| |
 The Chronicles of Spellborn is currently in closed beta. It is still in one of the earliest stages. The Team of onlinewelten.com has been allowed to have a look at Spellborn and behind the scenes. We met the SIL-employees Marco van Haren (marketing) and Bart Wiltenburg (3D-Artist) in the Netherlands, in a nice town called Utrecht. There we sat down in a comfortable restaurant and a laptop was unwrapped.
„That's Hawksmouth. Here you gonna start your adventure in Spellborn“
You start your journey in Hawksmouth located on the Shard called Parliament. The first six levels (the tutorial of The Chronicles of Spellborn) will be played here and the surrounding area. When we looked up we realized the you don't see the usual stars and stuff but a huge stony mass - protecting the so called shards from the Deadspell Storm (kind of a magic nebula) and light only passes through small holes. The variety of different characters look like humans, but their proportions are different from a real person.
When we set our first steps into this world we were amazed by the living sound environment. A tweeting bird followed by the rush of leaves in the wind. And with the pleasing light it feels like a pleasant day in spring. The soundtrack has been created by none other than Jesper Kyd himself, who was involved in the Hitman-Games and Splinter Cell. The developers are aware that most people turn off sounds really soon because you dont want too have music all the time, instead you just hear it in special places to support the visual things that appear.
„We dont want the players to stay in one area and grind the whole day“
Similar to Dungeons & Dragons Online you will get the most experience by completing quests. Grinding will not be gone completely but you won't get as much exp from questing than from killing monsters. You probably will grind in cases you want to (re-)raise your PEP-rating, PEP stands for Personal Experience Points. It is a buffsystem reaching from 0-5 and while having a rank higher than 0 your states and attributes will get a slight boost adequate to the current rank you reached. But if you die you are set back to zero and all bonuses are lost.
The quests in The Chonicles of Spellborn will apear in different forms. There will be the simple bring and get quests but also a race to the top of a hill, sneaking though a village or you just have to die to proceed in the quest - strange eh?
To create more diversity in the quests the developers will embed them into an interessting and dense storyline. There will be several big storylines that will accompany the player all the time as well as smaller side-quests. It might happen that one or more quests will reveal new information to change your point of view on certain things or unlock new dungeons or shards. To tell you a number: the questline Bloody Ties will have over 100 single tasks to be done (and its not the biggest of all the questlines). Furthermore there will be bosses in the world of TCoS that can be killed only once in a players life. Then this boss is removed from the world. He doesn't exist in the persistent world anymore - but by so called Ancestral Quests you can see for yourself what others have gone through to kill the beast. Those Ancestral Quests will be handed out by the Oracle, thus having a central role in the world of TCoS.
 Beside the obligatory sign above the head of QuestNPC's, guess it's kind of standard since WoW, NPC's will talk to you in the streets and maybe shout at you to come over. But the most interessting part is getting quests via the billboards, you can read news here or even find NPC's pleading for help, or even via ingame mail. You wont have a 600 helprequests from npcs though if you ever decide to take a break from TCoS.
|
|
