For months, Triara was a collection of screens: arena, tavern, dungeon, expeditions, market. Every system had its own menu and button, and getting around the game meant jumping from one page to another. Now everything happens on a map. When you log in you see the village, your team standing on the road and the other teams of your league wandering around.
A map instead of a menu
Your team appears as a small group of heads with its name and power. You move it with WASD or the joystick, or tap a destination and it walks there by itself. The buildings are the old menus: the tavern, the league arena, the cup coliseum, the market, the forge, the Witch’s Hut and the stable open in a window over the map, without taking you out of it. The stable sells mounts, which speed up your pace.
The village is only the start. Signposts along the roads lead to eleven other areas: Lighthouse Cape, the Forest, the Enchanted Forest, Autumn Vale, the Swamp, the Wilds, the Crystal Mine, the Graveyard, the Desert, the Volcano and the Bone Wastes. Each one has its own level band, its own beasts and its own people.
You can see your neighbours
The other teams of your league share the map with you. Walk up to one and you see its place in the table, its points and your chance of beating it. From there you can challenge it to a friendly, open its profile, propose a trade or send it a message. That is the idea holding everything else up: a Triara league is not a list of names, it is a village where you keep running into your rivals.
Characters with a story
61 characters live across the areas, five or six per map. Each one has a chain of quests that unlock in order and often send you elsewhere: talk to someone in the forest, defeat a beast in the swamp, pick something up in the mine and come back. In total there are more than 300 chained quests, written in Spanish and English.
Objectives mix four things: defeating beasts, gathering items from the ground, talking to another character and passing trials. Trials are short minigames (mazes, runes, the tightrope walker, noughts and crosses and friends) whose difficulty follows your level. The eight puzzles from the old expeditions live on here.
Daily errands from the travellers
Three travellers roam the world and wake up on a different map every day. They hand out the daily errands, generated at your level, up to five a day. They expire at midnight, which makes them the reason to drop in for a while every day even after you have finished the chains in your area.
Beasts and pets
Beasts appear alone, in pairs or in threes, and each group shows its level and how hard it will be. Attacking starts an automatic fight with your line-up that you watch in real time. Before each fight comes an opening strike: a ring closes in on the beast and, if you stop it in the centre, the beast starts the fight wounded. Chaining perfect strikes raises the experience from the win by up to 20%.
Pets no longer come from beasts. Every day, in every league, a single wild pet is sighted somewhere on the map. The first team to hunt it down keeps it, with one attempt per team. They are scarce on purpose: a pet fights beside its champion and should feel like a real find.
What the world is for
Quests pay coins, player experience and development experience for the champions in your line-up. With the move to a manager game, that is their main job: the world is where you earn money and grow your squad outside matches. The league and the cup, covered in another post, are where you compete.
If you want to see it for yourself, Triara is playable at triara.io, no account needed.