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Newsroom
Heroes of Telara : Interview with Trion’s Russ Brown
Posted Oct 05, 2009 by Michael Bitton
Steven Crews of MMOGamer got a chance to sit down with Trion World Network VP Russ Brown to talk about their upcoming fantasy MMOG, Heroes of Telara.
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There has been a lot of talk about Telara's malleable world, which allows for developers to change the properties and appearance of the world on the fly. In the interview, Russ Brown gives some specific examples of how the developers are looking to take advantage of this technology to keep the game fresh to players saying, "Once you have the content like animations, I can tell the servers how they need to behave. Once you have a dragon, I can say “Hey dragon, go attack over here. Hey dragon, go do this.” Or, “orcs go attack over there.”
Mr. Brown also adds, "One of my grand visions is to not only do it on a big scale but do it on a small scale too. Have things like merchants who have sales. Don’t always have the same things. So when people stumble across him, they’ll think “Cool, this guy is selling a magical weapon he didn’t yesterday.”
Some interesting details on the subclass system were revealed as well:
Russ Brown: So what the subclass system is; we have four basic core classes. And the four classes have their basic MMO roles. You have a fighter, a cleric, a rogue and a mage. The subclass system is how you do hybrids and how you get some specialization in your class. Given this example, so you want to play a paladin who is more of a fighter who can heal, you’ll play a subclass paladin on a fighter. If you want to play a paladin who is more like a cleric who can fight, you’ll play a paladin as a subclass to the cleric.
There will also be "boatloads" of these sorts of hybrid subclasses in the game, according to Mr. Brown. The subclasses will apparently even drop off monsters, as Steven Crews describes having seen a subclass drop off a world boss monster in the demo shown to him. The real question then is, how the heck do they plan to balance all these subclasses? Russ has got an answer for that one too, saying, "I’ll tell you this right now. I balance four classes. [Laughter] That’s my answer."
For the full interview head on over to MMOGamer.
