Tears of Polaris Preview Notes

Kunin

On February the 13th at Midnight, GMT time, Tears of Polaris opened its doors to allow anyone to come in and take a look at the newly redesigned novice introductions and explore a tiny bit of the world as well as take a look at some of the archetypes in the game. Over 300 people decided to take a look in the twenty-four hour period; from the blazingly fast Whitney to the multiple run through people like Saran and Kirraxus, just to name a few, and we learned a lot, fixed a lot, and are reinvigorated a lot from all the responses, comments, and suggestions we received!

On our forums, Finchy writes, “What if it sucked? What if I couldn’t work out what I was doing and left dejected and shamed? What if I didn’t get a cool laser weapon?

In less than an hour, I’m hungering only more for ToP’s general release.”

Comments like this were great, and really made us happy as developers, builders, writers and testers, but we also came out with some great suggestions. People like Fyra and Asilient have helped us take a second, fresh look at some of the finer points of our introduction and skill presentation with their comments on the forums, and we really appreciate thoughts like these.

We were striving for a quick, truncated introduction that brought the player into the universe of Tears of Polaris as quickly and seamlessly as possible but still provide ample information on the very basics of the game. For the most part, we have succeeded, but the introduction only lasts a few minutes. What are these three hundred and some odd players supposed to do for another 23 and a half hours? Well, it turns out the answer was kill each other. Repeatedly.

From our standpoint, this coffee binging, sleep depriving 24 hours has shown us a lot of things that we’ll be using to help make Tears of Polaris a better game:

Introductions Are Vital to Immersion

Pretty standard, but since we made this the focal point of the preview, players really began to dig into the introductions and we heard a lot of applause from our most detailed introduction, the Bileath Corporate Empire path, and some moaning that the others didn’t have as much meat. Players wanted their introduction to make them feel like they were really a part of this organization with all its quirks and nuances.

Tasks and Hints Are a Thing of Beauty

One of the things that weren’t included in this preview was Tasks. Tasks will help guide you in your first baby steps into Tears of Polaris, and the suggestions we received on items to mention have really given us feedback that will be crucial to the first stages of every characters life. Our goal is to get the player into the action of the world as quickly and painlessly as possible and Hints and Tasks are the first parts of our plan.

Interactivity Takes Gameplay to New Heights

We showed off some of the MXP functions in our preview and the response from this feature has been encouragingly positive! Little things like being able to push buttons on a console for a quest go a long way to bringing the world to life, not to mention making the transition into a text-only game for first time players much smoother.

As veteran open-world gamers, most of us know the rule of thumb that states “the more you put into a game, the more you get out”, and this certainly hasn’t changed, especially in IRE games. What we want to accomplish is allowing the player to get just as much out and put just as much in with dynamic input methods, offering multiple ways to accomplish the same task, but also to lower the learning curve.

With the help of you, the players, and your feedback, we’re very committed to ensuring a fun, fluid and challenging world for everyone to help shape, form, create, and even destroy! So please, keep those comments flowing!

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Tags: Events, preview, Tears of Polaris

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 11:14 amand is filed under Iron Realms News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “Tears of Polaris Preview Notes”

Gaetele Says:
February 17th, 2010 at 4:40 am
>_> If this introduction day was so fun and worthwhile, maybe you should do them more often!
Sara Says:
February 17th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
The intro was fun. Though having the chat channel on during the introduction made it way too spammy. But that was just for the preview, I’m assuming.
Peter Gleave Says:
February 18th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Yeah, I had fun testing things out. The global chat was spammy, occasionally informative.

The problem with the intro for me is it’s a preview into something you know little of. So you could go through it and say “This is the impression I get..” but going in equipped with a little information about the game’s history and instead being able to say “This is the impression I get, this is what we were going for. Maybe try..” It helps define the quality when you look for ways to add more characterization, especially in the latter part(s) of the intro.

I liked the intro, though. Shame I couldn’t spend more than an hour or so testing it further.
Kunin Says:
February 18th, 2010 at 7:48 pm
There is a vast amount of information about Tears of Polaris, both features and history, on the forums.

http://forums.tearsofpolaris.com
Peter Gleave Says:
February 19th, 2010 at 1:23 am
I’ll admit fault there myself, I don’t particularly keep up to date with the forums, so I mostly did the testing after the emails received.