MMORPG.com's Bill Murphy took in the sights and sounds at E3, stopping by the Trion booth for a little bit of hands on time with their upcoming MMORPG, Rift: Planes of Telara.
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Back in April I had the chance to fly out to San Francisco for Trion's unveiling of what is now called Rift: Planes of Telara. There was a lengthy hands-off demo exploring the rift gameplay mechanics back then, but at E3 this year I finally had a chance to get behind the controls and see how the fantasy MMORPG actually plays. Producer Adam Gershowitz (who recently has been added to the dev team at Trion) and head honcho Russ Brown watched over my shoulder and helped me along as I played through some of the game's newbie experience and explored the newly unveiled class system (details of which can be found here). And for a game that's still in the Alpha stages, the level of polish and sophistication is pretty incredible. Rift is certainly looking like the AAA title Trion hopes it will be.
Players will begin life in the Shadowlands. Not to be confused with the titular location of a certain Anarchy Online expansion, the Shadowlands is sort of a place between life and death in the Rift universe. Players are all former heroes of a past war that rocked the world, and begin as what the team refers to as "Ascended Souls", a Telaran slain during the great Shade War and resurrected to combat the forces of Regulos. As one of the Ascended, players have access and the ability to commune with the souls of Telara's many fallen heroes. Basically this serves as the lore reasoning behind death and the multi-classing system.
Read the E3 Hands On With Rift.
