Rift: Planes of Telara Interview
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7. There are lots of new MMOs on the market today. What sets Rift apart from the rest?
We've chosen to emphasize: The setting, the characters, the classes, the visual quality, the ranges of unique visuals themselves, a number of gameplay features we'll be talking about more as we have some good visuals to show, and the additional layers of dynamic content and gameplay that our engine was entirely built around providing.
In the end, it comes down to determining where in this massive endeavor to invest time in explicitly creating something unique, vs where we should iterate and make useful improvements to features that people will like.
Even in terms of which places we should evolve and how much, we're trying to make the smartest calls we can. For example, our map (which people use all the time at a part of primary gameplay) received a lot more evolutionary improvement time than, say, in-game mail, where people really just care about some basics.
What we're explicitly not doing is "everything is different for the sake of being different." MMORPGs are mature enough as a genre, and there are enough people who've played a whole lot of games, to where it's not hard to find people who will agree with this statement: Different doesn't always end up better. That's a trap that a lot of development efforts end up falling into, and the overall quality of the experience suffers as a result.
