Rift: Planes of Telara

[Alderaan]

Meh, i hate the way they're selecting for beta. I have a total of i think 9 posts on their forum. It does encourage people to not be tools on their forum and hopefully builds a better community, which is what they're going after, i suppose.

[Hyan]

Hmm so if they're inviting people to beta already when is the estimated release date?

[Purrrfect]

Spring '11 I think? I was a little let down about the posting thing, though shouldn't have been a surprise, Tera did the exact same thing for the FGT2 selections. I believe my post in that thread was maybe my 3rd on the board...

[Alderaan]

http://www.tentonhammer.com/rift/han...preview-part-1

5 new classes!

* Pyromancer
* Assassin
* Sentinel
* Beastmaster
* Saboteur

An exclusive first look at Trion’s upcoming MMOG
Very recently, Ten Ton Hammer was among the first group of gamers to spend some hands-on time with Rift: Planes of Telara. For this part of the preview, we'll explore never-before-seen classes, character creation, and the new starting areas of Shadowlands, Free Marches, and Silverwood. Along the way, we'll delve deeper into concepts like character progression and rifts and discover never before discussed topics like the death penalty, early boss encounters, professions and crafting. All that, plus some close-up impressions of one of Rift's never-before-revealed classes in part 1 of our first ever Rift: Planes of Telara hands-on preview!

New Classes and Character Creation

After settling into our seats at Trion's posh Redwood City studios, the first step was to make our characters. While we were busy toggling and sliding, Trion Creative Director Scott Hartsman took the opportunity to dispel some misconceptions about the game's player factions, specifically the Guardians. In our first Rift interview with Scott, he noted that it isn't as simple as the Guardians are good and the Defiants are evil. Instead, the Guardians serve the gods and the Defiants serve their technology. And both sides view each other as dangerous, if not outright evil.

Nightblade
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/87880/preview

Scott took this point further, noting that in the lore, the Guardians are far from a bunch of white hats. Only the smartest and best at killing made their way back from the Shadowlands to take on Ascension at the hands of the gods, regardless of their moral choices in life. The gods simply need an army of the strongest fighters imaginable, and the souls that fell short... well, that's where the game's dual-classing system comes in. You can tack on these souls to become even more varied and powerful, but more on that below.

In Rift, souls (or classes) are split down the Guardian / Defiant divide. We were introduced to several previously undisclosed souls, primarily on the Guardian side. A few of these classes included the Sentinel (a healer in the classic sense), the Pyromancer (fire-based DPS and direct damage), the Assassin (a poison DoT rogue), the Beastmaster (loads of pets and DPS), and one of my new favorites, the Saboteur (a class that specializes in sneaking up to five bombs onto a target, then detonating them - preferably when the mob is appropriately loaded down with de-buffs).

Your character will look pretty good, especially for a recently dead guy. Character creation is as rich and detailed as you'd expect in a modern RPG, complete with the en vogue triangular sliders for face and body shape, loads of hair styles, et al. The only sour note (and this too seems to be a trend) is the lack of a fantasy name generator. Being that this is how I and a number of my friends found our gamer tags in the first place, I'd hate for Rift to make the omission, but we'll chalk it up to the game being in late alpha.

And that brings me to my next point. Rift is officially in late alpha, but through level 12 (the highest I could get in our five hours with the game) it's more polished than games I've played in late beta. The options included novelties such as adjusting "footstep volume" (strange how much this can grate on you after a while), convincing goblin voiceovers, multiple combat and death animations for enemy groups, and swimming doesn't give you vasoline eyes and the inevitable smeary underwater zone headache. The Rift devs even took a page out of the FPS playbook: if you start to run short on hitpoints, the screen starts to grey out and your hear your heart beating faster.

Shadowlands

The Shadowlands is what Scott called "the island on Telara's River Styx - you're dead but not quite dead." It's your introduction to what your side - Guardian or Defiant - believes, who you are, what your mission is, and what your race has endured. Better yet, Shadowlands isn't a single player tutorial , but a true multiplayer experience hosting up to 30 people from your faction, complete with substantial opportunities to group within your first fifteen minutes of gameplay.

Satyr Dominator
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/87874/preview

Shadowlands is darkly gorgeous, heavy in contrasty blacks and purple hues and pierced by otherworldly light. Dead souls fell ominously from the sky like a meteor shower, only to be absorbed by the Shadowlands' soil. Meanwhile, ghastly creatures kept guard over the paths to the purifying shrine (Guardians) or technological wonder (Defiants) that would take my reincarnated character back to Telara. These creatures were a little terrifying too, especially if you zoomed into first person view. And yes, you can go first-person, and it's one of Rift's many little wonders - fun in snatches but inadvisable when fighting with potential adds beside and behind you. But it's not all darkness and despair; the landscape is full of trees, glens, streambeds, and comfortably twisted takes on a nice enough earthly landscape.

At spawn-in I was told that I have two soul tree points, so I immediately I got a taste of one of Rift's defining systems. Disparaged by some as simply Rift's take on talent trees, having experienced the soul tree firsthand I can say that it's not just a system of enhancements for your abilities. Instead, your choices in the Soul Tree determine what spells you'll have, both directly and indirectly. As a direct damage-dealing pyromancer, for example, I started out by enhancing my fireball and flame dart abilities with soul tree points. So far this sounds pretty familiar, right? But spending those points on unrelated abilities unlocked a new flame armor self-buff in a separate part of the soul tree. A few short levels later I obtained my fourth point which, once spent, granted me a spell which drains charge (charge builds as spells and abilities are used, much like rage with a WoW warrior) to increase the damage output of my fire spells. It's worth noting that in addition to Soul Tree enhancements, players can spend money at a trainer in town to rank up their spells and abilities too.

Respecing, multiple specs, and the ability to switch out specs on the fly are a fundamental part of Rift's character development. "People love playing with combinations. The idea is to facilitate it and turn it into fun rather than having people pay obscene amounts of money to respec." -Scott explained that player can buy up to four loadouts to switch between any time they're not in combat. If you notice your healer is having a tough time keeping your tank battle-ready, maybe you can switch to a build that includes minor healing. Or maybe a boss mob has lots of knockback - why not switch to a build with more ranged capability? 270+ combinations result from taking on up to three souls (two plus your starting soul). Won't that variance lead to a balancing nightmare? "We fully expect that people will discover new and exciting things that never occurred to us, and that's ok... that's part of the fun. We're not trying to overbalance everything and make everyone feel exactly the same."

Scarred Mire Ranger
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/87882/preview

Shadowlands also featured the first glimpse of dynamic content in the form of a extra-planar tear; a tear that can quickly grow into a rift. Planar tears are the start of an invasion from the planes of fire, water, life, and death. Minions from these planes seek soulstone, as do the Guardians (who use it to gain power from the gods) and Defiants (who use it to power their technology). Players can use Planar Lure items to enter the rift and fight the baddies before they're ready, but if tears are left unaddressed, tears become rifts, and rifts become huge and terrifying. The plane of fire rift in the Guardian Shadowlands quickly grew to a hissing maelstrom that dominated the skybox in a matter of minutes. Rifts - early ones at least, are soloable, multiple stage battles provide encounter-changing consumables and loot (via a nifty UI frame, I might add, that saves you from having to loot a chest at the Rift site). Rifts, however, have been compared to Warhammer Online's public quests, and not without good reason. But rifts can turn into something much more than simple, localized PQs, but for that you'll have to stay tuned for part 2 of Ten Ton Hammer's hands-on with Rift.

Silverwood and Free Marches
Following a harrowing multi-stage boss encounter at level 5ish, your character will be transported to Telara. For Guardians, this means the lush sylvan dreamscape of Silverwood in the north, for Defiants it means the slightly more foreboding Freemarch area in the south. Advance parties of extra-planar minions stalk both areas, warping and empowering the local flora and fauna to the whims of their masters. Tears and Rifts break out in greater frequency here, and quests begin to revolve around putting an end to the growing distubances.

Meridian Warlock Purifier
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/87879/preview

While we weren't able to craft anything usable at this early stage, some of the gathering professions were represented by trainers upon zone in. Butchering, mining, and gathering were among the trainable professions in the Free Marches and Silverwood starting area. Mining nodes randomly spawned atop rock outcroppings and Free Marches, being a bit more stark, is better suited for miners. Silverwood, on the other hand, seemed to contain more gathering nodes, and both areas were rife with animal-like enemies for butchering. Players can train a max of three professions and can retrain anytime, so it's worthwhile to train these professions even if you don't plan on crafting much for the extra soul tree training cash.

I spent the bulk of my hands-on time in Silverwood, playing in an around the level 9+ Argent Glade area deeper in Silverwood, and my Pyromancer continued to develop new skills, including a seven second root (perfect for kiting) and a long-lasting casting circle that amped up my damage spells even more. I evolved a tactic of creating a casting circle then moving forward a short distance and hitting the enemy with a long-cast fireball to pull, then using flame darts as the mob approached. Then I used the fire net ability to hold the mob in place moved back into the casting circle, and hit it with another volley of fireballs and flame darts. It worked pretty well, and I was pleasantly surprised that these kind of tactics were available even before level 10.

I looted my first collection around this time too. Scott explained that Rift will follow the EverQuest II model of collections, meaning that collections aren't just completionist tasks. Well, they are, but collections can be turned in or "stashed" (as Scott put it) for rewards.

It was in Silverwood that I had my first brush with death in Rift. It's been some time since anyone's tinkered with the MMO death mechanic. Rift's take? Once an hour, instead of respawning at a bind point, you can undertake a "Soul Walk." That sounds very nice and peaceful, but really it's eleven seconds of sheer terror as you rise from your corpse and run away from whatever killed you (and other things that want to kill you). Escape, and you're rewarded with no loss of progress or death penalty. In Rift, you're penalized for the crime of dying by surrendering a chunk of your hitpoint and power bars, and one way to gain back your precious pools is to eat special foods. The penalty is punishing but not too punishing, and the Soul Walk reintroduces some corpse run-esque excitement to a tired old mechanic.

Hopes and Fears
The Soul Walk, represents the proper mix of old and new required to successfully innovate on core gameplay. Truthfully, Rift is full of these sorts of minor innovations which add up to major improvement. Rifts resemble PQs but are (as I'll show you in part 2 of this hands-on report) PQs with a purpose. The Soul Tree is much like a talent tree, but offers more (including good reasons to spend points that players typically hoard). Aspects of classes and combat are very familiar, but Rift gives you more options sooner. Best of all, a comfortable level of solo and co-op challenge is back for low level players of a top-tier fantasy MMORPG.

Skeletal Barbarian
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/87875/preview

That's not to say that I don't have concerns, primarily with how Rift is interpreted. Trion has garnered top devs from across the industry. More than a few of these devs, such as Class Designer Adam Gershowitz, came from the Warhammer Online design team, and classes like the Pyromancer and Sword Dancer bear a striking resemblance to WAR classes like the Bright Wizard and Blade Master (respectively). Many believe that imbalance (or at least the perception of imbalance) played a big role in WAR's cold reception, and Scott Hartsman has made it known that some imbalance (especially in light of the 270 soul combinations) will be an ongoing part of the game.

While we didn't see an PvP action this time around, we did sneak a peak at UI frame labeled Warfronts. No details were available on this feature, but it seems likely that Rift is also adopting another favorite feature from Warhammer Online: scenarios. If that's the case, players who put a strong emphasis on fair play (or believe themselves to be the sole arbiter of fair play) will get to compare classes fairly early in the game, rather than when the Guardians in the north finally clash with the Defiants in the south at higher levels.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The most promising thing about Rift is how far along the game is even in closed alpha, meaning there will be plenty of time to get all the kinks worked out. And we haven't yet covered some of the more exciting things about PvE, such as what Rifts evolve into and what awaits players in dungeons and instances. This and more in part 2 of our Rift: Planes of Telara First Hands-On Preview!

[Insanecyclone]

http://www.curse.com/articles/rift-news/799723.aspx

Last week we were able to get our hands on an exclusive showing of Rift: Planes of Telara! We were able to take our starting character from level 1-11, check out some of the starting quests/zones, and participate in a level 20 instance with a group.


Starting

The folks at Trion set up a beautiful play testing area for us and Scott Hartsman gave us a brief introduction to the game including the two factions Defiants and Guardians. Although it might sound like good and evil, both sides are committed to achieving their goals and will do whatever is necessary. Guardians do it while serving the old gods, and the Defiants have turned to new technologies. He also mentioned that the way Guardians Ascend is by being the best at fighting and killing in their past life. Both Guardians and Defiants are brought back by the gods who are amassing an army of the strongest individuals, regardless of which way their moral compass pointed in their past life.
Playing The Game

Character Creation - The character creator is as lush as any major MMO. There are options to customize nearly every aspect of your character

Polish, Movement, Extras - Rift: Planes of Telara has an incredible level of polish and ran very well. For a game currently advertised in Alpha, it felt more like an open beta client and really impressed.

Character movement is very intuitive and feels like other MMOs. Camera angles could zoom in, zoom out, and felt completely fleshed out.

The team really put some thought into making the game enjoyable and alleviating painful tasks. For example they added the ability to click once to loot multiple surrounding drops (an excellent feature for anyone who's been mobbed by lots of quest spawn). Players also don't need to worry about repairing armor, and sitting out after a death (detailed in interview below).

Leveling and Early Gameplay - We were able to reach level 12, the highest level of the day by anyone in the press group (Go Curse!), and ran through around 30 quests. The most impressive feature of Rift was the absolute lack of any grinding through level 12. In the lower level areas the quests focus more on exploration, interaction with the map, and solving problems more than killing wingbats and bringing back their toes to the smelly old guy who collects them. It kept the game fun, and intriguing during the playtest. You also really get a feel for the soul system, and are actively changing your talents and spec as soon as you hit level 2. Making a few quick changes to my character before hitting the next quest made a huge difference in my play style and kept me constantly trying new combinations.

During a quest we came upon a swirly logo on the world map and encountered our first Rift. Rifts provide a ton of content, massive spawn (massive means massive, during one encounter huge mobs were dropping from the sky while these massive tentacle like creatures started appearing in the sky, very cool), lots of fighting, and great XP/loot. Closing the rift took about 15 minutes and absolutely had me excited to find another one and see what would come out of it.

Through level 12 we were able to see three distinct zones, completely fleshed out with NPC's, Vendors, Quests, Mobs, and a large area to explore. Even when exploring areas that were not related to quests we had or areas we were supposed to be near, it was still very apparent that the entire zone had the same level quality.

High Level Instance - Toward the end of the playtest the folks at Trion let us hop on level 20 pre-mades to try our hands at an instance. We played a DPS class character and were able to use the soul system to pick a combination of spells and abilities. The final boss of the instance was a ridiculously huge turtle/frog like beast the spewed purple venom vomit and was incredibly hard to kill. As a group we wiped about 8-9 times, and granted most of us were not familiar with our spell set or our surroundings, but the instance was very challenging and required a lot of team work.

We were able to catch up with Scott Hartsman a few days after the playtest for some follow up Q&A; enjoy!
Q&A With Scott Hartsman

Curse: The screenshots have shown consistent armor styles. Will armor vary graphically by archetype, or by souls. Is the equipment itself restricted to a particular soul?

Scott Hartsman: We will be locking it to archetype. Through a lot of the releases we've done so far, we've been sticking to certain armor sets, but as more armor sets come online over time you're going to see that look evolve, and since we are locking it to archetype, that really lets us do A LOT more visuals. For example, everytime you make a piece of armor you have to fit it to every race/gender combination in the game, and because of our archetype lock and number of race/genders we're going to be launching with more armor models than are available in many other MMOS. We're currently targeting about 15 or 16 base models.

Curse: Can you talk to us a little about death penalties in the game and how they will work?

Scott Hartsman: The one we've been play testing with for the last few months is a penalty to max health that players can eat away. It's tested really well, with a few balance tweaks, for example, what does it cost to get the food that removes the penalty, and how long does it take to eat away the penalty. Those are our tuning points.

Curse: What are the mechanics of multiplayer combat, are there combinations, how will players be able to work together using the different classes or soul system?

Scott Hartsman: The classes themselves are supposed to create synergies pretty well with each other. We're investing more time and effort into letting players discover souls and how they interact with each other on their own. Using different souls will create interesting combos as players learn how to use them over time. Our game is more about the individual souls themselves and the interactions that players can discover on their own.

Curse: Regarding end game content and progression - will certain content be gated off via flags and keys, or is it planned to be accessible to everyone from the beginning?

Scott Hartsman: When we release the world we want it to be as open as possible. We won't be setting flags or gates, ours will be can you kill it or will it kill you. It's not about questing for 80 hours to try and get somewhere.

Curse:: How many points will you have available for your souls at max level? Previous info alludes to 1 per level, but the last root ability is at 51 points. Is there any point acquisition aside from leveling?

Scott Hartsman: It is tied to one point per level, and what we fully expect to happen when we release is the same thing that's happening now in testing. We made the idea of having different roles, or what you might think of as a spec, available for purchase. So don't think of it as "man I've only got one point, and if I want ability X I have to invest in all of it and now I'm locked in". If you have four roles you can swap back and forth between, then great, you might have a paladin soul you use for a dungeon, and then one push button away you have a role that has spoints spread across other souls. The character I'm playing on alpha right now has two specs I use, if I'm just plugging through content I'm just 100% Beastmaster. I can also switch to my soul set that's 75% paladin, and 25% beastmaster because there are some good synergies there. Then when I want something new I switch to my other set which is part Champion and part Beastmaster. The point is you're able to take on multiple roles and switch between them at will. You can buy additional role slots at your trainer and you're able to put the roles right on your hot bar and swap anytime you're not in combat. It gives players a level of infinite discovery, and lets them find new and interesting combos to do without getting tired of their characters.

Curse: Does equipment use a durability system where all equipment must eventually be replaced, or is it tied to the death penalty and then repaired back to full indefinitely?

Scott Hartsman: There is none, the penalty for death is you lose some of your hit point cap/health cap, until it goes away. As far as equipment it will not break down or change. You do not need to go to Timmy the blacksmith to repair your epic armor.

Curse: Has anything regarding faction-specific souls been finalized? Will some souls be permanently locked off to a faction?

Scott Hartsman: At the moment the only locks we have in testing, are the choices you make when you first create your character. As you level up, are offered quests, and find other opportunities to get souls, you'll find that both sides have access to the same souls. There are some fictional gymnastics that we have to do to make that make sense, but at the end of the day we felt the need to do that - we didn't want to create a situation where we would have to balance the sides, and that isn't a winning road for players or us.

Thanks Scott and Trion for the great experience, we are anxiously looking forward to this new MMO!

[Priran]

sounds like aion with the ratio of asia grinder:WoW tilted even further towards WoW

[Alderaan]

There appears to be actual content, so i'm not sure where anything, other than the "rift", sounds like anything remotely similar to Aion or Asian grinder. This is an NA game with very respected devs that actually know what's going on.

[Priran]

things other than the defining feature that are similar to aion:

the Saboteur (a class that specializes in sneaking up to five bombs onto a target, then detonating them - preferably when the mob is appropriately loaded down with de-buffs).

In our first Rift interview with Scott, he noted that it isn't as simple as the Guardians are good and the Defiants are evil... both sides view each other as dangerous, if not outright evil....

Only the smartest and best at killing made their way back from the Shadowlands to take on Ascension at the hands of the gods

The character creator is as lush as any major MMO. There are options to customize nearly every aspect of your character

Curse: Can you talk to us a little about death penalties in the game and how they will work?

Scott Hartsman: The one we've been play testing with for the last few months is a penalty to max health that players can eat away. It's tested really well, with a few balance tweaks, for example, what does it cost to get the food that removes the penalty

For eons, the Ward held. And then, abruptly, it was breached... and a devastating magical disaster known as the Shade swept across the land, destroying or maiming whatever it touched.

Soul Attunement is the player’s ability to commune with the souls of Telara’s honored dead and gain their powers and abilities

also the art looks very similar to aion

what I meant is that this game looks and sounds like someone looked at the disaster that was Aion and decided it was interesting but they could do it better

[eunhye]

I think Hartsman is the original Eq1 developer

[Lucavi]

Game sounds pretty badass, and to me, that mostly stems from what others call and consider "fluff". Footstep sound adjustments and a seemingly-intense focus on the little things have me looking at this game more and more for a "non-pretty" alternate to FFXIV when I get tired of the stiffness and rigidity that that game is going to offer.

Thanks for keeping these updates coming.

[Man0warr]

I think Hartsman is the original Eq1 developer

Nah he joined EQ1 after it had been bought by SOE, around the Luclin expansion I think. He went on to totally reinvigorate EQII after it's dreadful launch + first couple expansions - he was heavily involved with the Secrets of Faydwer and Rise of Kunark expansions (2 of the best expansions for EQII).

He is rather respected by most of the gaming community that are in the know. He also trolls and responds to threads on some of the major MMO gaming forums like FoHguild.org

There are a lot of ex EQ/Vanguard people working on Rifts though, including one of the original EQ guys Bill Trost - some think he is the actual genius behind EverQuest (the first few years, release + Kunark + Velious) rather than Brad McQuaid - who was later found out to be a complete nutjob and addict after the inner workings of Vanguard were revealed.

Anyways, I have high hopes for Rifts solely because of Scott Hartsman.

[Alderaan]

Sentinel Soul Announced
http://www.telaracentral.com/?p=603#more-603

http://216.81.70.212/wp-content/uplo...l_shadow12.bmp

Sentinel – “It is easy to have faith in one god. I have seen the truth of the universe, devoted myself to the Vigil as a whole. I bring succor to the one and the whole alike.”

Overview

The Sentinel brings the blessings of light to all who do the will of the gods. Capable of healing many wounded at one time, Sentinels bolster their allies and protect themselves with divine wrath.

Strengths

Sentinels are defensive clerics who excel at group support. Their divine powers aid the weak and ensure that everyone in their group lives through the fray.

Weaknesses

Sentinels sacrifice offense for a strong defense, and thus struggle to deal massive damage to their opponents.

Background

Unable to reconcile the contradictions between the gods, the Elf initiate Niyol Cliffswind made a pilgrimage to Hammerknell. In the capitol of the Elves’ ancient enemies, the Dwarves, he tried to learn how Bahralt’s bustling cities could coexist with Tavril’s pristine wilderness.

His days there were a misery: jostled and berated, unable to gain audience with a priest of Bahralt. Then one night, a lynch mob pulled Niyol from his bed. “Filthy spy!“ they cried, for an Elvish surprise attack had breached the city walls. Dragged toward the gibbet, Niyol heard the clamor as fighting raged through Hammerknell.

The Elf vanguard burst into the grand hall just as the hangman fitted a noose to Niyol’s neck. A moment later, the dwarf fell with an arrow in his throat, knocking Niyol off his bench. The rope drew tight.

Battle choked the Dwarven hall, yet no combatant who fought near Niyol succumbed to their wounds. Even as he swung from the noose, the initiate mouthed a healing prayer, offering his last breath to save kinfolk and persecutors alike.

http://216.81.70.212/wp-content/uplo...s_rest_016.bmp

White light poured from the eyes of every statue to a god in Hammerknell, the words of his prayer booming from stone lips. Anyone who saw the light was healed; everyone who heard the words succumbed to a quiet serenity.

As the Elves lay down their arms, the Dwarves cut Niyol down and declared him a saint. Both sides pledged alliance ever after, and the mendicant went on his way.

The Elf commander had heard of Niyol’s pilgrimage, and asked if he had learned how the gods could overcome their conflicts.

“Each god values the life of each and every mortal. In this, there is unity,” Niyol said with the sure, clear voice of enlightenment.

Niyol spent many years spreading his revelation, performing miracles, finding in every culture a link to the divine. When the gods formed the Vigil, Niyol’s sentinels spread hope through unity to all the people of Telara.

http://216.81.70.212/wp-content/uplo...random_012.bmp

[Insanecyclone]

http://www.massively.com/2010/08/18/...dynamic-conte/

2 page hands on of the dynamic content.

[Alderaan]

http://www.massively.com/2010/08/18/...dynamic-conte/

2 page hands on of the dynamic content.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.massively...8/orphsl01.jpg

Just a few weeks ago, I was invited to attend Trion Worlds' Gamer's Day in San Francisco to get some hands-on time with a couple of the company's upcoming titles, including Rift: Planes of Telara. If Rift seems to have come out of nowhere, that might be due both to the acquisition of EverQuest II veteran Scott Hartsman to head the project as chief creative manager, and to a clever name change meant to reflect the team's shift in development focus.

In fact, that shift in development focus is precisely what I was at Trion's studio to test -- I got to check out the Rifts themselves in all their glory, in the context of the greater dynamic content system that the developers are so excited about. Massively's writers have been able to play and report on character creation and the starting areas of Rift several times over the last year or so, including earlier this summer at E3. But until today's embargo lift (coinciding with the reveal at Gamescom), no one had quite seen the fabled planar invasions and takeovers in action.

Now we have.

The very first thing I got to do was roll up a new character. I kinda knew what to expect, since our previous demos of Rift all started this way too. What I wasn't expecting were the new classes not yet revealed or only hinted at in earlier articles. Paladins, assassins, sentinels, and pyromancers (the last two since revealed officially) were among the new classes I spied; I also caught a glimpse of the Kelari and the Dwarves, who were also announced in the interim (we were assured that female Dwarves are en route and will not, in all likelihood, have beards). I must say that the Eth are hardly done justice by their portrayal on the official site. Characters of all genders seemed more or less well-proportioned and realistic (no one looked ready to keel over due to being, shall we say, top-heavy). I saw a good mix of eye colors, hair styles, and skin tones (important to me after all too many games sporting a hundred shades of pasty). It's no Star Wars Galaxies when it comes to character customization, but it doesn't have to be.

Eye-candy

I was particularly impressed at how lovely all of the characters were at creation. It seems to me that Trion has found the sweet-spot between so-few-options-that-everyone-looks-the-same and so-many-options-that-there's-a-million-ways-to-make-an-ugly-character. And I don't just say that because I'm obsessed with my character having just the right shade of lilac eyes. The game is split into two extremely interesting philosophical factions -- the faithy Guardians hand-picked by the gods to save the world, and the anti-theist Defiants who decide to bypass those useless gods and save the world themselves using technomagery. And if you know anything about games with two factions, you know that no amount of deep philosophizing and backstory about the lore of these two sides will ever, ever convince the players that one side isn't good and the other isn't evil. That dichotomy is inevitable. Players can't resist taking shortcuts to conclusions like these. So it's especially important that the "obviously evil" side not also be loaded down with a grotesque sideshow of freakish and unappealing races or species, or players will look only at that and sort themselves accordingly, just as in World of Warcraft and EverQuest II and Warhammer Online: goodie-two-shoes on one side, hardcore thuggin' on the other. Sure, the noble, holy Guardian faction gets the High Elves and sure I saw some angel-wing spell effects floating around, but the Defiants' humanoids are exotic and beautiful too. The team's goal is to banish those cheap storyline cliches and make the players' choices more about philosophy than about whose butt you want to stare at all the way to 50.

In any case, it's not just the characters who are appealing -- everything is exceptionally beautiful. The game is clearly employing clever tricks to reduce the strain of all the eye-candy (low polygon counts on things like foliage and reduced landscape textures when your attention is elsewhere), but the world is nevertheless gorgeous, and the devs are sparing no expense when it comes to the stuff players look at all the time. The particle effects are splashy and fun; the level-up effects are compelling; and the NPCs are ridiculously detailed and appealing. Heck, in some places, the terrain was so lush and the grass so thick that I could hardly see the LotRO-style targeting circle at the mobs' feet. It was fun to hear some of the Trion employees (who hadn't yet seen all of the characters we were running into) gasp with surprise at how amazing it all looked as the sum of its parts. They almost seemed shocked at their own handiwork. And maybe they should be -- I was similarly unprepared for the shock of seeing an NPC in game who looked identical to the impressive concept art on the site. Not since Guild Wars have I seen something like that! I was also gratified to see that female NPCs had a nice mix of clothing and armor both chaste and racy, unlike characters in some games I could note.

Pew pew and pets

I decided, in the end, to roll up a Defiant elementalist, complete with her "charge" bar -- every class has a unique mechanic, and the mage classes get a fun little bar that improves their boom factor. I don't usually go for mages straightaway in MMOs because I find fire spells a bit on the dull side, but I do love earth and water and air magic. The elementalist begins life with an earth elemental pet, crystalline earth shards, an earth ward, and... lightning comin' outta the sky? Yes please. I haven't really seen a good magician class since EverQuest, and I've been jonesing for my earth controller in City of Heroes.

Let me rephrase here. I shouldn't say my character begins life -- I ought to say she was reborn, as that is the chosen game mechanic. Every player character has died and is returning to the land of the living to save the world via sheer will. I jumped into the Shadowlands newbie area and proceeded to carve a path through the lowbie mobs -- rather, my pet did. Pet controls were lined up just like LotRO's or WoW's, and my pet was chomping down on mobs with barely any input from me, which is exactly the reason pet classes are so much fun -- laziness! The earthie was surprisingly well-animated and put to shame such pets in other games (I'm sorry, Mister Poo). I discovered that I would later get an air elemental pet too, along with an arsenal including fire to round out the elementalist. Earthie and I smashed our way through the now-expected assortment of kill, click, travel, possession, and gather quests, cackling gleefully at the iconic death squeal of the newbie mobs (will those be so adorable after a thousand squeals?).

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.massively...bmpjpgcopy.jpg

Your roots are showing

Since I keep comparing Rift to other games, I should get something out of the way. I'm a WoW fangirl. In fact I've played so much WoW that when I take a break to sample other games, I suffer a strange readjustment period. WoW makes me forget how much clunk there is in gaming. There's something about WoW's combat and movement system that's so smooth; there's a brilliant, intuitive intersection of animation and effects at play. Most games -- even those I love (hi LotRO!) -- just don't have that. They have funky skidding feet and pauses and jerking, and nothing ever works quite like you expect. WoW just works in a comfortable and organic way without any fuss, and you never notice how polished it is until you try to play something else.

So please understand that I mean it as a high compliment when I say that Rift: Planes of Telara has borrowed many of WoW's very best assets, including a distinct lack of movement clunk. I kept hearing caveats like "it's still in alpha" -- and indeed, the other media folks and I were playing on the alpha server along with alpha testers and internal testers, and every time we found a bug, someone would call upstairs and add it to some poor programmer's to-do list -- but I'll be frank and say I've seen releases from top-tier companies that were far less polished than this. Granted, we were a bit on rails during the Rift testing, but we got to play for several hours across several zones and instances. What I saw was polished and playable, and I was feeling completely comfortable with the game within about 15 minutes. If this is alpha, and content implementation continues at this pace and quality, I have high hopes for launch.

But Rift has significantly more in common with WoW and the preceding generation of games than just fluid movement and animations. Mobs and quest objects glitter to catch your attention. Inventory bags pop up like WoW's old standard. Merchants sell food and water to restore health and mana, along with familiar scrolls and potions to restore the same. Combat text scrolls along overhead. A resting mechanic rewards you for time offline. Emotes weren't quite finished yet (no /spit? what!?) but /wave worked just fine. Rift is even eschewing ammo for its ranged classes just like Cataclysm will. Stylistically, of course, it probably leans more heavily on newer games like Allods Online or Warhammer Online, whose updated graphics and interesting melds of fantasy and steampunk-lite make for strangely gritty cartoon settings. Scott Hartsman told us that the game will ship with a full complement of crafting professions, as well, from which players can choose three per character. In fact, three is precisely what I saw in the early areas; there were NPCs willing to train butchering, mining, and foraging. Rift will do away with crafting tools altogether, leaving your bag space open for the good stuff.

It also seems as though Trion has grand plans for PvP akin to WoW's and WAR's. Although I did not get to participate in any PvP at the event (unless you count the /kill cheat!), I did flip my way to a game panel sporting several joinable PvP battlegrounds, called Warfronts. I saw several lower-level battlegrounds tiered for levels 8-10, 16-20, and 10-19, marked as capture-the-flag events. We know Rift will offer both PvP and PvE servers, and the Trion team assured us that a PvP-flagging mechanic would be in place even on PvE servers, allowing for both consensual PvP and PvP during city raids (yes, city raids!). In fact, Scott told us that the team is considering allowing experience to be gained during PvP sessions, if that doesn't prove too unbalancing to the world-experience and dungeon-experience formulae.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.massively...nterrace22.jpg

Interface and mods

Rift has a standard, modern interface that's easy on the eyes and simple to learn. Players of the major MMOs of the last few years will be right at home with button bars, minimaps, party windows, and so on. The map includes a quest tracker, quest pointers, quest pop-ups, and quest map-highlighting (something that's becoming more and more standard for the genre). I found the UI a bit clunky for healing (more on that later) but honestly that's because I'm spoiled by games like WoW with their huge array of addons. Healing in almost every MMO is an awkward flurry of clicking at UI elements and inefficient eye-movement as you try to monitor too many bars set just too far apart. It just seems out of place in a game like Rift -- a game in which the designers are intentionally attempting to focus player attention on the center of the screen, not the periphery. Being the mod-junkie I am, I asked Scott Hartsman specifically about Rift's future insofar as addons and was told that the team is currently planning for basics like resizing, rescaling, transparency, and possibly even skinning, but that we shouldn't expect full-scale modding at launch. Scott suggested that the framework for such addons might be a post-launch project. I pouted, but I can understand the decision to polish first and pile on later.

Different strokes

Some of the genre staples Rift has borrowed have been vastly improved. For example, Rift features an elaborate achievements and collections system that rewards the player with various cosmetic bonuses like pets, mounts, and titles, without bogging him down with tedious grind. Several of these items dropped for me in the lowbie zone and I had only to click them to add them to my collections panel. Interestingly, Trion has chosen to tally your achievement points (though not achievements themselves) across your entire account, meaning that you haven't got to be a completionist on every character -- unless you really want to be.

I hardly had time to peek at my character's talent pane let alone play with respecs, but my glimpses showed talent trees very similar to WoW's -- with a multi-classing twist. Much has been said on Rift's elaborate build system, and for good reason -- few MMOs give players so many options to build their characters just the way they like. While we'll not be able to change our initial calling (i.e., class), players will be able to pick and choose skills and talents from all of the possible callings to craft their own hybrids -- ideally, players can choose to spec wide or spec deep. Scott told us that he estimated there would be over 270 combos at launch. And you'll get to try many of those out -- each character can have up to four loadouts at a time, so you can have your normal adventuring build, a build for when the guild needs you to tank, a farming setup, and maybe a build for PvP. Not every combo will work for every situation, and the team believes that by allowing everyone to do everything, balance issues will be mitigated. Easy respecialization built right into primary gameplay will help too -- respecs can be performed on the fly anywhere when not in combat. You can actually swap in a different build for trash mobs vs. bosses!

So how dynamic is dynamic?

I should have been prepared for Rifts and yet I wasn't. Public quests aren't new; several Mythic games like Ultima Online and Warhammer Online have them, and Champions Online polished them into a quality MMO concept. But Rifts... Rifts are even better. When you see one pop up on your map or minimap, you can gather up your friends and charge on in, forcing the Rift to open on its own if it's being pokey. Entering the area will provoke a pop-up with instructions for completing the encounter. The Rift will transform the landscape and spawn waves of mobs, scaled to the folks in the area. Solo? No problem. Twenty of your best friends? Rift can handle big. You needn't even be grouped up; your contribution is tallied individually, and even if you should perish, a convenient pop-up loot panel will ensure that you're properly rewarded for your efforts (and everyone is rewarded with something -- no losers here!). I found the Rifts to be pretty spooky and entertaining, if over a little too fast for my over-eager groupmates. Presumably, higher-level public quests will be more difficult, and they seemed to be propagating fairly consistently since so many of us were in the zone.

"An enemy planar boss and his minions had spawned, and they were steadily marching toward the nearest town, intent on laying waste to my allies."
Past the newbie zone, the map widened considerably and became dotted with the multi-colored warning symbols of enemy footholds. These enemy base camps are generated randomly based on zone participation, and can be attacked and subdued for fortune and glory just as Rifts can. In fact, if two opposing footholds spawn too close to each other, they are very likely to begin fighting each other (since the planes are all at war, too). I really loved that I could see the enemy's position on the large map, as if I were some general plotting out my campaign. But what really got everyone interested was a funny little arrow slicing its way across the map. That arrow, we were told, was the first sign of an enemy invasion. An enemy planar boss and his minions had spawned, and they were steadily marching toward the nearest town, intent on laying waste to my allies. Players could choose to tackle the invading army immediately, or proceed with a bit more strategery -- a bit of patience might allow the players to ambush the army while it was busy skirmishing with an enemy foothold along the way. Why not let the other NPCs do some of your dirty work, after all? And all of this is going on amidst normal questing endeavors. On a PvP server, this mechanic could get even more interesting!

Should the invaders make it to their destination unharried, they will carve a wide path through NPCs, including quest-givers in the hub towns, so everyone has a vested interest in stopping invasions quickly, although Trion has made clear that this system won't create more burden than it's worth for players who just want to carry on with their questing. Given the experience and loot rewarded by these types of encounters, I am hard-pressed to understand why players wouldn't leap at the chance to hunt down invasion NPCs! I can hardly imagine what Heroes of Telara would have been like if the team hadn't added in Rifts and these other dynamic aspects. Except for these unique features, Rift is actually fairly standard fantasy. It really needs a stand-out mechanic, a hook to bring in the crowds, and the invasion system delivers. Literally!

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High elves can't jump

Yes, you can jump in Telara. As we all know, the ability to jump is a critical gameplay feature! Really -- while jumping really won't reduce your aggro, it does instill the player with a sense that the world is truly 3-D. It helps sell the space and suspend disbelief. In fact, several Trion folks made a point of showing us that we could jump up into places other games would forbid, including up and over mountains and into zones that might be a tad out of our level range -- your life is yours to risk in the name of exploration. Of course, you can die when falling, so it's best not to climb too high. In Gloamwood (the recently released werewolf-ridden zone where the attendees were grouping up for adventure) I took it upon myself to climb up one of the bizarre, Gothic, Ewok-treehouse towers and throw myself off in an emo tribute to the gloom, but alas, I never did manage to kill myself, although I did come pretty close to drowning while taking notes. While most of the other writers were busy gaming up the levels, I was happily swimming (and fighting!) in greenish waters and thinking how fluid (forgive the pun) the animations were. Anyone can create a monster-bashing level grind; a great team manipulates the little things to convince us that the world is more than just a nicely painted hamster wheel.

I continued my adventure off the rails after getting separated from my team. Mounting up on the free epic mount I was given -- some sort of woolly-rhino thing -- I bounded around for a bit, enjoying the speed and smoothness of the ride. (I've spent too long in SWG, I fear, where the creature mounts are annoyingly slow.) I ran east toward what looked like a castle and was greeted with the gleaming spires of the Holy City of Sanctum. I treated myself to a tour, being primarily impressed with the quality and quantity of the NPCs stationed in Tavril Plaza and inside the keep itself. I could only wonder whether those NPCs would be victims of -- or victorious allies in -- the next invasion.

Fighting and dying (mostly dying) in the Realm of the Fae

After my excursion to the city, my level-18 group re-coalesced just in time to plunge (literally) into the depths of the Realm of the Fae instance. (The zone entrance was a watery hole in the ground!) Our five-person team (complete with an overleveled rogue tank -- yes, this is a game that really doesn't want you pigeon-holed too much into just one role) set about mopping up ents and fairies and dionysian satyrs wielding wine cups, all of whom seemed quite offended that we were crashing their festivities. The instance was divided up into several seasonally themed areas (greenery for summer; dead leaves for fall; snowstorm for winter), and it was a bit guided, to be sure -- hedges often marked out our path, and they didn't always look placed to perfection. And yet we still managed to get lost a few times. Nothing out of the ordinary for our first trip in a new dungeon, and at least the encounters appeared functional and playable (a far cry above the pathetic dungeons with which Warhammer launched).

I was quite pleased with how my premade cleric held up. He was pretty cute for a High Elf (we'd switched to Guardian faction for the afternoon), but I was wary -- while I like to play healers, I usually avoid holy-based healers. Strangely, my cleric's spells reminded me a whole lot more of my LotRO minstrel than my long-abandoned EQ cleric or WoW priest. I love that he sort of dipped to the side and behind to call forth his shimmering light. I certainly wished for a better healing UI, but I think we did all right with the default, barring a few deaths when we got split up or overextended. Not to worry; death in Rift seems fairly trivial. Once per hour, you can "soul walk" -- that is, resurrect right at your corpse, similarly to the revive/retreat system in LotRO, although in Rift you're given several seconds of impunity to scurry away from any lingering danger. After my second death, I resurrected inside the entrance to the dungeon, just as in Champions Online. A small health debuff was applied to my character until I ate a bit of food, and then we were off and en route to the final boss, whose death triggered yet another convenient pop-up that distributed loot to everyone on the team.

Over lunch, one of the other participants noted that she found the early game a bit too easy for her tastes, and most of the writers agreed. But the instance seemed appropriately challenging for mid-level characters, especially given our unfamiliarity with the premade characters we were playing. The Trion reps said that the scaling difficulty was intentional -- they want the starting areas to be accessible for newcomers to the genre; the later game will ramp up in challenge if you seek it out. Indeed, Scott told us that they particularly aim to ensure that no Rifts murder any newbies in the area, EverQuest-style. And no hell levels! Ever!

Closing my Rift

You know you've got something special when you're genuinely sorry to log out of the alpha client to go play more games, and yet that's exactly how I felt. I was skeptical about the game, going in. Among gamers, there's a feeling that MMOs made by "indie" companies -- at least companies not counted among The Big Three -- will forever be doomed to second-tier status. I have concerns about Trion's insistence that Rift: Planes of Telara will function under a traditional subscription model, not because I don't think the game is worthy (it is), but because I'm worried that the industry will have moved even further from that model by the time the game releases. We see the signs already in other top-tier MMOs, and players have begun to rebel against both extremes of the F2P/P2P spectrum. In some ways, Trion is asking people to risk a lot of money on an untried, untested dev team and an unknown, original IP. Will players be willing to do that next year when Rift sidles up to not just WoW: Cataclysm, but Guild Wars 2 and SWTOR too? I really hope so, because if Rift were releasing today, it'd probably be the smash hit of the last few years, WotLK notwithstanding. This is the game Warhammer should have been. I don't want to see it elbowed aside by sequels and star-power from teams with deeper pockets.

In the meantime, I've seen enough to know I'm looking forward to it anyway.

Realm of the Fae
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mq_pPhsFNo

Gamescom trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0JirfhEPhE

I particularly like the last paragraph when she says she didn't want to log out.

[Lucavi]

Now that's a preview. How is this game already having such massively deep previews when its not out till next year when FFXIV launches next MONTH and the previews are a cryptic and broken as anything still in development?

Pretty, realistic graphics can't be the only reason reason.

[Alderaan]

It's crazy that this is the alpha build and it already looks quite polished.

[Man0warr]

WoW was the same way - it could of released 6 months before it did. They used the beta to hype the fuck out of it and it was really fun to play and polished - people were paying hundreds of dollars for beta keys on eBay.

Rifts is supposed to have 32 classes/"souls" at release, that seems to be their major focus right now because at the moment less than half have been revealed.

[Insanecyclone]

Camera guy at the end got a beta card.

[Alderaan]

If this game somehow manages to come out this year i'll be ecstatic.

I get the impression that there's always something going on, with the rifts and pvp, and not just exp'ing for the sake of exp.

[Man0warr]

Feb 2011