Rift: Planes of Telara Interviews

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Written by BuckGB on February 7th, 2011

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How exactly are the invasions controlled in the world? There is always a massive spike in activity toward the end of each test. Are we likely to see major invasions only happen during planned events, and if that is the case, how often will these events take place?

A huge goal for the Betas is finding the high-water mark for planar content. Too many invasions/events/bosses and the experience becomes monotonous. We have some great core content that people want to enjoy as well. Still, they're too much fun to be stingy about letting players experience them! Beta has helped us refine the launching mechanism for these and to set up the systems to be tweakable should the need arise. So, some of our events will be planned, yes, but we have many different complexity and difficulty levels of our events.

From what we have seen thus far, it seems as though Rift is geared toward the more mature, dedicated gaming audience where other current gen MMO's seem to have gone the opposite direction and geared things more towards grabbing the casual online gamers. Is this something that was done intentionally and is there a certain audience that you are looking to attract?

The visual style for the game is definitely supposed to be high res and highly detailed as opposed to overly stylized and (cartoony). That is very much an intentional choice. That is what our artists are amazing at, it is what they are passionate about and that is the world that we are making. The gameplay itself is set up to be very accessible to somebody who has little MMO experience all the way up to somebody who has been playing them for a really long time. What we are trying to go for is for someone with little experience to be able to walk in, pick it up and go (okay, I get what I am doing here, I am able to have fun and this does work). Then the more time that they spend with the game and the more that they choose to learn about it, the more complex they will realize that the game actually is; we intentionally set up the game at the low end so that it is approachable to people who haven't played MMO's before. We don't throw a ton of new concepts at people right from the outset and yes, that is very intentional. People have to feel like they're at least understanding how to do basic things such as navigating the world and defeat your opponent(s). Otherwise you end up with a game where its not fun. Its kind of like how much fun would it be to wander around in the car and have no idea where you are going? You're lost, you're frustrated... it just isn't fun.

We definitely have a couple of easy steps at the beginning and then, within the first hour or two of gameplay, people get out into a shared world and start seeing these big zone events and start seeing invasions. They start seeing rifts and see their world taken over which is something that nobody else is doing. It is difficult to train someone for the concept of (your world is about to be taken over... be ready) when a lot of the experience is a result of emergent gameplay. We kind of have to step people up and into that; get them comfortable with their character and then see how they do on their own.

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