Trion's Lars Buttler

We're a publisher and developer for server-based games, games as a service - triple-A quality videogames that are simulated on powerful servers. 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.

So we brought together the technologies and the tools, the talent and the funding, as you know, and built Heroes of Telara, or HOT, as we sometimes call it for short, as a next-generation MMORPG. 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.

Now that translates into incredibly fun innovation in the RPG genre. Because if you have a dynamic game world now, you can throw unexpected, challenging, epic events in people's faces, and you can see how they react, what their decisions are. And those decisions directly have an impact on the world.

So we're no longer talking about a standard MMORPG for example, where every quest, every event is already mapped out and known, and where your actions only really matter to yourself, or maybe to your guild. 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. 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.

Great question. So, number one, Trion is a publisher and developer of a multitude of different games. Here at E3, we are actually showcasing the first big title, Heroes of Telara, a fully dynamic, massively social MMORPG. We also already announced that we are building a fully dynamic, massively-social action RPG in cooperation with the Sci-Fi Channel. And we also announced that we are working on a fully dynamic alive MMORTS with Petroglyph, with former Westwood [developers], almost the creator of the RTS category.

So the idea is not just to make one MMORPG, it is to create server-based games and take the innovation that server-based gaming allows you to different powerful, fun gaming categories. That is very different from making one game and so on. But although the first game, Heroes of Telara, is in a similar category like World of Warcraft or others, it's very different in terms of the experience that you will get.

And we felt that it was kind of almost irrelevant to go after WoW and try to do the same that people have done for ten years. The architecture of the gameplay of MMORPGs has not changed for about ten years. And WoW has really taken this to the best polish and quality. HOT is a new generation. It is very innovative in terms of gameplay, it uses very different technologies and tools, and so we don't feel it goes after a certain traditional MMORPG, it is actually a different category; it is a server-based game. Traditional MMORPGs are still client-computed.

That is really the key question. We did not build the technology for the sake of the technology - that's always really weak. We started with: "Wouldn't it be amazing if in an MMORPG you could really create heroes?" You could really have massively social events, you could really change the world based on player behaviour. You could really give people incredible choice, a sub-class with whom they want to play at any moment in time.

And all those things needed new technologies and tools. Just like Pixar and others have built technologies and tools in order to allow for greater, better, more fun experiences. Many companies that I've seen in the past failed when they wanted to do something innovative when they used old technologies. They just used what they had at hand. And they couldn't really push the envelope. We have the end goal in mind of really building a different, more innovative, more exciting, fully dynamic, massively social game category, the category of server-based games, and that's why we built the technology.

And of course we announced the Trion Platform first because we had to build it first, and it's now applicable for all different kinds of games. But the exciting thing about E3 this year is that we show the first in a series of a portfolio of exciting new videogames, and that is Heroes of Telara.