Trion: Telara MMO will feature "emergent behaviour"

Players of Trion World Network's forthcoming MMO title, Heroes of Telara, will benefit from innovative new gameplay designs, including emergent behaviour and a fully dynamic world where no two experiences will be the same.

That's according to the company's CEO, Lars Buttler, who told GamesIndustry.biz that such ideas are what sets Telara apart from other MMORPG titles in the sector - World of Warcraft included.

"We felt that server-based gaming can bring very substantial innovation to various different game categories. And we felt very strongly that the RPG category could be improved significantly and that you can really innovate in that category," he explained.

"And what you can do with server-based gaming really translates into great gameplay innovation in the RPG genre. Server-based gaming allows you to simulate the entire game, all the different processes of a game, server-side. And because that's the case, you can have live videogames.

"You can have fully dynamic worlds that can be changed by the developer and the user all the time. You can also have massively social worlds, with many, many people coming together and doing things."

He went on to detail exactly how that will manifest itself in Telara - one of several online titles that Trion is currently working on.

"We are talking about a game now where we can literally call upon you to become a hero, because if you think of what makes a person a hero, it's not doing something that is already well known, or do the same thing every day, or do things that don't matter to anybody but yourself," he said. "Heroes are people that do things that are unexpected, that are challenging. They have to make really tough choices, and those choices affect their world.

"Now this is exactly what you will find in Heroes of Telara, where we challenge you to become a hero, to make tough choices, to face unexpected challenges and events every time. And we never have a game that is the same. There are small events, there are big events, there is even emergent behaviour in the game that changes the game world. A lot of it is not even known to us, it's like the ghost in the machine. The game is almost alive, and that allows you to create heroes."

The full interview, in which Buttler also explains more about how the company's joint project with The Sci-Fi Channel is coming along, is available now.