RIFT MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Ten Ton Hammer: Obviously, no one intends to launch a half-baked game, but it happens. And often.  Do you feel like you have the time and the resources required to take this game the full distance prior to launch?

Scott:  Absolutely, absolutely. We have the resources, and the studios that are working together inside and outside Trion communicate and collaborate freely and frequently.  We’ve got what we’re calling the Trion platform, which consists of work done at all three studios as well as our Austin tech center. When you’ve got that many brains solving a lot of common problems, you can get economies that you can’t get by having 50 or 100 guys in a building.

Ten Ton Hammer: You’re a long-time veteran of MMORPG development,

Scott: I have scars to prove it… (laughter)

Shimersand's major exports include giraffe parasols and fantastic concept art.

Ten Ton Hammer: And not to mention a pretty excitable guy. But I don’t think I’ve seen you quite this excited about a game in all the times we’ve met. What’s different about Rift?

Scott: I got involved in this game at a different point in the dev cycle. By the time I got involved in the last project that I worked with – I mean, clearly I was excited about it, and the team was phenomenal, and great people to work with – but it was much later on in the dev cycle than Rift is.

When I joined Rift, I was there for more of the foundational elements and I was there both to understand the smart things that the team had already done and to add my experience to their already insane amounts of experience. Half of the team has an incredible amount of single-player and console experience, and half of the team has more MMO experience combined than any other team that I’ve ever heard of. I added it all up last week on a whim, and people on our team have had development responsibilities on 27 launched MMOs, not including expansions. 

So it’s that range of experience – yes, it’s exciting, but I’ve never been around so many smart influences. I think that has a lot to do with the industry maturing, but there is something that feels really special about this project. It’s not standard elves in tights fantasy. It’s fantasy with – like I said – a magical technology element, a constant and active threat of invasion, and an extra-planar element. There are six known planes that are attacking right now, and I can’t talk too much about where the story will progress in the future, but knowing that that story exists and has been thought out well – it definitely gives you something to feel excited about. 

Ten Ton Hammer thanks Scott Hartsman and the Trion team for a closer look at Rift: Planes of Telara!

You can learn more about this title, tentatively slated for a 2011 launch, in our first look at Rift: Planes of Telara article, the first Rift dev diary video, Rift at Ten Ton Hammer, and the official site.