Rift Fans Get Some Answers at Trion's Gamer Day
This article originally appeared on ZAM on Nov. 16, 2010.
A handful of fans from the official Rift: Planes of Telara forums were recently invited to tour the Trion Worlds office and get their hands on the game. They also had their questions answered by the Trion team. Editor-in-Chief Darryl Gangloff reports on the event.
Last week, Trion Worlds hosted its Gamer Day event to give members of the press and some lucky fans the opportunity to get their hands on Rift: Planes of Telara. A handful of official forum members were given figurative golden tickets to tour Trion's office in Redwood City, CA and meet the the team behind the upcoming MMO.
After playing Rift's alpha client for hours, the community members got the chance to have many of their questions answered by some high-ranking Trion team members: Trion Worlds CCO and Rift Executive Producer Scott Hartsman, Vice President of Development Russ Brown and Guardian Lore Lead Nicholas Taylor McDowell. The discussion covered a wide variety of topics, and you can find them all after the jump.
Be sure to check back with ZAM throughout the week for more news from the event, including detailed information on the new Guardian and Defiant starting areas, the Deepstrike Mines instance, and PvP.
Q: How long is the day and night cycle in the game?
Hartsman: Seven hours. We intentionally don't have day and night quests. One of the things we're in the process of doing right now is deciding exactly how much of that seven hours is day and how much of it is night. Right now the way our world is set up, the day period and the night period are even. We're skewing it a little more toward daylight hours and more dawn and dusk hours and a little less pure night, because pure night in MMOs tends to be too dark to be fun.
Q: Will there be mini-games, like tossing around the Heavy Leather Ball in World of Warcraft?
Brown: We don't have any in the game yet.
Hartsman: We're going more for funny achievements right now. We had a prototype of an actual chess game playing out in our scripting system which was kind of fun, just as a proof of concept. You want to make sure they're polished enough before you put them out.
Q: How did Cyril come to lead the Guardians?
McDowell: Cyril was an adventurer in his younger days and was the one that exposed King Aedraxis of his necromancy. He convinced Zareph, Aedraxis' brother, to start the revolution. He became a general, even though he was at heart a solo adventurer and champion. During the battle he was the one who was very sure about this and became the spiritual leader of the Guardians. When the rifts came and everyone died, the gods brought him back to lead the fight against the machine-born and the dragons.
Q: What's your feeling on the role dragon cults play in the story of Telara?
McDowell: We wanted to theme their personalities so designers who wanted to tell various stories in the zones would have some way to attach it to the larger plot and a larger dragon. It was a way to tie together a lot of the stories we were doing with a greater plot and a greater evil and to make the themes almost color coded for people who want to go deep into the lore and get the backstory. And people who are just running through the content can at least see what the themes are and get a feeling for when the plot appears. They'll think, "Well it's an earth rift and I'm fighting guys that are dressed well, it must be the Golden Maw."
Q: Who worked on the neutral factions?
McDowell: The neutral factions are a creation of the pod leads of the various pods that do the zones. Each pod had an end-game zone, so they chose something from their story to become that faction and we tied them in. Some were done earlier and some were done later. The Dragonslayer Covenant in Shimmersand is something we placed in with the understanding that we needed a faction, whereas the Ice Watch was something that had existed for a long time as a story element that we kind of elevated up to make into their own faction.
Q: Is there reputation in the game? What does it give you?
McDowell: Yes. We're tying different reputations to many things. They don't all grant you the same thing.
Q: How will you balance the population in regards to PvP on PvP servers?
Hartsman: Here is why I love our designs. This is why we don't have things like an overt overworld territory control game between the two factions. As soon as you do that, you have the problem of having to guarantee that it's going to be 50/50 in order for the service to be fun. None of our PvP is based around the idea that you need that for PvP to be fun. We are designing around needing that.
Q: Can you get to a level where monsters don't aggro?
Hartsman: Not right now. The radius shrinks a lot. We're trying to make sure that we don't end up in this world where we end up with essentially bots running through zones never being touched by anything.
Q: Will there be other dynamic content in the game besides rifts?
Brown: We have these rare events where depending on how you act you get a friendly merchant or a black market. We have those spread about for flavor. If I kill a merchant and a black market appears, it's up for a few hours. It's very random and dynamic. And then later on you can try it and save the merchant.
McDowell: The biggest problem with these rare events that appear is messaging to the players that something is different and how they can deal with it. There's a learning curve with rifts, but you understand how they work. You understand how invasions work and you can see them from far away.
Hartsman: One of the things we learned through early testing is that you can have all these dynamic elements in a world, but if you've never been there before the fact that something has changed now is meaningless. The entire dynamic nature of everything was being lost. That's why when we started to emphasize rifts, invasions, defend objectives and assassinate the invader objectives, those things are very obvious. They actually change the world when they're going on. They have graphics that show up on the map so you can actually see that something exceptional is happening.
McDowell: We'll probably be doing more dynamic content once we have an established player base who have learned what the world is supposed to be like. Then we can start messing it up because you'll know the difference.
Q: Any plans for a mentoring system?
Hartsman: We're not going to do mentoring for launch, but it's definitely on the post-launch list of things we'd like to do. The system needs to be fun for the person doing the mentoring. We don't want you to lose access to abilities or have to hold onto extra armor. The philosophy we use is that unless something overtly harmful is happening, we err toward the side of fun. If it's fun and it doesn't hurt anything, we keep it.
Q: Will there be holiday events?
Hartsman: They're something that everybody wants to do, but we need to build the game first.
Q: What do you anticipate as being your first special event after launch?
Hartsman: I can't even begin to answer that question without offering up too much information. Suffice it to say, we already have the first event planned prior to launch.
Q: Do you have any events planned that are like the Scourge invasion in World of Warcraft?
McDowell: We have massive invasions! That's our game!
Hartsman: You can definitely expect that there will be days when, for some reason or another, the world's just kind of going to go crazy. And it will be fun.
Q: Will game cards be available for players without credit cards?
Hartsman: It's currently in the plans.
Q: What about security features? Will there be authenticators?
Hartsman: That one we really can't get into too much. At some point, the game will become available for pre-order and by then we'll have a much better handle on what we'll be able to do for platform security. I can tell you on the back-end we already have the ability to report on hackers and exceptional economy conditions. Some of that's already there, and hardware we'll talk about later.
Q: What are your plans for the transportation and teleportation system? Will there be faster travel options after launch?
Brown: You'll have things like teleportation, fast mounts, buffs and guild summoning at launch. You'll have tons of ways to get around. That being said, we're a fully modeled world. There's no reason we couldn't possibly do flying.
Hartsman: We are making enough world so that it feels fun. As such, getting around our world is less onerous. We don't have that level of agony in our game. We intentionally don't have a lot of travel time.
Q: Will you be supporting a fullscreen windowed mode?
Hartsman: Yes, it's in there right now. We always knew we were shipping with fullscreen windowed mode. One of our engineers even requested it.
Q: What are your thoughts of adding novelty souls to the game?
Brown: I love the soul system. Right now we have no novelty souls. In a short period of time, we are going to introduce to the alpha team some very interesting new types of souls.
Hartsman: I don't know if it's been explained clearly, but the ability for us to add speciality souls is there. As long as you have a starter soul, and as long as we're sure that the starter souls can all group, raid, PvP and solo, then we can start adding crazy souls from there. They can be more fun because we know you have that base. We can do a 10-point specialty soul that you suddenly find in the world.
Q: Will you be able to use special characters in the naming system?
Hartsman: Right now we are alphabetical only.
Q: Will surnames ever be added?
Hartsman: There could be at some point, but right now we're trying to see how we do with just first names and titles. We'll have titles at launch. Surnames are on our list of things we'd like to add to the game.
Q: Will Rift have flags like PvP and roleplaying?
Hartsman: Right now we have AFK in-game. We don't have LFG implemented yet. Again, there's the list of stuff we'd like to add, and we're just going down the list.
Q: Will there be a dynamic weather system?
Brown: We don't generally make it too dynamic since it's irritating, honestly. We give it more for the feel of the zones. For example, you'll have areas with a lot of snow. We don't have things like dynamic rain. It's a conscious choice.
Q: Will there be guild alliances? Is there a guild member cap?
Hartsman: Right now we don't have a cap. We'll end up figuring what cap we should set later on. It will definitely be in the hundreds of characters range. There are no in-game alliances yet, but we do have custom chat channels.
Q: What is the planned update frequency for the game?
Hartsman: I've lived through nine years of live MMO work. It's different for every game and every audience. In the games that I've worked on in the past, we found five to six weeks was perfect for smaller updates, and then larger content updates like every three months. As for our specific plan, we just want to launch the game. We don't want to put the cart before the horse and promise anything.
Q: What is your ideal server size?
Hartsman: The cool thing about our architecture is that we can add more capacity just by adding more processes. Our initial guess is that the world is going to be fun with 2,000 to 2,250 players leveling up. We'll have cross-server Warfronts right off the bat, so those really don't count as people in the world.
Q: Will there be server rule sets like PvE and PvP? Will roleplaying be enforced?
Hartsman: Roleplaying is not something you can really enforce with rules. We have two tags: RP and PvP. Servers can have no tags, which is a standard PvE server, or they can be RP, PvP, or PvPRP.
Q: Would you ever consider special edition servers, like permadeath or last man standing?
Hartsman: We've kicked around a few ideas like that, and I think that kind of thing would be awesome a couple years down the line.
A handful of fans from the official Rift: Planes of Telara forums were recently invited to tour the Trion Worlds office and get their hands on the game. They also had their questions answered by the Trion team. Editor-in-Chief Darryl Gangloff reports on the event.
Last week, Trion Worlds hosted its Gamer Day event to give members of the press and some lucky fans the opportunity to get their hands on Rift: Planes of Telara. A handful of official forum members were given figurative golden tickets to tour Trion's office in Redwood City, CA and meet the the team behind the upcoming MMO.
After playing Rift's alpha client for hours, the community members got the chance to have many of their questions answered by some high-ranking Trion team members: Trion Worlds CCO and Rift Executive Producer Scott Hartsman, Vice President of Development Russ Brown and Guardian Lore Lead Nicholas Taylor McDowell. The discussion covered a wide variety of topics, and you can find them all after the jump.
Be sure to check back with ZAM throughout the week for more news from the event, including detailed information on the new Guardian and Defiant starting areas, the Deepstrike Mines instance, and PvP.
Q: How long is the day and night cycle in the game?
Hartsman: Seven hours. We intentionally don't have day and night quests. One of the things we're in the process of doing right now is deciding exactly how much of that seven hours is day and how much of it is night. Right now the way our world is set up, the day period and the night period are even. We're skewing it a little more toward daylight hours and more dawn and dusk hours and a little less pure night, because pure night in MMOs tends to be too dark to be fun.
Q: Will there be mini-games, like tossing around the Heavy Leather Ball in World of Warcraft?
Brown: We don't have any in the game yet.
Hartsman: We're going more for funny achievements right now. We had a prototype of an actual chess game playing out in our scripting system which was kind of fun, just as a proof of concept. You want to make sure they're polished enough before you put them out.
Q: How did Cyril come to lead the Guardians?
McDowell: Cyril was an adventurer in his younger days and was the one that exposed King Aedraxis of his necromancy. He convinced Zareph, Aedraxis' brother, to start the revolution. He became a general, even though he was at heart a solo adventurer and champion. During the battle he was the one who was very sure about this and became the spiritual leader of the Guardians. When the rifts came and everyone died, the gods brought him back to lead the fight against the machine-born and the dragons.
Q: What's your feeling on the role dragon cults play in the story of Telara?
McDowell: We wanted to theme their personalities so designers who wanted to tell various stories in the zones would have some way to attach it to the larger plot and a larger dragon. It was a way to tie together a lot of the stories we were doing with a greater plot and a greater evil and to make the themes almost color coded for people who want to go deep into the lore and get the backstory. And people who are just running through the content can at least see what the themes are and get a feeling for when the plot appears. They'll think, "Well it's an earth rift and I'm fighting guys that are dressed well, it must be the Golden Maw."
Q: Who worked on the neutral factions?
McDowell: The neutral factions are a creation of the pod leads of the various pods that do the zones. Each pod had an end-game zone, so they chose something from their story to become that faction and we tied them in. Some were done earlier and some were done later. The Dragonslayer Covenant in Shimmersand is something we placed in with the understanding that we needed a faction, whereas the Ice Watch was something that had existed for a long time as a story element that we kind of elevated up to make into their own faction.
Q: Is there reputation in the game? What does it give you?
McDowell: Yes. We're tying different reputations to many things. They don't all grant you the same thing.
Q: How will you balance the population in regards to PvP on PvP servers?
Hartsman: Here is why I love our designs. This is why we don't have things like an overt overworld territory control game between the two factions. As soon as you do that, you have the problem of having to guarantee that it's going to be 50/50 in order for the service to be fun. None of our PvP is based around the idea that you need that for PvP to be fun. We are designing around needing that.
Q: Can you get to a level where monsters don't aggro?
Hartsman: Not right now. The radius shrinks a lot. We're trying to make sure that we don't end up in this world where we end up with essentially bots running through zones never being touched by anything.
Q: Will there be other dynamic content in the game besides rifts?
Brown: We have these rare events where depending on how you act you get a friendly merchant or a black market. We have those spread about for flavor. If I kill a merchant and a black market appears, it's up for a few hours. It's very random and dynamic. And then later on you can try it and save the merchant.
McDowell: The biggest problem with these rare events that appear is messaging to the players that something is different and how they can deal with it. There's a learning curve with rifts, but you understand how they work. You understand how invasions work and you can see them from far away.
Hartsman: One of the things we learned through early testing is that you can have all these dynamic elements in a world, but if you've never been there before the fact that something has changed now is meaningless. The entire dynamic nature of everything was being lost. That's why when we started to emphasize rifts, invasions, defend objectives and assassinate the invader objectives, those things are very obvious. They actually change the world when they're going on. They have graphics that show up on the map so you can actually see that something exceptional is happening.
McDowell: We'll probably be doing more dynamic content once we have an established player base who have learned what the world is supposed to be like. Then we can start messing it up because you'll know the difference.
Q: Any plans for a mentoring system?
Hartsman: We're not going to do mentoring for launch, but it's definitely on the post-launch list of things we'd like to do. The system needs to be fun for the person doing the mentoring. We don't want you to lose access to abilities or have to hold onto extra armor. The philosophy we use is that unless something overtly harmful is happening, we err toward the side of fun. If it's fun and it doesn't hurt anything, we keep it.
Q: Will there be holiday events?
Hartsman: They're something that everybody wants to do, but we need to build the game first.
Q: What do you anticipate as being your first special event after launch?
Hartsman: I can't even begin to answer that question without offering up too much information. Suffice it to say, we already have the first event planned prior to launch.
Q: Do you have any events planned that are like the Scourge invasion in World of Warcraft?
McDowell: We have massive invasions! That's our game!
Hartsman: You can definitely expect that there will be days when, for some reason or another, the world's just kind of going to go crazy. And it will be fun.
Q: Will game cards be available for players without credit cards?
Hartsman: It's currently in the plans.
Q: What about security features? Will there be authenticators?
Hartsman: That one we really can't get into too much. At some point, the game will become available for pre-order and by then we'll have a much better handle on what we'll be able to do for platform security. I can tell you on the back-end we already have the ability to report on hackers and exceptional economy conditions. Some of that's already there, and hardware we'll talk about later.
Q: What are your plans for the transportation and teleportation system? Will there be faster travel options after launch?
Brown: You'll have things like teleportation, fast mounts, buffs and guild summoning at launch. You'll have tons of ways to get around. That being said, we're a fully modeled world. There's no reason we couldn't possibly do flying.
Hartsman: We are making enough world so that it feels fun. As such, getting around our world is less onerous. We don't have that level of agony in our game. We intentionally don't have a lot of travel time.
Q: Will you be supporting a fullscreen windowed mode?
Hartsman: Yes, it's in there right now. We always knew we were shipping with fullscreen windowed mode. One of our engineers even requested it.
Q: What are your thoughts of adding novelty souls to the game?
Brown: I love the soul system. Right now we have no novelty souls. In a short period of time, we are going to introduce to the alpha team some very interesting new types of souls.
Hartsman: I don't know if it's been explained clearly, but the ability for us to add speciality souls is there. As long as you have a starter soul, and as long as we're sure that the starter souls can all group, raid, PvP and solo, then we can start adding crazy souls from there. They can be more fun because we know you have that base. We can do a 10-point specialty soul that you suddenly find in the world.
Q: Will you be able to use special characters in the naming system?
Hartsman: Right now we are alphabetical only.
Q: Will surnames ever be added?
Hartsman: There could be at some point, but right now we're trying to see how we do with just first names and titles. We'll have titles at launch. Surnames are on our list of things we'd like to add to the game.
Q: Will Rift have flags like PvP and roleplaying?
Hartsman: Right now we have AFK in-game. We don't have LFG implemented yet. Again, there's the list of stuff we'd like to add, and we're just going down the list.
Q: Will there be a dynamic weather system?
Brown: We don't generally make it too dynamic since it's irritating, honestly. We give it more for the feel of the zones. For example, you'll have areas with a lot of snow. We don't have things like dynamic rain. It's a conscious choice.
Q: Will there be guild alliances? Is there a guild member cap?
Hartsman: Right now we don't have a cap. We'll end up figuring what cap we should set later on. It will definitely be in the hundreds of characters range. There are no in-game alliances yet, but we do have custom chat channels.
Q: What is the planned update frequency for the game?
Hartsman: I've lived through nine years of live MMO work. It's different for every game and every audience. In the games that I've worked on in the past, we found five to six weeks was perfect for smaller updates, and then larger content updates like every three months. As for our specific plan, we just want to launch the game. We don't want to put the cart before the horse and promise anything.
Q: What is your ideal server size?
Hartsman: The cool thing about our architecture is that we can add more capacity just by adding more processes. Our initial guess is that the world is going to be fun with 2,000 to 2,250 players leveling up. We'll have cross-server Warfronts right off the bat, so those really don't count as people in the world.
Q: Will there be server rule sets like PvE and PvP? Will roleplaying be enforced?
Hartsman: Roleplaying is not something you can really enforce with rules. We have two tags: RP and PvP. Servers can have no tags, which is a standard PvE server, or they can be RP, PvP, or PvPRP.
Q: Would you ever consider special edition servers, like permadeath or last man standing?
Hartsman: We've kicked around a few ideas like that, and I think that kind of thing would be awesome a couple years down the line.