Curse

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.

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.

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!

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!

For more information on Trion and Rift: Planes of Telara visit: http://www.riftgame.com