The RIFT

[01:34] Scott Hartsman, Trion’s General Manager, Chief Creative Officer, and Executive Producer for Rift, gives a brief rundown of general daily schedule

• On any given day, Scott talks with the designers, engineers, artists, audio.
• He’s involved with pretty much every aspect of the game.

[02:45] Scott discusses the scope of the game and how his previous experiences have affected it.

• He oversees Rift: Planes of Telara
• They want to create a high quality, epic experience
• Scott doesn’t want to release unfinished systems and would rather release a smaller set of features that are complete and amazing, rather than a ton of features that aren’t working.
• Trion is on target with their scope for release.

[07:11] Arithion asks about Dungeons and instancing areas of the game.

• All dungeons in the game are instances.
• This decision is completely intentional, they believe that players will be coming to the game with groups of friends.
• Dungeons should be fun, not causing issues between people who are currently at the area you want to be and not letting you get your updates.
• Rifts, Invasions, Defend events, Kill events are all more social (group AND raid content) and everyone can participate.
• Instead of instanced vs. non-instanced dungeons, their focus is how to create social opportunities for people, within their world and content.

[11:20] What are they planning for LFG tools?

• His teams have created LFG tools in other games, but overall LFG tools tend to be underused.
• Very few people want to start a group, so unless there is a system that auto starts a group there is no point in creating an expensive LFG tool.
• At launch, they have a core base of a LFG Channel in channel.
• Full group formation tool is not in lauch scope.
• Warfronts are cross-server, automatically queued, and have automatically formed groups.

[13:29] Arithion inquires about rare item drops in-game.

• Rift currently has them in game.. right now!
• Ultra-rare drops are also already attached to players in PVP.
• They depend on which race and which side of players being killed.

[14:31] Will there be solo, small, and full size grouping possibilities as equally feasible leveling paths?

• Yes, he has leveled up one character entirely solo.
• Currently he has been duoing/trioing content on another character.
• Full grouping the entire game would be tough since there is not group content for every level of the game.
• Once you are past a certain level in-game, there are dungeons for every level range, except for a few patches. Major and minor Rift content also are good for small groups.

[16:16] How much playtime should it take for a player to reach level cap?

• More than an hour!
• Primarily, making sure the amount of content available in-game matches the leveling rate.

[18:23] Scott releases some new endgame content information!

• Arithion confirms 2 Raids, Reputation tasks, Raid Rifts, Level 50 Dungeons.
• Scott adds a Level 50 Warfront, Artifact Collections, Epic-Tier Crafting, and an Achievement system to the list of available endgame content.

[19:38] Scott talks about Raid Rifts.

• Lower level character will most likely not be ambushed.
• They are mostly in high level areas and not instanced.
• Other players can come up and mess with each other, or help each other.
• This is Rift’s version of contested/cooperative content.
• Players get the ability to trade in sourcestone for specific lures to lure out specific enemies (like Raid Rifts).

[21:47] Are there any type of PVP rewards from Warfronts?

• Yes, you can gain PVP favour which will give you access to items.
• You can also gain prestige, which will let you rank up in PVP.
• Ranking up in PVP unlocks new rewards and unlocks new abilities in PVP Souls.

[23:14] Can players attack the opposing faction’s city and will they drop any loot?

• Yes, people can attack each city and their leaders.
• Cities are not meant to be raid content, killing the opposing leader will be mostly for bragging rights.
• It will not be rewarded.

[24:26] Arithion asks about gold-seller spam and any measures in-place to combat it.

• Spam and fraud have increased a lot in the past few years.
• There are a few different things they are doing to prevent it.
• There will be a spam filter by launch, right now it is a basic throttle.
• They are planning on creating an intelligent filter for spam.
• They are building tools to track transactions and patterns of money to help combat spam and cut off the problem at the source.

[26:01] Down the road, is Trion planning on things like server transfers or name changes?

• Not necessary to have at launch.
• There has been discussion about adding it after launch.
• Scott would rather fix other issues, or add something that players would use more at release than something that would likely not be used at game release.

[27:01] Arithion surprised Scott with a trick beta question!

• They are on the road to Beta and the servers are doing well.
• As soon as they are confident about the servers handling the load we will know more information.
• Arithion has VIP passes to give out to people!

[27:44] What has been the greatest challenge thus far in the creation of Rift?

• Playing the zero-sum game that is the development process.
• Figuring out which of the great ideas do they want to invest time in researching and then developing so that it makes it into the game.
• Development is not a single act that takes place.
• There is a lot of Research involved in the Research and Development.
• Research is a lot more expensive than the Development of the game.