RIFT: Planes of Telara has been out for some time now, but it’s complicated lore and opposing factions are still confusing for many players not excluding me so i took some time to figure it out. If you ask what’s going on inside the game, you can hear all manners of versions, including the one that all of the characters were put back in the past of their world, and the tutorial area is what happens in the future. Which is, actually, far from the truth. This post sums up the story according to developers diaries and interviews. If you want to know more about RIFT: Planes of Telara lore, read this post. Also, as a side note i want to add, that current lack of upgrades doesn’t by any means indicate that Chick Geek Games is shutting down, i just have my hands full with preparing to my Diploma hearings and the State Graduation Exam (both are coming in around 2 months, which is frustrating). Now, to the RIFT’s lore part…
RIFT world that we see when we start the game is torn by a civil war and plagued by Rifts, a holes to other planes that are full of vile creatures, waiting to destroy the world. There are two sides you can play for – the Guardians and the Defiants. Either way, no matter which side you take, you are a nameless hero resurrected by someone and unleashed on the world to make it a better place in the end. You do some world-saving and then find yourself in another place and time – 20 years later, after the war is finished. But who the heck are those Guardians and Defiants, why the fight each other and Regulos, and what is this stuff that’s being referred to as a “Blood Storm”?
Telara is not a normal planet we’re used to – it was created by its gods (the Vigil, which consists of 3 gods) and made entirely of something called “sourcestone”. It’s something like a pure magic, or its presentation in the material world: sourcestone makes such things as transferring energy to substance possible, which is quite a valuable feature as you may guess. Telara’s inhabitants used it for their own magic and their technology was based on it, and everyone were happy until the Blood Storm came. The Blood Storm is a group consisting of six Dragons, rulers of six elemental planes, lead by Regulos – the Dragon of Death. They were busy destroying planets for whatever unnamed wicked reasons Dragons could have but mainly for the sake of Regulos having fun, and finally stumbled upon Telara. At that point, they found the sourcestone feature and decided this world was too precious to destroy it, so they went on to conquer it by opening Rifts – “doors” from their planes to Telara.
The gods who have created Telara and its inhabitants managed to fight off the invasion and seal the dragons with Ward. Ward is something that you usually use to seal off bloodthirsty Dragons from other planes, if you’re curious what it is. Everyone were happy for a long time, until 20 years before the RIFT’s main events. King of Mathosia was unlucky enough to have two game-cocks in one coop, so the Kingdom ended up being torn by a civil war between Zareph Mathos and his twin brother Aedraxis. It wouldn’t be so bad if only Aedraxis wouldn’t go all megalomaniac and stuff and use some ancient technology to destroy the Vigil’s Ward.
Why Aedraxis has used it, is clear enough: he wanted power and where else do you get it but from a sealed-off deadly creatures that want to conquer your world? So the Ward fell, which made Regulos free and sweeping the plane of Death over the world – an event called later “The Shade”. This is where both Defiants and Guardians were formed. Who are they?
The races presented in RIFT were milling around Telara for a long time before the Blood Storm, so they had a history of their own by the current time. Dwarves were created by the Vigil god Bahralt with his desire to create things, so they were natural crafters and traders. During the Blood Storm Laethys - the Dragon of Earth plane – wanted to enslave them by making them lust for treasures crazily, but failed miserably as dwarves fought the urge and the Dragons. During the current events the joined with the Guardians side.
Elves were created by the Vigil god Tavril at the beginning of the world, but during the Blood Storm events they split into two races: they were slaughtered by Dragon of Air Crucia, some stayed true to Tavril and became those we know as High Elves, while others turned away from their creator. They chose to make pacts with spirits and lesser gods hoping they’ll provide more safety than Tavril. Those elves became Kelari, were shunned by High Elves, and lived on some distant islands that has been destroyed by Regulos during the Shade events. High Elves joined with the Vigil formed the Guardians, while Kelary went to the Defiants side.
The humans were created by the Vigil too, by all the gods together, but even long before the Blood Storm they split into two factions. The Eth moved to the south and kept their nomadic style of life until the Blood Storm, while the Mathosians moved to the north and studied along with the High Elves. Being close to the elves they ended up joining the Guardians. But during the Blood Storm was formed another faction that had a miraculous beginning: invaders from the plane of Air, instead of killing everyone as usual, decided to help humans fight the Dragons. This group of planar beings called Shalastiri was lead by their prince Bahmi, and after the Ward was erected, they had to stay in Telara because the Ward made it impossible for them to return back home. They bred with humans and their offsprings called themselves Bahmi after the leader of their planar ancestors. The majority of Telarans distrust them because of their planar origin, but the Eth humans did not mind and the centuries of alliances between them end up with Bahmi being part of the Defiant faction.
The Ethians themselves ended up in the Defiants because they discovered how to use sourcestone to make powerful anti-dragon weapons which were used in the war, but after the Dragons were sealed the Vigil forbade the use of such technology and they had to maintain the will of the Vigil. Ethian cultists wanted to use the old technology to destroy the Ward, nothing is said about Bahmi having anything to do with that – but, after all, they had planar origins and some of them could possibly want to get back to the plane of Air. While struggling with themselves, the Ethians end up destroying their own cities and getting back to nomadic ways, while Mathosians build up an empire. Which ended up with a civil ward and destruction of the Ward by using the very same old Eth technology.
When the Ward fell, the races split. The Guardians were the High Elves, Mathosians and Dwarves, and the Defiants - the Bahmi, Eth and Kelary. The Mathosians blamed the Eth for their machines destroying the Ward, and the Eth blamed the Mathosians for their kind using these machines in the most wicked way ever possible. The future Guardians put their faith into the Vigil to save the world, and the Vigil answered them: fallen heroes came back as Ascended to help fight Aedraxis (it’s what we see in tutorial stage) and then then Vigil stuffed them somewhere for 20 years, so they came back again after the war.
Other races, shunned by the Vigil, formed the Defiants faction and started developing technology to change the fate of the world themselves, without the Vigil’s help. While Regulos was finally stopped 20 years ago, the Ward still fell and Telara was left open to all the Dragon to enter with their elemental forces. Then, the Defiants from the future came and it became known that the Vigil and the Guardians failed to protect Telara, only some Defiants were left – they came back in time to help their ancestors and providing them with a technology that replicated the Ascension. So the Defiants created Ascended heroes on their own, to save the world.
I must also note that every Ascended in Telara is a resurrected person with no memory of their own past but with a package of “souls” from different persons – with all their skills and so, i guess, some of their memory left. So practically they all are a bunch of undead people with multiply-personality disorder. Have you seen “The Dollhouse”? It’s even cooler here in Telara because everyone are also undead. Go figure how bad things are going if Telara is in need of such a heroes!
The current state of Telara is unstable – will the Guardians really fail? Or the history took another road at the point where people came from its future to change its past? Either way, both factions are faced with grim choice now: even if they’ll find a way to fight off the planar invaders and somehow replace the Ward, they also must destroy the rivaling faction or be destroyed themselves. This is what we have at RIFT’s launch, but who knows how the story develops in future expansions…
In the previous post i told you 
In previous post about Prius Online and ARGO Online IP blockage i told you about two ways to pass an IP block: first way is to use a virtual or dedicated server with access to its operating system via Remote Desktop session manager, and a second (and much more common) is to use a program that will let you connect to a proxy server in another country, so your browser will work through that server and the sites you’ll be visiting will see that server’s IP instead of yours. I took as an example 
There’s a “Territory Coverage” post on Prius forums at GPotato’s
How to split items (item stacks)?
I'm writing this kind of posts from time to time, yes. Chick Geek Games blog has been online for almost 5 months (since 10/12/10) and generated 123 posts (not including this one - i like the number 123 and don't want to spoil it :), which makes it roughly 25 posts per month. Also, since i started the blog i was adding all kinds of advertising, that's not because i'm so greedy, it's coz' i'm on Advertising degree and i wanted to test these systems "live" and see how they work. This is why you can now see ProjectWonderful ad space down there, i used a lot of PW ads as a customer - to find cool stuff - but never been a publisher and curious how it works from the insides. If anyone wants to pick up that space, i can move it to a higher place in blog's skin. Also, i have implemented Yandex.Metrica counter now to get more stats on which pages are getting how many hits - to understand better what my visitors are interested in (Blogger standard tools aren't so good). I had to open every post i have made and manually insert a counter code in it %) But until the new counter gathers new data, here’s what we have on Blogger stats now:
As i have said in the lead of this post, playing in an MMO already makes you to play some kind of a role, but you may not be fully aware of that. You’re doing quests, grinding, crafting and stuff like that, where’s that kind of role-playing they’re making servers for? The real role-play starts when your character is more than just a bunch of pixels on your screen, when he or she is really becoming a “character” in a sense like in a movie – with a back-story, a temper, a goal in life. When you’re not just grinding to hit a level – but when you’re exploring the world and building you place in it. When you immerse yourself in that world. Sounds strange to you? Well, why do people even find that fun? Let me name you a few reasons:
So, if no fanaticism required, what do you have to do?
Another example i mentioned in the lead is how Creatures game series fans are funding a new game’s development on their own. These games weren’t online, but they are setting an even more outstanding example that Ryzom did – Creatures series is what is called A-Life games, Artificial Life genre. The first game was released around 15 years back and featured a living world of Albia, inhabited with animals, plants and creatures called Norns. It was a virtual model of a real eco-system, and Norns had many features inherent to real living animals, including DNA, biochemistry, brain model and even a capability of learning – the player could teach them to do stuff and listen to simple sentences typed from keyboard. 
A distinctive feature of the game was its open architecture – using in-game script language called CAOS game’s fans were able to create from scratch literally anything, from in-game items and new Norn breeds to new in-game zones or whole total conversions, or even a 3rd-party software that would work as a part of the game. Creatures 2 was released in 1998 and Creatures 3 – in 2001. It had a very strong fan base of people who played all the games and modded them for years, and everyone were waiting for the next part. But it never came out. 
Original developers team called Creature Labs and led by 
Steve Grand was working on a theoretical problem of simulating a living creature in a virtual environment for many years now, but last week he stepped out of the shadows and created a Kickstarter project for 
As the description of Grandroids project states: “Imagine that someone has discovered alien creatures on a nearby planet and is planning to import them to Earth to sell as pets. Would you want to buy one? I can't promise actual physical aliens from another planet, but I can offer you real 'alien' life forms who can live in a virtual world on your computer. And I do mean real. I'm not talking about a computer game designed to simulate lifelike behavior; I mean genuine artificial life. I mean virtual creatures constructed from complex networks of virtual brain cells and biochemical reactions and genes. They'll learn things for themselves and have their own thoughts. I don't program them to behave in a certain way - they make their own decisions.”
