RIFT : Planes of Telara

Necuno

Necuno

The Piper
now this looks like possible AAA mmo...




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Mysterious rifts are tearing the world of Telara apart. A powerful magic explosion during the final days of the Shade War has left the veil between Telara and other planar dimensions fractured and torn.

Treacherous and powerful, these rifts occur when another plane of reality intersects with the magical Ward protecting Telara. Rifts create doorways for planar invasion, destroying the lands and people of Telara, but they may also grant otherworldly power to those brave enough to seize it.

Now no part of Telara is truly safe. Invasions can occur anywhere and at any time, and the danger to the world is growing. Two major factions have emerged to save the world of Telara from the rifts: the Guardian and the Defiant. Each faction works in different ways to preserve Telara's future, and both seek to undermine the other.

While little is known about the exact nature of the rifts, Telaran scholars, priests, and historians strive to unlock the mysteries of these massive portals. It is believed that the rifts are being caused by direct attacks on the magical Ward surrounding Telara. Regulos, the dragon god of extinction, seeks to free his imprisoned minions of the Blood Storm trapped deep inside Telara. These attacks weaken the veil and cause planar disruptions that open the destructive rifts across the world.

Often, rifts appear in the world as a tear in the fabric of reality. Powerful magic has been used to study these anomalies, and sometimes they have been opened inadvertently, resulting in great tragedy. But there is still much to learn from these destructive forces. Can riftic power be harnessed by sorcery? Can powerful beings enter the rifts to venture into the deadly planes beyond? How many planes really exist?

With rifts, only one thing is certain — if they are not stopped, the world of Telara will surely end.
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official site
http://www.riftgame.com/en/


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random tube vids



 
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gameinformer.com: Rift: Planes Of Telara’s Dynamic Content Sets It Apart

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Not many companies are trying to make a traditional subscription-based high fantasy PC MMORPG any more, but new developer/publisher Trion Worlds is doing just that with Rift – and they might just pull it off if the game’s solid E3 showing is any indication.

Rift cribs much of its design from familiar sources. MMO players will be right at home with its auto-attack-with-ability-buttons combat and high fantasy setting. Trion is banking on the game’s dynamic content system to differentiate it from the pack. Rifts are dynamically generated all the time, putting the world of Telara under siege by murderous forces from the elemental planes.

Trion’s unique technology allows it to dynamically stream randomly generated rifts wherever it wants. These events look similar to Warhammer Online’s public quests, with stages being completed as players accomplish objectives and loot given out at the end based on participation. The difference is that they randomly pull content from the huge bank of possibilities that Trion plans to have ready for launch. One fire rift, for example, will be unique from another fire rift – and the several elemental planes are all radically different from each other.

These rifts are more than loot bags that players run around popping. They alter the landscape and monsters around them, twisting animal, vegetable, and mineral with their chaotic forces. There will be consequences to not closing them, though Trion is still developing that portion of the feature and isn’t sharing details yet. It’s probably a safe bet to assume that the dynamic content generation tech behind the rifts will be put to as much use as Trion can squeeze out of it.

Rift’s character progression is also worthy of note. Though it looks similar to World of Warcraft’s talents at first glance, the “heroic souls” system is much more interesting. At creation, characters choose a calling: mage, cleric, warrior, or rogue. Within this archetype, two choices of profession are available. For instance, a rogue could choose to be a blademaster or a ranger. This determines the skill tree you initially have access to. The upper part looks like a WoW tree, with skills leading to other skills and a gated progression depending on how many points you dump into it overall. Below, a set of core active abilities unlocks automatically, also based on your investment in the tree. All rangers, for instance, will have the basic bow-shooting abilities they need to fulfill their core role. These “roots” of the tree also form your basic skill progression; all ability acquirement is through the heroic soul system.

As you complete quests, kill mobs, and generally do your MMORPG thing, you collect heroic souls. Each one of these is a whole new skill tree to explore. At levels 15 and 30, you gain the ability to equip a second and third tree concurrently, so long as they're compatible with your calling. Imagine, for instance, having an entirely new talent tree drop when you finally kill the Lich King. While you can’t choose them on the fly, you’ll be able to save tree loadouts and point assignments to some extent – Trion gave the example of being able to flip between your raiding and PvP skillsets at town, even though they may use entirely different souls.

A neat dynamic content generation system and cool character progression do not a complete MMO make, but they do form a good foundation. Trion still has a lot of questions to answer about social features, combat diversity and character class interaction, and endgame viability. For now, though, it’s nice to see a premium MMO with potential.
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...more vid spam.

Rift: Planes of Telara E3 2010 Trailer

more on gametrailers.com :)

E3 2010: The Hands of Death Walkthrough (Cam) HD
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2010-rift-planes/700767?type=flv

New Generation Interview HD
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/new-generation-rift-planes/65124

:edit.

quite sold on the whole dynamic content idea they are working at.

to just mention three:
a) dungeons will progress in relation to your char. ex. on your next level, maybe a bit of the dungeon will unlock, but the spawn will be different and harder.
b) servers being different to each other due to world and player events.
c) random world events including the rifts which don't open statically, but also randomly.

makes me think of tabula + hellgate + mix of their own; gives bit of dynamic maturity. see one of the persons working on this is actually dev from EQ1 and EQ2.
 
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Hands-On Preview

In the world of MMORPGs, I feel like it's hard to ignore a little game by Blizzard. Developer Trion Worlds seems to feel that way too, as there's a huge World of Warcraft influence on their upcoming title, Rift: Planes of Telara. But that's not such a bad thing.

The story of Rift takes place in Telara, a world that is exists between, and is magically sealed off from, the other planes of existence. When the magical ward begins to break down, rifts begin to open across Telara, allowing some rather unwelcome guests in. These rifts and subsequent planar invasions become one of the centerpieces of the title. There are two main factions that are seeking to protect Telara from both these invaders and Regulos, a joyous individual who goes by such personable titles as The God of Death and Eater of Worlds. While both the Guardians and Defiants have shared goals, each also yearns for control of the world. The Guardians seek to create a world honoring the Vigil, Telara's founding gods. In contrast, the Defiants embrace their magical abilities and technology, considering themselves superior because of it. As one might imagine, as a player, you'll choose one of these two factions to ally yourself with.

The way in which Rift handles character classes is one of the game's more noteworthy aspects. There were several starting classes (around 10) in the version we played, and Trion says there could be well over 30 at launch. Unlike some games, however, you aren't locked into one specific role for the duration of your journey. As you progress, you'll be able to commune with the souls of the dead, who will allow each player to alter their path and ability set. Implemented correctly, this system could go a long way towards keeping gameplay fresh and giving players a great incentive to continue playing, rather than the simple promise of just gear and more gear.

Another familiar method of character customization is the skill tree. Again, we've seen this before, but Rift has the distinction of offering both "branches" and "roots" for their tree. The top part of the tree offers the usual branching skill tree (hence the name) that opens up more as you put points into it, and grants you updated stats and abilities. The lower part, the roots, features a linear progression of skills that unlock as you add points to the branches. The root skills are key to your character class, and offer more important upgrades than say, a 1% boost to evasion. In any MMORPG, there are going to be skills you are simply required to unlock for your class, so instead of lumping these in with the incremental stat increases, they have their own method of being unlocked. This allows you to spend points more freely, without being stuck using them on a few key things first.

One of the initial things you'll notice about Rift is that it's simply gorgeous, but it's not just because of high polygon counts. The developers have a keen eye for detail, and small touches like grass blowing in the breeze and the subtle glow of the tree lantern in the opening area seem minor, but all contribute to making a lifelike, fully-realized world. Trion Worlds calls Rift the first truly high-def MMORPG. Whether or not they're right might be up to the individual to decide, but the graphics do pack in an immense amount of detail. From the impressive draw distance to smooth character and world animations, Trion already has a polished presentation, and it's still a while from release.

In terms of gameplay, basic MMO questing and combat rules apply here, including the auto-attack and ability bar along the bottom of the screen. One thing Trion discussed regarding quests is that they want to try to keep the player progressing, meaning that you should get quests that require you to move forward to complete them, instead of always doing the "get quest > complete quest > run back to quest giver" circle that sometimes makes you feel that you aren't making much progress.

The aforementioned rifts aren't simply a story element – they're also a gameplay element. There are always several tears in a given zone, an indicator that a rift can be opened in that spot. We saw several rifts opened by other players in our demo version: some Death Rifts (appropriately black, ominous and tentacle-y), and some Life Rifts (which resemble a mutated botanical garden of sorts). While Life Rifts are more pleasing to look at, all rifts present the player with a cluster of enemy mobs to fight back – in fact, we found stronger enemies at the less visually menacing Life Rifts.

By now you probably have a good idea of what Rift is about, even if I didn't get into the dynamic world events (which will be there at release, but which we weren't able to witness during the show), PVP, crafting, and so on. While there definitely is a large influence from Blizzard's pride and joy, there also appear to be enough unique features even at this early stage to warrant a look. And besides, if you're going to attempt to tap into a fanbase, you could do much worse than to go after one that's 12 million strong.

Rift: Planes of Telara is currently scheduled for release in 2011.
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i can't get fucking over this :)
it's going to be good :)
Yeah for multi classing :)


Create three-class combos in Rift: Planes of Telara
You have died. That’s the start, not the end of Rift. You are simply too awesome to stay dead. Instead, you start the game fighting your way through limbo back to the land of the living, at which point you’ll emerge at an interdimensional crossroads, and into the game proper.

Rift is a fantasy MMORPG in a world that’s being invaded by not one, but about half a dozen other planes of existence. Through, yes, rifts. Game-wise, that makes it an unpredictable landscape of sudden attacks pouring out from these portals, and unexpected opportunities to jump through them and explore a completely different universe.

“The entire idea of the engine that the game sits on,” says development director Scott Hartsman, “is that it lets us do some interesting things with dynamic content that you’re not gonna see in other games.” So it’s not just a few ambling critters wandering out of a hole in spacetime – there are rival factions who can take over whole settlements depending on your actions.


“Having the world reacting to what the players are doing, so that the balance of power can be pushed from faction to faction, is definitely one of the things we’ll be doing with this system,” says Scott. “There’s a system behind it that knows the state of all the players in the world, so we have ways of intelligently doing this without stepping on the poor level six guy who just wants to beat up the undead.”

Without seeing something like that in action, it’s always hard to judge how much of it is a nice theory and how much will truly make the game world a more exciting place to be in. So the most interesting thing about Rift, to me, is the way that they’re handling classes.

“Players are ascended souls,” Scott says, “and there are some souls that weren’t quite strong enough to make it. So when you begin the game, you choose what your soul was in its life – a Pyromancer, a Nightblade – and that’s the soul you begin with. That determines your abilities, your power system, the primary resource mechanic, and the gear you can use. Then later on, through questing or advancement with NPCs, you can discover other souls. You can collect and, not to sound vampirey but, embrace these other souls.”

You can ultimately embrace up to three different souls at the same time, and they can be different classes to your own. You then pick and choose how to invest your powers across them: spreading them evenly across three different classes, keeping your original as your primary, or even investing everything in one of the new souls you’ve picked up to completely change your character. “It lets players create their own combinations of classes and cool combinations of powers that even we didn’t really foresee,” says Scott.


“In all the MMOs I’ve worked on, people have always wanted more and more ways to do interesting things with their classes, and what we’ve done is taken class play and class experimentation and almost turned it into primary gameplay.”

A quick way to find out if someone really loves the game they’re working on is to ask them how they play it. Scott immediately lights up at the question, then hesitates. “Hmm, am I playing announced classes, or classes that I can’t talk about? Right now I’ve been playing a Nightblade/Ranger combination that’s quite a bit of fun. So it’s a guy who has the ability to attack from afar, has the ability to have a buddy out there in the field, and then also has some throwing weapon abilities and an excellent melee finisher.”

Between them, Scott and his team at Trion have worked on 27 different MMORPGs. Sharing and analysing that experience has informed their decisions about Rift on every level, right down to the nitty-gritty like group size. “We’re doing five-man groups – and ten- and twenty-man raids,” says Scott. “The last few games I’ve worked on have been six person groups. The reason we ended up going with five-man groups is if you want to create challenging content, you end up having to solve what’s called the two healer problem.”


“In a six-person group system,” he explains, “if you make content that’s hard, people will bring two healers to it. Two healers, a tank or two, and a couple of damage-dealers. And what happens if you balance for that kind of group is that you just make it even harder for groups to get off the ground, since healers and tanks tend to be limiting factors.”

“So our goal is to not make it even harder for players to get into groups. It’s one of those things that you don’t really realise until you’ve been doing something the same way for seven years and you think: ‘You know, there’s probably a better way of doing this.’”

It’s nice to think that the sheer number of fantasy MMORPGs out there might actually start making them better, rather than increasingly hard to tell apart.
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more vid spam.... on class system :D

[video]http://www.viddler.com/explore/massively/videos/199/[/video]

...i'm so building a proper cleric like in the days of nwn1, fear the return of my talos high priestess i will rend f***ing flesh ;)
 
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after last night's QA, bit of clarity on the "multi classing":

http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?1552-Class-System-Q-amp-A
1
Can we build a hybrid of a fighter and healer not to be stuck to just standing in a corner going in girly voice "heal"..."heal"..."heal" ?

2
From what I understand was you could mix together any possibility of classes with one being your primary, is this correct ?
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Neither is possible. You can only combine classes from within the calling. "Warrior" and "Cleric" are two different callings.
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bit disheartening as i would have liked a more open ended multi classing system like in neverwinter nights 1....
 
i read something about beta keys in next news letter... well i'll wait and see. in the mean time there is more vid spam for your eyes to feast on :D

 
sigh. beta, no wait, final now :D

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!
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