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

Ten Ton Hammer: In many MMOGs, players typically have their level-up build and their group build, but then at level cap, their chosen build becomes narrowly defined so as to capitalize on their class's core strengths. Is this how you envision things playing out with attunements in Rift?

Scott Hartsman: I think high-end is when you want to give people the most flexibility. For example, wouldn't it be neat if you could take your plate-wearing dude and have him be a cool soloer in one set, a great PvPer in another set, and an awesome raid tank in another set? I think it's really important to give players more things to do in the high-end rather than pigeon-holed into a single role. I think that's kind of boring.

Ten Ton Hammer: But players tend to pigeon-hole themselves, seeking that one über build, right?

Scott Hartsman: Sure, and I think it's on us to make sure we have a game where that's not the end-all-be-all game experience. You're talking about raiding, and the classic case of the tank that's built up and geared up to be a raid tank, and that is it, period, end of sentence. I think it's on us to make games that have more to do even when you're that guy.

Ten Ton Hammer: So from a class design perspective, are you designing with all that in mind? Will there be multiple paths to perfection in any given role?

Scott Hartsman: I don't know how close we'll get to this; I'm a very honest person if nothing else. But the goal is this: no matter what choice you make at character select on day one, the idea is that, yes, you should be able to go be the best at endgame-something, but that you should be able to successfully fulfill multiple roles in group, in raid, and in PvP. We don't want anybody to ever be at the point where they've put hundreds of hours of time into this character, and now that they've hit the end-all-be-all, they're a one trick pony. That's really not fun.

Ten Ton Hammer: So the idea is that there will be no bad class development choices, essentially?

Scott Hartsman:  Don't get me wrong, we're giving players the tools to make all kinds of bad choices. But, none of them are irreversible, and sometimes the difference between good and bad is just moving a few points around. We expect there to be a lot of theorycrafting too.

Ten Ton Hammer: On the classes and callings page , we see nine of the 16 souls revealed. Are you pretty set in concept for what those classes will be?

Scott Hartsman: Absolutely, on all but one. And the other thing is: there's more than 16. That's all I can say on that right now. The thing that you should take away when you look at that website is that that ain't the full complement. There's more.

Ten Ton Hammer: Since not everyone has the time or desire to delve deep into theorycrafting to make the kind of character they want. Is it clearly laid out, or will we have to sit down and puzzle about our character out-of-game using detailed charts and graphs?

Scott Hartsman: I wouldn't worry about that too much, because we expect a couple of things to happen. First, when you have a system like this, and it's customizable, there will be many conversations, threads, etc. of what's your favorite build, what works well for this, etc. In any game, there's going to be some cookie cutters that everyone is going to like. That's fine.

For those who are just in Rift for the social experience and don't want to play the class system at all, that's fine. Just keep investing in the one class you picked. Chances are, you will come out okay. Alternately, built right into the game is the invest and preview ability. It's not a system where every time you click a button [your choice is] confirmed forever. If you go to respec all of your points, yeah, you can respend them nine or ten different ways and experiment with them in real time before you finally hit okay and accept all the changes. We're building that in from the beginning; I think you have to with a system like this.

Ten Ton Hammer: So respec'ing won't break the bank? It's not an escalating amount of money you have to pay?

Scott Hartsman: It's not obscenely escalating, we'll put it that way. We're expecting people to want to do this. Actually, we're expecting people to need to do this. We're tuning it more to be a token cost and less of a 'holy crap, I need to save up tons of money so I can do X tonight.'

Ten Ton Hammer: Some folks think class balance will be an impossible task with the system you've described. I'm not sure how anyone can talk balance prior to beta, but how are you addressing balancing concerns from the get-go?

Scott Hartsman: Sure. Here's the thing: I love when people say, 'Oh, this is going to be hard or impossible to balance' because, to me, that means they're adept at finding ways to cheat the system, which means they're going to have fun with it. That said, there are some people who think of imbalance as a universal problem. Imbalance is only a problem if it traps users into a corner where they have no way to make their situation better. This system gives you so many tools to help you help yourself. And if something is incredibly out of whack, of course we'll deal with it.

Ten Ton Hammer: It often seems to matter more that players have the perception that classes are out of balance, whether they actually are or not. Are there things you can do at this stage to address the perception of imbalance? Sort of work on your trusting relationship with players?

Scott Hartsman: The perception of imbalance I think is always going to exist. I'm actually more afraid of systems where there is no such perception because if you have achieved perfect numeric balance, congratulations, you've just made the more boringly overbalanced game in existence. That's actually far more deadly to the success of a game than making something that had the potential to be too interesting. A lot of it will always come down to how good an individual player is behind the keyboard.

Ten Ton Hammer:  Have you toyed with the idea of class build presets? Sort of the old KOTOR-ish auto-level idea?

Scott Hartsman: It's something we've talked about, but that's the kind of thing where I'd want to see what happens in beta first to determine if we really need that. In our testing so far, we have our own fair share of newbies (on a dev team this size, we have lots of people who aren't involved with the class system at all, and we haven't seen the need for it yet). If we need it, we can go that way.

Ten Ton Hammer: That kind of leads into my last question. The soul tree is a purely level-based development system; you're getting points per level to spend on classes and callings. Will there be a skill-based component to character development as well?

Scott Hartsman: Not to developing primary skills like that, no. Our tradeskill system, however, does use learned skills over time. But for combat, it's all about the leveling. You allude to something that we've had lots of conversations about, continuing to add new dimensions to the system. But we realized we were already going to have our hands full with just the system as spec'ed - we'll try that first and then see if we need new complications. So far, I think we're good. We started out on the assumption that we'd need one full time class designer to handle all the souls, and very rapidly that expanded to 3 and 4. Most games that I've worked on in the past have generally had one person or two. It's rapidly turned into something that we wanted to double down on to ensure we come up with something great. We're trying to put our money where our mouth is on that one.