E3 2009: Heroes of Telara First Look
There seems to be an MMORPG everywhere you look nowadays, which can make it rather difficult to stand out from the hordes of orc slaying warriors, troll melting mages, undead turning clerics and backstabbing thieves commonly found in these games. Trion World Network is trying to make this distinction by working on Heroes of Telara, a upcoming game scheduled to be released sometime next year. At E3 2009, I got a chance to check this game out, which the designers want to call a massively social game.
One of the interesting elements of Telara lies in the fact that every single character can be any one of the four base character classes at any time. No longer will you have to worry about sending out a "looking for group" request for a specific character class and hope that someone responds. Instead, you'll be able to instantly swap at will between the mage, warrior, cleric and rogue classes to fill these slots. Of course, there will the be traditional attack and defensive power adjustments, as well as the skill changes that you'd expect, since each class has its own abilities, bonuses and weaknesses.
On top of the ability to switch between classes, you'll also be able to trigger what's known as sub-classes, which you can acquire by picking up cards from defeated opponents or performing different quests. These sub-classes have a base class that they're attached to, so even though some of these classes will change the look and function of your character, they'll level up as you level up that particular class, unlocking new abilities and powers along the way.
The other thing that Heroes of Telara is trying to establish is a world where things are constantly going on within the world. This was demonstrated by walking outside of the secured walls of a city, only to notice that battles were raging back and forth between people and bandits in the fields. While the option was presented to walk in and battle any of these groups, players could also go in search of what would be known as heroic quests, which would dynamically be generated for characters to respond to. These would frequently involve larger beasts that needed to be killed, such as eliminating spellcasters or taking out creatures that eventually took over and started burning the town to the ground. Thanks to the dynamic nature of these quests, the effects of these attacks and these quests can have long lasting effects - fail to save the town, for example, and it's completely burned to the ground, not to be rebuilt for a very long time. By contrast, if you repel the attack, the townspeople remember your deeds and celebrate you every time you enter.
The dynamic nature of the gameplay isn't solely restricted to specific classes or levels of characters either. In fact, while the town was being burned, we were told that players within the general vicinity could contribute to the safety of the town regardless of their own level. Low level characters could, for example, cast water spells to put fires out, while mid-level characters could try to escort townspeople out of burning buildings while high level characters attacked the creatures. Although it was still very early to talk about more specifics of the game, such as the PVP elements or other gameplay aspects, the stylized look of the characters coupled with the dynamic lighting for spell effects and day/night cycles made Heroes of Telara an eyecatching title that many MMO fans will probably want to keep an eye out for.
