts appearing from miles away due to environmental effects is also very cool. That really does contribute to this game being a virtual world and will give the players something to rally around, a common goal that will help to facilitate communication and roleplay amongst each other. Its also a great way for Trion to stick its proverbial fingers up at the static gameworlds of other mmos like Fallen Earth for example where nothing ever really happens.
I think it will help immersion. Afterall there is nothing at all immersive about seeing a box appear on your screen with a "loot all" button. You still might pay attention to dice rolls, though again I see nothing immersive about that either. It has to be better for immersion value when the players attention is focused on playing the game rather than paying attention to game mechanics.
As for the way they handle different appearances, I suppose everything in computer games becomes predictable sooner or later. The only way to make things truly unpredicatble would be to allow players to create the appearance of their own clothes and armour as they do in Second Life, but that would of course only serve to make a mess of the game world and ruin immersion.
It sounds like they want to give players everything they can as easily and minlessly as possible. The ability to change classes at anytime that they talked about originally and all of this make it sound like it is insanely accessible and could be a lot of fun for any given amount of time as long as they have the content to back it up. A 1-2 month grind to an endgame treadmill and i'll be gone in a month or two, but dynamic endless content could make it amazing.
yea I ll be one of those, dont see why they would have quests at all for the rifts. should think you already know what your purpose is with them. dont need to be asked to get anything from them. would prefer if they had made it opposite, putted in items in the rifts, that you then would need to figure who could possible need it. be it NPC or player for various dye´s or craft materials. over all sounds like another mainly solo quest grinder. with some extra quests on top if going about in groups, for no particular reason other than xp - which I do hate...and all claim to hate - kill 10 rats. but still dont want to play a MMO without cause its then just a grind.
other than that sure they want an action game...the auto looting. well wonder how many ways you could upgrade your gear how many diffrent potions they could have. cause that gonna be some junk load of upgrades...or inventory filler.
so yes. not crazy about how they make it a "mindless" action RPG...pre judge...know :P
will see. it got some other really strong points tho, that should be well worth trying it out for.
I really wanted to know about the character class and skills system.
Eh, I'm not getting too worked up about this game yet. Maybe years of misleading promises from game developers have jaded me, but when you really consider what we know about this game so far without sensationalizing it, it's not that amazing.
Consider how you'll feel about this "dynamic" content when you've been playing for months or years. You'll start noticing the same basic patterns (fight x of mob y followed by a miniboss) and start to lose interest. Once you get over the dynamic content portion - what does the game have to offer that's so novel? Maybe the class system, but we haven't even gotten confirmation that that is still intact from Heroes.
Sorry, but I'll need a lot more fleshed out information before I start considering this over the several other AAA titles coming out within the next year or so.
Def interested in this game now that I've read more about it. Hopefully it turns out to be more PvP than PvE oriented.
Hmm... 2 factions, traditional gameplay, public quests.
"Why fix something that works?"
It may be one to keep an eye on.
I'm excited about this game. It reminds me a lot of what Horizons was trying to do years ago before corporate drama and what has to be the worlds worst launch handicaped the game to a point where it never recovered. Horizons had these same dynamic spawns and developer unscripted events. They had these " rifts " too which went over quite well cept when they would spawn over a rare crafting resource zone or something. That would piss a lot of people off and with a population dwindling, a lack of players to fight it back cause them to be removed eventually.
Horizons also suffered from being way ahead of it's time and I suspect the technology simply wasn't available yet. I think the technology is strong enough now though. Horizons also had this class changing on the fly thing and it worked out great because certain skills and abilities could be obtained from the various class you trained in and " blended" into a custom build. If Rift does something like that I think I'll have my perfect mmorpg.
My only fear is this, combined with the state of the art graphics will raise the min cpu reqs too high for my ageing cpu. Hopefully they will come out with some min. reqs sometime soon so I know whether I'll need to save up to upgrade or save up to buy a new cpu.
I wish the game luck, but I'm not inspired.
It sounds like another in a long line of games focusing on visuals and char customization over innovative gameplay. 1000 faces to choose from, but I have to point, click, press a number sequence (which most likely wont change depending on the monster you are facing), and repeat. Oh, and all the while I'm looking at the back of my chars head anyway =/
I have to say I like what Trion is doing with their other titles better - this appears to be their "safe" game. Kudos for the good graphics, though, and while I'm not impressed by what I've seen on the "dynamic content," maybe that will change.
Sounds more and more like I'll be giving this one a pass. The dynamic content is the one real potential draw of this game for me...but everything else runs exactly counter to my interests. Sounds like they are making a game that is designed to play itself and allow players to be mindless...or a game more geared toward those who view MMO's more as a "sport" and less an extension of the old pen&paper RP experience. Nothing wrong with that...but definately not my style.
I am really looking more for something that would be a spiritual succesor to the old pen&paper RP that I grew up with. That pretty much requires dynamic content....but really wouldn't go along with things like re-speccing a character from one class to another on the fly...or some-how automagicaly being awarded all the quests associated with an instance just because you step into one.
i like the loot system
and the guests being given by the instance itself
I dont judge a game this early. They can say either way. I will follow it and if possible try it out.
Uhh... this game sounds like Warhammer and public quests, doesn't sound original at all. "Why fix what isn't broken? It works and it's fun, you know?" (about the gameplay mechanics)
Yeah dude, it's called IMPROVEMENT. Do we NEED to improve anything, like cell phones and televisions?? No, but we do because we WANT to, which is the whole point. I think everyone would welcome a change to the stagnant gameplay of most typical MMORPGs, this is just based on my experience.
The graphics look pretty good, but I mean if they were any worse I'd be disappointed. Screw these people saying "oh you need an MMO to have horrible graphdicks so every computer ever made can run it, even one from the 1980s" , I don't really wanna play World of Pong. Instead of game designers being forced to bring their game down, people need to get with the motherfuckin times and put something in their computer that isn't 10 years old. And no I didn't mean that in a sexual way, you sick bastards.
...or did I?