Rift Interviews
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IG: Going up against the big dog in the house, World of Warcraft. They've expanded to include services like the Remote Auction House and the Armory. You've started that, but is it hard getting all that up and running?
SH: It's incredibly challenging. It's getting one more part of an architecture that needs to come online alongside the rest of the company. If you're trying to compare us to every game that's gone before, I think we compare very favorably, but if you compare bullet-for-bullet with a product that's had 200 people working on it for seven years, you're going to get a slightly different comparison.
But if I had to pick a couple of things that make us special, it's the speed at which we've proven that we're able to adapt and innovate. We're able to develop new cool stuff and interact with our players. The way we steer what we're doing based on what's going to resonate best with them. I think that's one of our new-kid-on-the-block advantages.
IG: Late in the game, you switched to the different marketing strategy, with the tagline (We're not in Azeroth anymore.) That may have invited some of these comparisons to World of Warcraft. Do you think the strategy was a positive or negative?
SH: Interesting. I think it's a little of both. For starters, I loved the campaign. When I first saw the campaign pitch I laughed my ass off. Very bluntly. We saw it and went, (Wow there's no way we can do that. That means we have to do that.) For any company that starting out, trying to get attention in a very crowded marketplace, you have to do something to get attention and I think that campaign really helped us stand out. I think the polite way to phrase it is it inspired many conversations around the internet. And that's really what we needed. So in that regard, I think it's did its job phenomenally. It did its job better than we expected.
On the flipside of that, if people take it too literally and don't take it as the well-intended humor it really is, it does invite people to go, 'Oh well, if they're going to say that, then I'm going to make a checklist, and I'm going to go ding ding ding ding'. That kind of thing doesn't really worry me because as far as I'm concerned it did its job. Got lots of people to keep coming to the game.
And then GameFront brings us the results of an impromptu interview that took place on Trion's IRC channel:
Can you give us any information about Phase 3?
Rift team: Yes, once you complete it the raid instance River of Souls will become unlocked but you'll have to go through Alsbeth's reanimated minions to do it!
As the Gaming industry goes, more and more people are obviously comparing you to World of Warcraft. What future updates are you planning that will push you further away from being compared with such huge Gaming names?
Rift team: While I can speak to the surprises we have in store for our next update, I can say that we are already working on our next world event, which will be much more involved than this current one. As Andrew already mentioned, we're learning a lot from the current event and can't wait to apply that to the one we are working on now. Through these massively social experiences you'll start to see RIFT diverge more and more from the MMO pack as something special, and it's our hope we can bring them to you as often as possible.
