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

Ten Ton Hammer: Imagine that we’re playing on a brand new server and we’re playing low level characters. There are rifts opening up everywhere. Is that controlled by you guys? By the time we were higher level, wouldn’t the higher level areas be overrun and we would have to fight to take back those areas?

Scott Hartsman: Again, for specific initialization commissions, which is what you’re describing, that’s the kind of things that we’re tuning. Is that going to be the most fun for people? Is that what people are going to enjoy the most? That could very well be the case. You could be the first guy in the world to hit Shimmersand Desert, and you could be the first one beating back the footholds that have been set up there for weeks and maybe you get an achievement for that. Is that something we could do? We could absolutely do it that way. There’s a lot of different ways we can tune it from here. I’m not too worried about how it presents itself that first time. I’m more concerned that there’s enough interesting things going on and making sure that no matter what level you are, you always have your choice in whatever activities you want to be doing across the main types of activities that we have in the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: Say our server is humming along and everybody is having fun, then a Hartsman server is created. Everybody flocks to that new server. Is our server screwed by all the rifts? What happens if, God forbid, a server population gets really low? What happens with all the rifts?

Scott Hartsman: That’s the beauty of having a dynamic system, because we’re the ones in charge of saying what happens. Again, you don’t want a game where you turn players into janitors of the landscape to where their primary activity is going around repairing and sweeping up the damage. We want to make sure that there’s enough activity so it’s fun, enough activity so there’s danger, but not too little activity where you don’t see anything or too much activity where the world is quickly overrun and the people are screwed. Again, those are matters of tuning and the first knobs that we exposed. Those are the things that we try to adjust to get the most fun that we can.

Ten Ton Hammer: Speaking of the world and the rifts, how big is the world? What kind of size are we looking at here?

Scott Hartsman: The easiest thing we could have done, literally, is create terrain. We could have created a larger world space than has ever been created in MMOGs and ship it. We can do that. The problem is that that’s not fun, because creating empty space, while creating a feeling of holy crap – this world is gigantic, also creates annoyance in travel time and you end up with a very low density of interesting things to do. To us, it’s about making sure we have enough interesting things to look at, but still make it big enough so you feel that there’s a lot of things left to explore. Somewhere in there is the balance point of where our world is. On top of that, there’s also making sure that there’s interesting dungeons and interesting raid zones and interesting war fronts along the way to tie the story together. To us, it’s about the quality of any given piece of world rather than just flopping down any number of height maps saying, look, we have the biggest world in MMOGs ever. We could do that and we’d probably get some press out of it, but it’s not what we want to do. We’re looking at having a high density of interesting things to do.

Ten Ton Hammer: I like the point you made about players not being forced to being janitors of the world. I hate games that force you to do things along those lines. I know some hard-core players love being forced to take part in events to keep the world balanced. Is Rifts geared more towards the casual player or the hard-core player? Or perhaps somewhere in-between? How do you balance that?

Scott Hartsman: I guess it depends upon how you define hard-core and casual. There’s been years of debate on the blogs, the boards, and the sites about what those words even mean. For the sake of giving you an answer, let’s assume the amount of time in a week that a person spends playing a game. Our goal is to make sure that if you’re heavy on that scale, you have stuff to do. If you’re light on that scale, you have stuff to do and you should feel that you’re able to make the same progression at a rewarding rate. That’s what we’re about. If you want to succeed as being more than being relegated off as a niche game, you have to make sure that you have enough going on in the world and that you’re attractive to enough people so that critical mass can build and people can migrate over with their entire group of friends. In order to do that, you have to make sure that you satisfy enough of the types of players that are out there, and that’s what we’re looking to do.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is the game geared towards soloing or grouping? Can you solo everything or are there things that you need a group for?

Scott Hartsman: It depends upon what you mean by everything. The overland world and the overland quests and the path to max level do need to be a fun and rewarding experience to the solo player. We’re probably seven or eight years out of any game succeeding that hasn’t been compatible with people who just want to play online in a world around their friends. That is a valid, and I say dominant, style of gameplay these days. At the same time, you want to onramp into interesting group activities and raid activities like instances and war fronts.

One thing that is unique to us is that we have this dynamic content layer which opens up a whole brand new style of abilities for us to get people into groups in new ways. I can walk over to a rift, see you guys, and start helping you out. Even though we’re not in a formal group, we are implicitly grouping and helping each other out. We all probably appreciate that the other players are there. Maybe we then decide to form a real group and go off and hunt a major rift with some major invasions, which are group content. Perhaps we bump into some other groups and we decide to join together and go off in search of an epic rift invasion, where now we’re doing raid content together. The addition of the dynamic layer actually gives us a lot of flexibility in trying to bootstrap people more into groups or raids who might have never given it a shot. If you ask me, that’ll be a huge win if we can pull that off because most of my fond memories in MMOGs have involved grouping and raiding.

It’s not that people don’t want to group or raid; people don’t want to deal with the pain-in-the-ass of getting five, six, or twenty people together. They don’t want to waste time. They want to get online, play the game, and have fun. Again, it’s not that players don’t want to play with other players; it’s that players don’t want to go through the pain-in-the-ass hassle of forming up with other players. So we think if we can provide that opportunity through dynamic gameplay with rewards, they’ll take that shot.

Ten Ton Hammer: How does the holy trinity of MMOGs (DPS, healer, and tank) fit into the game? With all the combinations that you can have, how do you determine what’s what?

Scott Hartsman: We do have a lot of combat roles and it’s more than the holy trinity. We also have control and peer support because we want people to be effective doing a lot of different things. The trinity itself has its ups and downs. It’s incredibly easy for people to understand and that is important. At the same time, let’s say you have a support class that’s geared to help DPS perform a full third above their peak. That’s a big thing, and you don’t have to worry so much about other support roles because the one you have makes your DPS kick so much ass. They’re happy because they’re playing an effective support class. Again, that’s been impossible since all the support classes for the last seven or eight years in MMOGs have all been balanced for fun to solo, fun to group, fun to raid, fun to PvP, etc. Because of those restrictions, you couldn’t make a fun support class anymore, but we’re able to do that.

Ten Ton Hammer: Give us one final word on Rift.

Scott Hartsman: Rift is a real, honest-to-God MMOG. We’re not kidding. Once you can give it a shot, please do. Once you do, you’ll realize that we mean it. It’s a real game. It’s coming soon. Once people try it, they find it to be a hell of a lot of fun.

Listen to the interview on Ten Ton Hammer Live!