Heroes of Telara Interview With Trion’s Russ Brown

Trion World Network, a wellfunded startup company, is working on its first title called Heroes of Telara. Steven Crews had the opportunity to talk to Russ Brown, the VP in charge of the game’s development.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at Trion.

Russ Brown: I’m Russ Brown, I’m a VP at Trion for Heroes of Telara. I’m kind of the top of the food chain for the whole project.

The MMO Gamer: So you’d be the man to talk to, then?

Russ Brown: Yes. [Laughter]

The MMO Gamer: You said something very interesting during the demo. You’d been in the industry for quite a long time before going into retirement. But, then this game brought you out. Why?

Russ Brown: It was the opportunity to do a game where I could change content, the dynamic content, based on what the community wants. So, so much of being in games was guessing what the community wants, guessing what the game player wants, giving it to them and then going “OK, hopefully that works.”

So now I can react, that’s very important to me.

The MMO Gamer: Well technically, if you want to know what the community wants you can just go to the forums and see what everybody is complaining about.

Russ Brown: Well, you’re a wise man. [Laughter] Sometimes the forums are right.

The MMO Gamer: And sometimes they are very, very wrong. Anyway, we should probably be talking about Telara, not the forums.

Russ Brown: Yeah. [Laughter]

The MMO Gamer: So how does this game allow you to do that, then? React to players to give them what they want faster than a standard MMO?

Russ Brown: It allows me because of the way our technology is [built]. Once I have content on your machine; so you will still have to patch. I want to make sure people understand that. Once you have the content like animations, I can tell the servers how they need to behave. Once you have a dragon, I can say “Hey dragon, go attack over here. Hey dragon, go do this.” Or, “orcs go attack over there.”

So I can figure out what the players want to happen and do that.

The MMO Gamer: So you’re trying to set up a system that’s more dynamic than most MMOs, and actually create something approaching what they used to do in MUDs, or early EverQuest with live GM events?

Russ Brown: Exactly! Something where you can actually make a difference, so it’s not the same. Right now, in a lot of MMOs, if I go to this zone it’s the same as it was three or five years ago. And also I can give the players what they want.

One of my grand visions is to not only do it on a big scale but do it on a small scale too. Have things like merchants who have sales. Don’t always have the same things. So when people stumble across him, they’ll think “Cool, this guy is selling a magical weapon he didn’t yesterday.”

The MMO Gamer: The problem that always comes in is that dynamic ability comes with a cost. How are you going to manage that? Are you going to enlist volunteers for this, or have an extremely large customer service team?

Russ Brown: So we have a full development team, and we have a pretty good pipeline for getting that done really quickly. But yea, it’d definitely something that we’re going to have to support. It’s more gaming as service; we’re there to serve you.

The MMO Gamer: Is there anything you personally would like to talk about? The sort of thing people such as myself don’t generally ask you?

Russ Brown: That’s a great question. What I want to talk about is letting players have fun. Giving the players what they want.

The MMO Gamer: In an MMO? Are you insane, sir?

Russ Brown: [Laughter] No! I’m not! It’s supposed to be fun, it’s not supposed to be a chore that I’m scheduled to do every day and eight o’clock, right? You’re supposed to be in there to have fun! And my goal is to have fun. I think so much in gaming, especially online gaming becomes a chore.

The MMO Gamer: So then why do you think that the common mindset among developers seems to be that MMOs must occupy 5,000 hours of gameplay, and therefore we must make players do XYZ that they don’t really want to do for the first 4,900 hours to get to the fun stuff?

Russ Brown: I honestly don’t know. And sometimes I wonder that. I think you can make a game fun. I think sometimes games, and not just MMOs, make a game but not necessarily make it fun. That’s the answer I’m going to give.

The MMO Gamer: A follow-up to that would be, “fun” means different things to different people. What is it to you?

Russ Brown: Two things define fun for me. One is seeing new experiences, going around and seeing cool stuff and seeing stuff change and the other one is character advancement. So for me character advancement is fun, I need to feel like my character is getting better and that I don’t have roadblocks. I need my guy to feel like his growing.

The MMO Gamer: How is advancement handled in the game then? How have you sought to make it fun?

It was very interesting during the demo, where you where showing off that any character can change between any job at any time. I did have some wheels in my head turning, thinking “Huh, this is never going to work. You’re going to have to carry five sets of armor around with you.”

And the subjob system was very interesting; can you get into that a little bit?

Russ Brown: So what the subclass system is; we have four basic core classes. And the four classes have their basic MMO roles. You have a fighter, a cleric, a rogue and a mage. The subclass system is how you do hybrids and how you get some specialization in your class. Given this example, so you want to play a paladin who is more of a fighter who can heal, you’ll play a subclass paladin on a fighter. If you want to play a paladin who is more like a cleric who can fight, you’ll play a paladin as a subclass to the cleric.

So that way, I can always, when people say “Well you know, a hybrid’s not as good as this class.”, if you want to be the best healer, be the cleric.

The MMO Gamer: Does the subclass level up as well, or does it just stick to your main class’s level?

Russ Brown: Excellent question, you’re the first guy to ask that! As your main class levels up and [in] your subclass, more stuff gets unlocked as you get more levels. So they’ll automatically appear, you don’t have to go to a trainer.

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