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

Ten Ton Hammer: The perception among your fans is that you’ve done a good job of being transparent to your fans. That counts for a lot in today’s market; MMOG fans are a pretty jaded lot. What have you done differently?

Hal Hanlin: We’re not making promises we’re not keeping. We say we are your next MMO. Why? We have graphic superiority, innovative and fresh gameplay built from a foundation you’re already familiar with, a class system you’re going to feel is intuitive and wish it was in your next MMO and more.

How do you kill what has no life? A big sword!!

Ten Ton Hammer: For better or worse, the gamers we talk to feel like they know everything there is to know about Rift. Do you have any aces up your sleeve?

Hal Hanlin: We’ve been more open about this project than any other project I’ve been on. E3 2008, which you mentioned before, was very heavily scripted because it was a technical proof of concept piece. At Cologne with Russ Brown [Trion VP of Development], I was doing demos up in the executive area and it became really clear between us that our game is awesome. We’re not going to blow off the market hype, but at the same time, when talking to people new to the game, there’s no smoke and no mirrors. Our game is good enough to stand up on its own. 

Ten Ton Hammer: Put another way, you guys really haven’t talked about your road map after launch. Given the long record of mainstream market disappointments in the MMO space in the last few years, do you feel like you owe the player something to make them invest time and money into the game?

Hal Hanlin: We’ve shown people everything they wanted to see. If they didn’t know to ask for it, heh,  that’s a shame. There are level 50 expert dungeons of everything currently in the game, and they’re not just your typical heroic versions, they open up new wings entirely and there are 40% more bosses in these. We have raids we’ve talked about and raids we haven’t talked about. We even have raid Rifts we are currently testing. We have a huge amount of content we could talk about, but we have the ability to go from an idea to a testable event within a week. Given that we can do that, I don’t think the players that come to our game will ever be disappointed. It’s our game too. When I go home, this is what I play. Not because I’ve been told to, but because I want to.

Looks like things are going to get hot around here!

Ten Ton Hammer: Those are some very short development cycles. It sounds like you have a lot of confidence in your design team and this game.

Hal Hanlin:  I have crazy confidence in them! This is not confidence based on faith either, this is confidence based on watching what they’ve done and are doing right now. I’ve watched them do the work from start to finish and they are without a doubt, fantastic. They work together and keep all things coherent and transparent.

Ten Ton Hammer: Last question. So we’re less than a month from launch. Is there anything about the game you want to point out that maybe you feel us as the press hasn’t done a good enough job highlighting?

Hal Hanlin: The enthusiast press and the foundation press have listened well. I would love to have some great bullet to present you with right now, but candidly we really have gotten some attention about everything.

Our thanks to Hal Hanlin for this interview.