RIFT MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Our first look at Rift: Planes of Telara was good, very good, but we had some questions. Will these great looking "HD" graphics run on yesterday's computers? What drives the two player factions, and will their be all-out PvP or just a flavor of hostility? Is "dynamic content" limited to Rifts - tears between the Planes and Telara which allow nasties to invade - or does Trion have more mind- and world-bending tricks up its sleeve?

To help answer these questions, we lied about our credentials and scored an interview with Scott Hartsman, Trion Redwood City Studio Lead, Creative Director, MMORPG development veteran, and all around nice guy.

Ten Ton Hammer: Let’s start with the name change. What does Rift: Planes of Telara say about the game that Heroes of Telara didn’t?

Scott Hartsman, Trion Studio Lead, Creative Director:  So the original name Heroes of Telara… there were a couple of issues there. As people were spending more time on the present day lore – what’s going on in the world right now (which is something that really turns into the focus when your engine and tools are ready)… once you’re doing launch content development, some of your story ideas, that’s where they really get proven out. We realized that so much of the story was revolving around Telara’s relationship to the planes - that the Rifts were such a central element to the story-  that it seems to be a much stronger way to connect people to what this world is about.

The other part of it is that “Heroes” kind of implies that you’re all good guys. As we all know, some people want to play good guys, some people want to play bad guys. You’re not being shoehorned into a good guy role in this game.

So Rift: Planes of Telara fit the world that was being made, it fit the content that was being made, and actually drew from story elements that had existed in the original lore of the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: That’s a good segue into the two player factions of the game – the Guardians and the Defiants . What motivates each faction, and is the a good vs. evil sort of thing? What’s the “big evil” that both groups are fighting?

Scott:  The “big evil” is a story point that’s going to be introduced a little bit later on. Right now, what we’re really trying to get out there is that the Planes are pushing in on Telara.

In a traditional good vs. evil setup, the Guardians would be good, the Defiants would be evil.  But really, both view each other as evil. The Guardians, on the one hand, are very spiritual. You could call them traditionalists. They have a relationship with the old gods of Telara and they draw their power from that relationship to the gods.

A Defiant Bladedancer hopes to make a martyr of a Satyr.

On the other hand, you have the Defiants. They’re more practical, more about taking risks. The Defiants are more technology-driven, and one of the things that separates these two factions so thoroughly is that the Defiants are resurrecting old, abandoned technologies that the traditionalists long since outlawed as offensive to the gods. So we’re actually able to bring a slight cyberpunk twist in some of our visuals. Think of it as very high magical technology – it lets us do some cool things with visuals and story, in addition to the Rifts and the Planes, which are really strongly unique to us.

Ten Ton Hammer: Does that steampunk or technological twist tie into your class choices as Defiants vs. Guardians?

Scott: It impacts it. Right now our class system is something that’s really cool, we’re love it a lot, but since we are still pre-alpha, we do have the ability to say that it’s just not quite baked enough to the point where we’re ready to talk about it. We’ve played through a lot of our classes and, as you saw, we’ve been demoing lots of classes. The idea is to make sure your side does impact you, it just might not be exactly through your classes. 

The sides have their own cities, so it’s not like everyone’s in the same city and we all just happen to hate each other.  The Defiants are on one side, they’re southern,  Guardians are northern. And the things that go on in the cities will be fairly reflective of their backgrounds and aims in life.

Ten Ton Hammer: Just to be clear, are these capital cities by faction or by the individual races?

Scott: Yes, by faction. The Defiant city is called Meridian, the Guardian city is called Sanctum. It’s very much faction based. This is a world that is at war; there is a civil war going on in addition to the invasions. Think of them that way; it’s not like, ‘oh, I’m in happy Defiant land.’ It’s like I’m in the Defiant war headquarters.