The RIFT

The Rift: Episode 21 Podcast Notes

[03:20] Can you tell us a bit about how you came into the industry and how you came to work for Trion?

• He’s been in the industry since 1999.
• He has worked on some MMOs and some Consoles.
• A few friends of his worked at Trion and he was invited to interview.
• Of all the places he was looking at at the time, Trion had everything he was looking for: vision, talent, toolset, and financial strength.

[03:50] What is it that a Design Producer does?

• Hal pushes people. He pushes the managers to give clear directions, the Pod Leads to fit an incredible amount of work into a (sane) timeline.
• He doesn’t push people to work ridiculous hours, but rather make them work within a very efficient timeline.
• He’ll push back the Pod Leads to make sure the concepts being brought up will have value and aren’t “heat of the moment” requests.
• He pushes other departments to complete things when others need it.
• Finally, he pushes the design team to deliver more than they think they can.
• Basically he tries to keep everyone honest with themselves: Do they really want it? Can they really use it? Is it important? Is it going to drive subscriptions?

[04:51] What is your favourite Rift?

• They just added a ridiculous number of rift events.
• They just added a Life rift event that continuously pumps out waves of spiders and giant egg sacs.
• Eventually you fight the “momma” and you fight her for a bit, and eventually she releases the egg sacs.

[5:42] What class or faction do you enjoy most?

• Hal is a Warrior, through and through! The Paladin being his “go-to” soul.
• He has tried all of the classes, but he loves playing Warrior classes.
• The Warrior calling is so very flexible with what they have.
• He also plays on the Guardian side!

[06:29] What current or favourite soul combination are you using?

• He tends to play the same three souls, but in completely different ways.
• He has a Paladin/Reaver/Unknown “Anti-Magic” soul.
• He also has 3 different Roles playing those three souls quite differently.
• If there is an encounter with a lot of mobs, he’ll equip a very heavy Reaver soul combination.
• The Reaver is good against multiple enemies and has abilities that will suck the life from them and give it to you.
• Once the trash mobs are done, if a “heavy” mob is coming, he’ll switch into a heavy Paladin build because it is good for single-point damage surviving.
• Paladins have an ability to pop their life back up to (near) full!
• If he sees an area filled with Mages, he’ll switch to a Role that can absorb some of the magic damage and use it in a counter-attack.

[08:49] What are your most and least favourite aspects of Rift right now?

• He loves the Invasions. There is something thrilling about going about your business and suddenly an invasion pops up.
• Sometimes another plane will attack while you’re fighting another invasion, and now you’ll have 2 invasions attacking each other and you.
• His least favourite aspect is PvP. He says he is very bad at it. “Dead Simon” owns him at PvP!
• Two different competing invasions will cause the surrounding terrain to shift between the different factions, and between them and Telara.

[11:29] With the diversity of the class system, is it feasible for a group of all one calling to run a dungeon successfully?

• He believes that it is possible, though it would depend on the gear, the skill of the player, their communication, etc.
• It also will depend on the specific dungeon. Each dungeon and the bosses in it are hand-crafted, so just because a group can do it in one dungeon doesn’t mean they can do it in another.
• There is no one “true build” in the game. Someone will probably end up finding a way to do it, but that’s ok.

[12:32] Should everyone expect that at least one of the Roles a character has will be able to fill an empty slot in the group?

• He doesn’t believe there is a healing Rogue.
• There is more flexibility to deviate from the “Holy Trinity” than in other MMOs.
• Players can change their roles based on the encounters presented, and allows players to switch up and alter their strategies for each boss.
• Warriors can rez!

[13:53] How are the Heal, Tank, and DPS Roles spread out? Are they evenly spread out?

• There isn’t a healing Rogue.
• Since they are still finalizing how the souls will still play, where they will end up he cannot tell.
• One of the reasons they went down this road is so they can have souls that SUCK in PvP or be horrible in PvE, but are awesome for another use.

[14:41] With the focus on the social aspect of the game, will players earn more benefits (ie. experience) for grouping? Is there an incentive to group?

• There is – currently they are trying to discover how to communicate this fact to the players. Some of the benefits are subtle.
• They adjust experience when you are in a group. Quest experience isn’t based upon grouping – but you can finish them faster.
• When there is more people attacking a Rift, the more people that help, the further the rift can be pushed, and the more experience and loot can be awarded than playing solo.

[16:04] Is there a bonus to experience when grouping? (Less than if you were soloing, but more than if the solo experience was split between the group)

• Hal isn’t sure on the specifics, so will leave this for one of the systems devs!

[16:36] Is the max level content being relied upon as the grouping contingent of the game (and the rifts of course)?

• There is a ton of content for groups – even from the beginning in Silverwood.
• There will be a way to group and level – Dungeons, PvP, Warfronts, Group, Solo and Guild Quests, and Rifts all give experience for group content.
• Major Rifts require full groups and are available in every zone.

[17:59] Rift plans to launch with an endgame. Is there more planned for after release? What is the expected lifespan of the current content?

• The announced content is for the Day 1 endgame.
• The engine they are using was built for this – it was designed from the ground up as a service that they are streaming the new content to the players.
• The development structure has been setup for this as well.

[19:05] Will the best items be available from raids? Will there be crafted items that require raid drops to complete?

• It really depends on the items being talked about.
• Raid instances will give awesome loot, for sure, and will most likely be the best items.
• Raid rifts will give the best Essences and Focus items.

[19:42] What are Essences and Foci?

• A Focus is an item that you can equip, purchased via currency earned by doing rifts.
• Essences – Greater or Lesser – also drop from rifts, and can be placed into Foci
• The Lesser Essences have stat adjustments and resistances to a specific planar type.
• As an example, Hal has a Focus that has 1 Greater slot and 5 Lesser slots.
• His Greater Essence has a “vampiric” effect – it sucks the life out of the enemy and gives it back to him.
• The Lesser Essences on that Focus all have a bunch of Death resistance. Similarly, he has 5 other essences for the other planar types.
• The stat boosts / resistances stack, so you can build your own trinket!
• Raid Rifts will give the best Essences and Foci.
• You can also get raid-level recipes from raids, you might be able to craft even better Foci.
• The harder the content, the better the loot. The hardest content will give the best loot – but there are lots of different types of hard content, each of which benefits your character.

[23:28] The resistances actually mean something to help mitigate damage?

• Definitely. There is a noticeable difference between having the correct resistance type equipped and forgetting to have it.

[24:15] Scott mentioned earlier that around two-thirds of the design team has transitioned to endgame content. Is the endgame content going to be one of Rift’s main selling points?

• It will definitely be a selling points.
• The main selling point is that the game is awesome.
• It has HD graphics, it’s an MMO world, and has a complete feature set from Day 1 – including a fleshed-out endgame system.
• They have an unprecedented dynamic content sitting on top of a platform designed to deliver even more of it.
• There is the dynamic elements of rifts, invasions, and footholds as well as a way to give progressive content through the ages.

[25:30] What are the plans to get the word out about the game with a few months left until launch?

• Trion has not yet begun to fight. The massive marketing blitz has yet to begin!
• Once people see the game, they are interested. Once they get a hands-on preview, they get hooked.
• People will soon start to hear about Rift everywhere.

[26:49] Is the Soul System really going to be mix-and-match, and are people going to be able to choose their souls from the beginning?

• Players will spend hours tweaking soul builds to try out different combinations.
• They’ll try multiple different ways until they find one they like, and then name that Role. Then it becomes part of their Armoury.
• You can have up to 8 souls, of which 3 can be active at anytime.

[28:23] Is there any way for players to test their souls?

• There are manikins / training dummies available.
• The best way that Hal found to test new builds is to go to an area with mobs just below your level and test out your new Role on them.

[29:01] Is the first souls only available from the 3 “starter” souls, or can you choose any of them?

• When you start playing, you are just your calling. Shortly after you choose your first soul from the 3 starter souls.
• If people don’t want that first one, don’t worry: you get another new souls (your choice!) a few minutes later.
• The starter souls are designed to help new players so that they don’t end up picking a soul that will be hard to play – for example, a group-oriented soul.

[30:06] What sort of things will players have to do to obtain souls?

• There is an entire Pod focused on “massaging” around how and when you get your new souls.
• They are trying to find the balance between just far enough so that you are like, “I really want another one.. awesome, I got one!” and not “It’s going to be forever!”.
• It certainly will not be “Wow I got them all, it was too easy” with no challenge.
• The easy answer to how you’ll obtain souls: You play Rift.
• You can get souls through: crafting, questing, dungeons, raiding, or rifts.

[31:41] In an earlier interview you said, “Our goal is to create content that is memorable and vivid, and worth coming back to over and over as opposed to just ‘more more more!’”. How on track is your team to this goal?

• Without reservation, they are exceeding their expectations.
• An example would be the original starting area – the Shadowlands. They gathered feedback, which basically was – “You guys need to do better”, so they did.
• The new starting experience is now completely and radically different for both factions. The Defiant and Guardian starting areas are completely different.
• Coming out of the starting area, you know what it is to be your faction and you know why the other faction is evil, horrible, or whatever justification you need to go and slaughter them in large numbers.

[33:47] How many character slots will there be?

• At this point they are planning on shipping 6 character slots per account.

[34:05] Are you concerned at all about replayability? (Since we know of only 2 starting zones, and only 4 callings that can get all the souls)

• He has played several characters throughout the game, and done the same content a number of times.
• The world itself is not the same each time you play through it.
• You can choose to level alts in a completely different way – Questing, PvP, Dungeons, Rifts, etc.

[35:15] If there is an invasion coming at you from around the same level, will you need to run away? Is there an element of danger or risk involved?

• There is always an element of danger.
• The invasions are the balance tippers: if you’re involved with something else, they can appear and add a whole new dynamic to your gameplay.
• Both Footholds and Rifts can spawn invasions.
• If players decide to not do their job of clearing rifts, the world will becoming invaded by planar invasions – each of which will attack other planes and player footholds.
• Even if it gets to that state, a group of players can do a significant amount of repair work.
• On a platform where they can change the rules, as long as they message it properly, there are a number of possibilities!

[38:33] Is the idea to make the endgame so robust, extensive, and enjoyable that players will fall back less on making new characters?

• There is an immense number of things to do at level cap.
• The amount of content that can be done up through level 50 – and you can fall back to it even once you are at 50. (Example: crafting)

[40:18] Hal mentioned before that they didn’t want a “group dependant” soul as one of the first choices. Do you want to then have different Roles for this? (Group dependent, PvP, Solo, etc)

• That’s one of the selling points for the soul system.
• You can use the same 3 souls in different combinations to achieve different tasks. (In different Roles)
• Many that have a “support” Role actually spec it out as a full-blown support role.

[41:13] What is your favourite pie?

• Hal and his son bake a profound Apple Pie (Though we haven’t been able to get the recipe from him yet!)

[41:22] Is there anything else you’d like to let the fans know about the game?

• Sign up for Beta events!

[42:07] Arithion asks Abigale how the Beta Events are going to work.

• When people are selected they will be sent a link to where they have to sign the NDA.
• They will have to sign the NDA before they download the client.
• People will be kicked out for breaking the NDA. (Just don’t break it!)
• Abigale, and everyone at Trion, is excited for the Beta events to start!

[43:48] When is Beta?!

• Beta starts December 3rd! It’s right around the corner!

[44:13] How about when is release?

• Looks like we’re back to Soon(tm) again!