Rift: Planes Of Telara Hands-On Preview

20 Oct 2010 at 13:00:47 by Peter Parrish

Rift: Planes of Telara is a huge project. Four years in development with multiple millions spent on it by a series of heavyweight investors, the game is aiming to force its way into the competitive MMO market as a serious contender. On the fifth floor of the Trion Worlds office in Redwood Shores, San Francisco, there are more than 130 people making the magic happen. Around half of these employees have prior MMO experience, having worked on titles like Dark Age of Camelot, EverQuest 2, Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft. The structure is in place for the development of a great game, but will Rift deliver a popular, critical hit?

I was fortunate enough to be one of a group of games writers invited to San Francisco for some hands-on time with the title. Our brief from Producer Scott Hartsman was "feel free to break everything, we break it every day." He told us that we were playing the same Alpha build that the Trion staff are currently working with, and referred to the benefits that come from having so many employees familiar with MMO development. It's nice, he said, to have so many people saying "let's not make the mistakes we made on our last game."

Player Factions

Telara is engulfed in an eight-way conflict between the six known planes of existence (Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Life and Death) and two playable factions - the Guardians and the Defiant. These two factions encompass several distinct races, all of whom have access to four 'callings'; warrior, cleric, rogue and mage. As players are one of the Ascended - former heroes resurrected to combat the current threat to the world - these callings are further sub-divided into 'souls.' Mages, for example, are able to adopt the souls of Elementalists, Necromancers, Warlocks, Pyromancers and more.

The Defiant are a technology-based faction whose scientific dabbling is rumoured to have caused a major cataclysm. Naturally, the Defiant themselves do not believe this scare-mongering and feel it was probably put about by the Guardians, who they view as overly traditional and a little stupid. Furthermore, the Defiant suspect that it is in fact the Guardian's foolish faith in gods that will lead the world of Telara to ruination.

Conversely, the holier-than-thou Guardians view the Defiant as an evil influence and place their trust in faith, light and general goodness. They feel a golden age of Telara awaits if the land can first be purged of corruption and redeemed. Both factions have their own ideas about how to save the world from an incredible disruption that is about to occur (primarily spurred by the Plane of Death.)

Starting Zones & Character Creation

Players will see a different set of introductory events, depending upon which faction they decided to throw in their lot with. Guardian players will begin by seeing what happened on the day the Plane of Death invaded Telara and the dark forces started pouring in. Naturally, the Guardians blame the Defiant for this unfortunate event and will devote themselves to turning back the tide of evil.

However, the Defiant begin in the future, at a point on the Telaran timeline where the Guardian's plans have already failed. They realise that the Guardian's faith in the gods was terribly misplaced, but have one chance to take a trip back in time (via an advanced time-machine device) to Telara's past and set things straight. Whether this future-point is a fatalist inevitability, or just one possible version of events, is unclear.

Trion is in the process of finalising an improved character creation toolset, and some of the new character customisation appeared to be locked. We were warned that "some pretty obnoxious colours" were being used as placeholder defaults, and these turned out to be various tones of green and pink. Although customisation was limited on the day, it was possible to see that the options have increased from those shown off in earlier versions of the character creation process. At release, it seems players will be able to tweak and fiddle around with a range of facial features, personal markings and even height.

I warmed to the idea of sporting a garish pink hairstyle, and launched my Defiant Kelari rogue into the world. For anybody who's played an MMO recently, the user interface and control scheme of Rift will be like slipping on a much-loved, cosy sweater. Hotkeys bring up stat screens, inventory and abilities, while skills and attacks can be assigned to other keys in the range of 1 to 9 and beyond. Wasd moves your character around, mouse control can zoom the viewpoint in and out, rotate it, and so on. So far, so comfortable.

I'd been given a brief introduction to the background and lore of the Defiant, so I was able to navigate around the initial areas without getting too confused. Without this primer I feel I may have been a bit bewildered. The textual exposition from the NPC quest-givers left no doubt about what I should do, but I felt a fuller narrative explanation regarding my motivations would've helped. More flavour text means more reading for players to do, but this may be necessary to convey the scope of the situation in Telara.

Granted, it's extremely tough to outline a brand new universe full of fresh lore in such a short time (imagine being dumped in the middle of Lord of the Rings without a clue what Orcs or Elves are,) and Trion has plenty of time between now and a 2011 release to tighten this area up, so this doesn't cause too much concern. It's possible that an as-yet-unshown introductory cinematic will explain all of this perfectly in the release version. Again, what was expected of my character in these opening areas was always very clearly laid out, it was just the sense of motivation which remained a touch elusive.

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