Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted

Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted
Developer(s)	Virtrium LLC
Designer(s)	Rick Simmons, Jason Murdick, Heather Rothwell
Engine	Intrinsic Alchemy Mantrid Engine[1]
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows
Release date(s)	NA December 9, 2003 EU December 5, 2003
Genre(s)	Massively multiplayer online role-playing game
Mode(s)	Multiplayer
Distribution	Digital distribution

Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Virtrium and originally released by Artifact Entertainment as Horizons: Empire of Istaria.^[2][3] Tulga Games, LLC acquired the game and all related assets on January 25, 2005 and sold them to EI Interactive July 2006.^[4] On July 18, 2007, Virtrium LLC (Vi) acquired the rights to the game.^[5][6]

Set in a sword and sorcery world, the game allows players to be adventurers, crafters, or both, and features a struggle between the "living races" (including the players), and "the Withered Aegis", an army of the undead seeking to destroy all life.

Istaria is unique among MMORPGs in that players may choose a dragon for their avatar. Istaria allows players to build non-instanced player communities with either multi-level underground dragon chambers or ground level communities.

Gameplay

Istaria uses the race/class/level paradigm common to many role-playing games, as well as similar mechanics as other massively multiplayer online games. The goal is to join the forces of the Gifted together with other players against the evil hordes of undeads the Withered Aegis, to build communities, repair broken structures, and solve lots of quests. Different from other MMORPGs in Istaria the player fight not each other in player versus player fights, only together player versus environment. To measure strength in player versus player is possible in a zone created for player fights, on the Isle of Battles. The charm of the game is the great amount of adventure and trade schools that can be partly performed simultaneously.

There are eleven playable races include Dragons in addition to the more conventional biped Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, and Half-giant races. Other races are less familiar, but typical of fantasy games: Dryads, Satyrs, Fiends, Saris (a cat-like anthropomorphic humanoid), and Sslik (an asexual non-anthropomorphic reptilian humanoid).^[7] There are 28 adventure and 20 trade schools a biped can chose from. The special feature for the bipeds is to be able to learn any amount of schools. Only one trade and adventure school can be active at a time. Each adventure class adds masterable abilities to the character which can be used in all other adventure schools, adding additional powers to the character. It can be changed between the schools as often it is necessary without disadvantages. The adventure schools split up in heal, mage and warrior classes and mixtures of them.

Dragons have one adventure school and three trade schools and are totally different from bipeds. A dragon starts as a flightless hatchling, in an epic quest they grow up to an adult dragon able to fly. In another epic quest series, dragons become older, reaching the point of ancient dragon with a lot more abilities as well. During the quest to adulthood dragons need to decide between two different factions called Helian and Lunus. Helians prefer to magic in combat and are more friendly minded to bipeds. The Lunus prefer to use melee tactic during fights and are very sceptic to bipeds. The gift of flight is reserved to the dragons in Istaria.^[8]

The tradeskill system is of a very high grade of complexity. The three dragon trade schools are used to build lairs, scales, spells and crystals. The biped trade school splits up in schools to produce usable items: clothes, armors, weapons, jewelry, scrolls, potions, food, tools, spells and trade schools to build structures like: houses, guild houses, walls, workshops, silos, and consigners. There are about 150 different resources to gather from ore, wood, plants and animals, similar to Ultima Online. With higher levels higher tiered resources could be gathered, for example metal used for weapons and armors: Tier I: Copper and Tin, Tier II: Iron, Tier III: Steel, Tier IV: Cobalt, Tier V: Mithril and Tier VI: Adamantium. The resources are refined using tools and machines to be crafted into final products. During assembly of the final products the craftsmen can apply techniques to color and for improved quality and attributes. For the production techniques and formulas need to be collected and bought over time. The craftable equipment, which can be of epic quality, is the base of any adventurer or craftsmen and is a huge difference to a lot of other MMORPGs where trade skills often play a subordinate role. There are over 2000 formulas and techniques a jack of all trades, Grand Master Crafter, can register in their knowledge book.^[9]

Development

The core concepts behind Horizons before release were as follows: to create a zoneless,^[10] constantly changing environment in which players would cooperate to hold back a seemingly unstoppable enemy: the Withered Aegis.^[11][12] This enemy would consist of a few individuals from the Living Races (races that the Players belong to) in an unholy alliance with groups of Devils and Demons from another existence called the Realm of Blight. The twisted Blighted magic would include necromancy, the ability to create zombies from corpses and even reanimate skeletal remains into fierce warriors. Due to the co-op nature of the game The Aegis would be entirely AI controlled.^[13] According to David Bowman in 2002, "Horizons will not ship with player versus player conflict. Rather Artifact has chosen to put its full attention to making the player versus environment gameplay the best it can be."^[14]

This enemy was originally supposed to be dynamic in nature,^[15] launching automatic attacks on player held positions and blighting (capturing) the ground with its evil magic. This proved to be difficult to implement properly in practice, and the battlefront was eventually scaled back into static regions of Player and Blight held areas. However, in the years after Horizons launched "World Events" would be held that would allow players to make a permanent mark on the world. While not as cost effective to maintain as an automated system, this allowed Artifact, and Tulga, to keep their promise of a changing, interactive world.^[16]

After several years of stagnation, at Istaria there were no land and lairs to purchase anymore. Only through Plot Reclamations, involved by Virtrium 2008, came areas owned by the players available again which no longer had a paid account.^[17][18] The Plot Reclamations have since been carried out monthly. With the various continuously updates new content has been added since 2007. Updates the client has taken in recent years since Virtrium does the development and thanks to the more powerful computers today days, the lags have reduced significantly and the game runs smoother and more stable as it was previously the case.^[19]

Plot events

When first launched, the Horizons staff established an event-driven storyline. These events revealed the lore and history of Istaria and occasionally led to the discovery of new, different events.

Originally the game was slated to have weekly events, but since September 2004 they were drastically reduced in number due to staffing and financial issues at Artifact and, later, Tulga. Some of the events included digging tunnels and building bridges to access new areas, and the freeing of an entire race from magically maintained slavery to the Withered Aegis. Both the Satyr and Dryad races became player accessible through such large scale, server wide events.^[16]

Prior to the launch of Horizons and the problems that followed, these events and others like them were intended to be ongoing in a continuous fashion. Virtrium added seasonal events that are hold during the year, Spring Festival, Summer Festival: Pax Istaria, Fall Festival and Winter Festival: Gnomekindle.

Reception

Istaria suffered from several problems in the first years after launch. Many of these are acknowledged by both the current and former management of the various companies that have owned Istaria. Rick Simmons, the owner of Istaria, has stated that his team is working to rectify these issues as quickly as possible.^[20] Istaria suffers from a number of performance issues affecting both the client and the servers. These performance problems are often, and sometimes incorrectly, categorized by players as "lag". According to David Bowman, former Creative Director of Artifact and President of Tulga Games, "The client combat systems were slow and jerky... while there were many reasons to like the game, most players couldn't get to them past these problems."^[21] After several years of stagnation, Istaria no longer had land available for new players to purchase. However, a recent "Plot Reclamation" project has made available many areas which had previously been owned by players who are no longer subscribed.^[17][18] Several games currently on the market have many times the number of quests to complete, monsters to fight, items to obtain, and areas to explore than what Istaria can offer. David Bowman: "There was not sufficient enjoyable content for the players, with some promised content systems not making it into the launch."^[21]

Subscription

After downloading the game can be tested two weeks free, after this period depending on the type of subscription monthly recurring charges. Istaria distinguish between three different subscription models. Free Access is a Free-to-play account, which is restricted to one character and merely allows the race of human to play. The Basic Access sub costs monthly $ 9.95 includes up to five characters, but you can not have a plot or dragon lair. With the Property Holder Access account, which costs $ 14.95 per month, it is possible to have a plot or lair and up to 7 characters. A special feature in the account management allows Basic or Property Holder Access subscriptions to create more characters, to acquire several plots of land or lairs and to log in with multiple characters at the same time in the game from one account.^[22]

Server (Shards)

With the start of Horizons there were three European and eight North American servers (shards). Because of the immense problems at the beginning of Horizons many players sought other alternatives and also some servers visited by very few players. In October 2004 the three European Shards Wind, Ice and Earth were merged into Unity, the five standard shards Life, Shadow, Bounty, Twilight and Energy to Chaos and the three RPG server Spirit, Dawn and Expanse to Order. With the takeover by Virtrium the Unity shard end of 2007 was taken from the net. It took a few months until finally, in April 2008, the Unity players got the opportunity to move their characters after the order or chaos, without incurring any costs.^[23][24] Currently there are three American servers called shards, one of them is the test server. The server Chaos is the regular server which is populated by a large number of players, the second game server Order is aimed at the role players and the server Blight is the public test server on which updates and new features can be played before they appear on the regular game servers.

Content Updates

The following major content updates have been released by the Virtrium development team.

• Hammer's Rest (October 16, 2007)
• Gnomekindle 2007 (December 12, 2007)
• Tasty Treats (March 24, 2008)
• Pax Istaria (July 29, 2008)
• Dralnok's Doom (July 1, 2009)
• Scourge of the Skulks (February 10, 2010) ^[25]
• Dragon Rite of Passage (June 22, 2010) ^[26]
• September 2011 (September 6, 2011) ^[27]
• November 2011 (November 29, 2011)
• Spring Update 2012 (April 10, 2012) ^[19]
• November Content Update (November 12, 2012)
• Gnomekindle 2013 (February 2013)
• Spring Festival 2013 (May 29, 2013)
• The Crystalshaper 2013 (October 15, 2013) ^[28]
• 10th Anniversary Celebration! (December 10, 2013) ^[29]
• A Bitter Wind 2014 (April 8, 2014) ^[30]
• In Memory Of 2014 (August 19, 2014)
• City Under Siege (February 10, 2015)

See also

• List of dragon video games

References

External links

• Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted website