Horizons Preview

Ever since the advent of Ultima Online and EverQuest, thousands of people from around the world have spent their evenings engaged in high adventure, creating colorful virtual personas, seeking out and battling fearsome monsters, earning fame and fortune, and chatting with other players along the way. Since then, EverQuest and its competitors, like Dark Age of Camelot and Asheron's Call, have collectively evolved online role-playing games to the point that they're not just time-consuming hack-and-slash games, but rather communities of friends who chat, travel, and adventure together online. Developer Artifact Entertainment will attempt to build on this idea by making its upcoming game Horizons feature not only hack-and-slash combat, but also in-depth trade skills, player-owned housing and businesses, and plenty of customizable features.

The last time we saw Horizons was at this year's E3, and even then, it was clear that it will be a colorful game that features lots of different environments, including forested hills, jungles, arid deserts, and snowy mountain peaks. And just like other online role-playing games, Horizons will let you explore its many areas in search of treasure and danger in the form of fierce monsters. But in other online RPGs, when players and monsters fight, they swing their weapons in the air near each other and occasionally grunt in pain, while Horizons will actually show players and monsters scoring hits on each other and dodging and parrying attacks. It will also allows players to choose from one of five hotkeyed combat skills that will let them take different actions depending on how the battle is going. And one of Horizons' most intriguing features is its inclusion of powerful dragons with the ability to fly as players characters--though even these mythical beasts will be carefully balanced when it comes to fighting battles. For instance, though dragon characters will be able to attack their enemies from overhead, they'll have access only to their breath weapons while in the air, and not their formidable biting and clawing attacks, while their enemies on the ground will be able to use any tactics they wish.

But if what we've seen recently is any indication, Horizons will have more to it than just fighting. A lot more. For starters, the game will have player-created housing that will not only let players build online homes for their characters, but will also let wealthy player guilds construct castles for themselves and their friends. Once a castle is constructed on a major plot of land, new subsidiary plots will be unlocked that players can then use to build ancillary homes and storefronts around the castle, basically creating a new city. Artifact Entertainment hopes that these cities will go a long way toward helping players feel like they're part of a community, especially when they have their very own base of operations in the game.

In order to travel across the huge world, from starting cities to player settlements to the wilderness, players will be able to use magical travel gates that, like the portals in Asheron's Call, will let them quickly jump from place to place in the huge world of Istaria. But these gates will only work for destinations that have already been visited. In other words, the more often you travel in Horizons, the easier it gets, since you can use all the travel gates that lead to places you've already been to. And if you happen to belong to a wealthy and powerful player guild that has enough in the way of finances and resources, you'll even be able to build your own personal travel gates to travel quickly to and from your estates.

Tools of the Trade

Travel gates will be just one of the projects that would-be artisans can undertake in Horizons. Though players will still be able to hunt monsters and bring back valuable antique weapons and armor from their enemies' lairs, Horizons will have an in-depth crafting system that will let players create the most powerful items in the world of Istaria. Horizons' crafting system will have a number of intriguing features, not the least of which is the way it will handle crafting resources. Resources in Horizons, such as leather, adamantite ore, and other raw materials, will "spawn" in deposits across the world and can actually be depleted, at which point they may reappear in another location later. The game's development team will keep a careful eye on the demand for certain resources and will plan the respawns accordingly. In fact, Artifact Entertainment hopes that players will begin to look at crafting and resource hunting as a new kind of adventuring--that is, instead of going out and hunting for wealthy monsters, players may very well go out hunting for hidden resource deposits. Once items are crafted at a forge or workshop, they'll be recorded in a nearby tome that players can consult whenever they wish. In an interesting twist, the tome will be coded in XML, which will let players who own handheld computers stream trade information in real time to see which items and resources are most in demand.

Skilled artisans will be able to customize their characters' and guildmates' appearance more or less completely. As we saw at E3, Horizons' powerful graphics engine is not only capable of creating impressive special effects and rendering huge outdoor environments, but it's also capable of adding in minute details, including layered clothing and customizable items. In Horizons, players will be able to wear multiple layers of clothing (a powerful but stylish fighter might wear a cloak over a steel breastplate over a tunic, for instance), and skilled artisans will be able to craft, dye, and even emboss logos on whichever items they specialize in. Artifact even has plans to let accomplished player guilds create their own personalized guild emblems, submit them for approval, and then make them available in the game to place on their weapons, armor, and clothing.

Customizing content will be an important part of Horizons. As Artifact Entertainment designer Steve Snow puts it, the developer wants "to make a game where you play the game you want, instead of being restricted to what [Artifact Entertainment] could think up." In fact, you'll even be able to customize Horizons' interface by resizing or closing any and all chat windows and then locking your preferences for future use. Horizons will also have an in-game instant messaging system that will let you quickly and easily see which of your friends are online and send them a message in a new window, rather than having to type in a single dialogue box and having your chat buried under fighting and magic-spell messages. In fact, Artifact plans to release tutorials that will let players edit their installation files to change the look of the game's interface, import their own skins for each of the game's menus, and even alter the appearance of objects in the game. Horizons will also ship with a Maya 3D-model application that will let industrious players import their own 3D models into the game. For instance, if you don't care for the appearance of a certain monster, such as a zombie, you can create your own model, import it into the game, and see your custom-built model each time you log in, even if other players can't. If you like, you can post your 3D models for other players to see and use as well.

Even though Horizons is currently in an alpha-testing stage, it's clear that the game has some intriguing ideas and should have plenty of options for would-be adventurers, especially the kind who don't like to spend all their time fighting. The game is scheduled to go into beta testing soon, and we'll have more information on Horizons then.