In
the latest episode of href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/podcasts/live/19">Ten
Ton Hammer Live!, Jesse and Ben
sat down
with Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer of style="font-style: italic;">Rift: Planes of Telara.
In this wide ranging interview, they discuss many of the unique
features of style="font-style: italic;">Rift
such as the class system and the dynamic world setting. If you be
either Guardian or Defiant, read on!

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Ten
Ton Hammer: For those who have been living in a cave or under a rock
and haven’t heard of style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Rift:
Planes of Telara style="font-weight: bold;">, can you tell us
something about the game?



Scott
Hartsman: Above all, style="font-style: italic;">Rift
is a high quality, AAA fantasy MMOG that evolves the genre in
interesting ways and revolutionizes it in a couple of others. You have
this entire world in peril; the world is facing complete annihilation
from the power of the Blood Storm, which is a swarm of gods that have
been caught up in their travels through the universe and they have
their eye on this planet. On this planet, you have two ideologically
opposite factions, the Guardians and the Defiant, and they’re
both trying to figure out how to save the world in two incredibly
different ways. Also on this world, you have all of these rifts from
all of these different planes of existence opening up to either swallow
the world or attack the world or take from the world into themselves.
So, you have a world with an eight way war going on, and it’s
a game about why your side is right, why the other side is wrong, and
what is the best way for you to go around fixing everything wrong with
the planet.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: What I like about this is the different spin from other
MMOGs. What else is different compared to all the other MMOGs out there?



Scott
Hartsman: Sure,
that’s the first thing everybody wants to know. Fantasy MMOGs
are a pretty crowded space. There are a lot of games out there, there
have been a lot of games out there, and I think it’s fair to
ask why the hell I should care about you? I can go on about this for a
couple of hours, but the two biggest things that grabs everybody right
off the bat and makes them understand that there is something really
cool and unique going on here is, first, the entire world is dynamic.
What I mean by that is that we have this game that has all of the
elements that people have come to know and depend on in fantasy MMOGs.
It’s got quests, items, levels, and all of that stuff. Then
on top of that, we have this dynamic layer of things going on in the
world that represent this global struggle. Think of it almost as a LAN
controlled game where you have rifts opening up from these other
dimensions, big massive social events taking place in this world where
people can just walk up and join in starting the fight. It goes one
step beyond that as these invaders are actually trying to take over the
world. What I mean by that is that they are literally trying to attack
all of your outposts and set up their own footholds in the world
because they are out to take over the world. The invaders
don’t necessarily get along with each other. Every one of the
planes is controlled by a different god, and every one of them has
their own wants, their own needs, and their own desires. They are using
this world as a stage for their own grand battle, and the players are
caught up in the middle of it. It’s on the players to try to
survive in this world as well as to push back the invaders and take the
fight to the invaders as well as taking the fight to the other side.
That’s one of the things, the entire layer of dynamic
activity of large scale events that is always going on.



The other difference is our class system. We set out, very
intentionally, to create a class system where people would be free to
make choices that actually matter. You can think of any class that
you’ve ever wanted to play in an MMOG or any class that you
have been able to play in an MMOG, and, chances are, you’ll
be able to find a way to put that class together in this game. This is
all about taking all the fun of investing in different classes,
spending points, and getting cool abilities and creating what you want
to play out of those component parts. The way we do that is that we
have this concept in the game of once your character starts out in the
world; you’re actually what we call an ascended soul. That
means that your soul is so strong that you died and your soul came out
the other side and you have the ability to control multiple souls and
you’ll learn to control even more as you level up. At the end
of the game, you’ll be controlling three different souls that
are effectively three classes, and you get to choose which parts of the
three classes you wish to take into yourself. We expect, and already
see, players taking a ton of time experimenting with different builds,
different class combinations, and different tricks that they can use to
play the game. It’s a game where we don’t just want
the content not to get old, but we don’t want the classes
themselves to get old. The idea is that you can keep playing with this
over and over again and have fun with it for months and years.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: Trion Worlds is a new company. Can you tell us about the
expertise you have in the company on this game?



Scott
Hartsman: Sure, the Rift team
is up here in Redwood City, California. The team numbers over a hundred
people, and I have gone through the exercise of adding up all of the
games, single player and MMOG, that everybody on the team has worked
on. It turns out that it was over two dozen online games and platforms
and another two to three dozen single player games. From the MMOG side
alone, we have people who have worked on games that most players would
be familiar with, such as style="font-style: italic;">Everquest,
Everquest
2, style="font-style: italic;">World of Warcraft,
Dark
Age of Camelot, style="font-style: italic;">Warhammer Online,
and even some of the smaller games. A lot of us come to this with our
own experiences and lessons that we’ve learned in the past
and we’re really trying to improve on the things that all of
us have learned. It’s been great to make a game within that
environment with that much experience. In a way, while we’re
sitting here together, we’re learning from each other.
I’ll be the first guy to admit that there’s people
on this team who’ve worked on games that I wasn’t
part of and just being able to learn from them in ways why they think
that this will work, why this won’t work, and why this
doesn’t work so we should do it this way, has been fantastic.



Ten
Ton Hammer: I think that you’re being modest. For those who
don’t know who Scott Hartsman is, he was the guy that really,
and forgive me for being blunt about it, put style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Everquest
2 style="font-weight: bold;"> on the map. In terms of
your MMOG knowledge and experience, as well as your style and
creativity, it really brought that game forward. I think that you have
a great team over there.



Scott
Hartsman: I definitely
appreciate it, but I can’t take credit for all that. Yes, I
was the guy in charge after that thing launched, but at the end of the
day, it was all about empowering developers to make the decisions that
they wanted to make about things that they felt strongly about and
could back up after actually playing the game. I mean that is such a
critical thing, and it’s one of the core tenets of this team
too. At this stage of development, we have more people who have been
playing the game for months on their own personal time than any other
game that I’ve worked on. It’s something that has
worked really well for us. As you mentioned, it worked well for us in
the past on style="font-style: italic;">EQ2
also where you take the people who have the hands-on
experience… there’s just this entire other level
of information that you only get from sitting in your own chair at your
own computer at your home, trying to play the game. You know
what’s frustrating; you know what’s not in a way
that really helps inform all of the data that we’ve pulled
from all of these games to see what’s working and what
isn’t. If you ask me, it’s more about empowering
people to do that rather than one guy chucking down proclamations from
up high. It’s making sure that the people have the tools to
do their job.



I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no better or
worse than a lot of other people. I’ve learned stuff from
fairly junior people and I’ve learned stuff from fairly
senior people, and I like to think that it goes both ways.
It’s mainly about making sure that there’s an
environment where everybody can be in on the conversation.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: You were talking about the class system. Can you give us
more details? Are there any limits to it?



Scott
Hartsman: Absolutely. When
you create a character, you pick your calling. Your calling can be
considered an archetype. You decide whether you want to be a warrior
running around in plate mail or a mage running around in cloth armor.
Once you choose that, and what that does is fix the type of armor that
you can wear and the power system that you’re using. For
example, warriors use attack points, mages use both mana and a mechanic
called charge, and so on. Every calling has their own power set and
armor type. Inside that calling, you have a set of souls to choose
from. Some of the souls you start out with, some of the souls you
discover or earn by leveling up. I’m going to pick a random
example. My character on our alpha server started out life as a humble
warrior; a guardian warrior. He’s one of the chosen of the
gods and he started out his life as a paladin because I like paladins
and they’re kind of fun. He leveled up a few levels and
unlocked the ability to have a second soul. The soul that he was
granted and equipped right alongside that of the paladin soul was the
beast master, and the beast master is a plate-wearing melee character
who gets a pet. The idea of a paladin with a big dog seemed kind of
cool, and so I ended up playing him that way for a few levels and then
respecced his points a few times. When I got the chance to do my first
instance run with a group, I went to town and bought the ability to
take on a second role, or a spec, and built a second role that was
slightly different 100% paladin that was all about tanking. Now here I
am tanking, with two sets of specs I can go back and forth. When
I’m soloing, I can be a beast master/paladin because it has
good armor, good shield, and good damage in a pet. When I want to go
tanking in an instance, I can be a pure paladin and be all about the
defense.



Later on in life, I unlocked my third soul, and for the third soul, I
decided to take on a champion because champions, by default, get this
ability called bull rush, which lets you zip back and forth between
targets. Then they start getting more damaging abilities, and I was
doing more soloing than grouping at the time, so I respecced myself
entirely and picked up a third role that was all about the champion and
beast master talents. It was very heavy into soloing and doing damage.
The last time I played the guy, which was about a week ago, I had him
with his three specs flying around and I have the ability to pick up
another one if I want. He has the capability to solo and take on mobs
or being able to be a really cool tank. One of the other cool things
about the class system is that we very intentionally made sure that no
matter which calling you choose from the get-go, you have the ability
to take on a few different group roles. No matter what you pick,
you’re not always a tank, you’re not always a
damager, you’re not always a healer, you’re not
always support, and you’re not always control. You have the
ability to be able to do two or three of those activities just by
swapping souls around. I’m sure that most MMOG players,
myself included, are aware of the situation where you have a bunch of
friends who would love to go off and do stuff together, but
it’s five DPS guys sitting around town with their thumbs up
their butts because they can’t do anything without a tank or
a healer. In this game, we intentionally made sure that people can
fulfill multiple group roles. So far, that flexibility has really been
paying off. People are having a lot of fun playing with the class
system, and they’re having an easier time getting groups
together because at the end of the day, it’s about getting
online and playing and having fun with your friends.

Ten
Ton Hammer: Relating the class system to something I’m
familiar with, I’m thinking about style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Final
Fantasy XI style="font-weight: bold;"> where you had a paladin
and, at a certain level, you could get a second job, say a red mage.
However, your new job could only be half of your level. So, if I was a
level 40 paladin, I could only be a level 20 red mage. How does it work
within style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Rift style="font-weight: bold;">? Can I be a paladin and
be a complete beast master or do the additional classes be only a
percentage of your main class?



Scott
Hartsman: The way it works is
that you have a certain number of what we call affinity points to spend
and the number of points that you get grows upwards as you level. You
get to spend your points in your current set of souls any way you
choose. For example, with my paladin/champion, I could put all of my
points in paladin and just use champion for the one free ability that
you get and that’s ok. Or I could spend my affinity points by
putting them half and half, or I could spend them by putting them into
a third soul, or spreading them evenly over three souls. It really just
depends upon which abilities you want to go after, and that tends to
dictate how you end up spending your points. Like I said, the system
itself is rife with opportunities for experimentation.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: I’m glad that you mentioned the three souls as
that was my next question. Could you put those points into all three
souls?



Scott
Hartsman: Yes, you can. You
get one pool of points, and that pool of points is determined by your
level. Where you choose to put your points is totally up to you. We
fully expect that there’ll be people who’ll choose
to be the ultra-specialized single soul type. At the end of the day,
just because you get a cool free ability for just equipping a soul, we
expect people will have three equipped. Once you start playing with a
system like this, you start realizing that there’s some
subtleties in here that you don’t get to do in any other
game. What I mean by that is that since we have the concept of souls
that you only get after a certain level, we don’t have to
make every soul good at doing everything like people have to do making
MMOGs with a traditional system.



Taking a look at the current juggernaut, every single class has to be
able to solo, it has to have a raid role, it has to be able to PvP, it
has to have a group role, and so on and so on. We don’t have
those kinds of restrictions, because, for example, in our game we have
a bard soul and it’s set up for some fun solo ability and
it’s heavy on group support. It’s not an awesome
PvPer, and it’s not the most awesome of the soloers, but it
can solo. Since we know that you have other souls and specs, we
don’t have to make the bard the greatest at PvP or soloing.
We can say that we want to make this specialty soul that is primarily
focused on group support, and in our system, that just works. Why?
Because we have those other souls that you can fall back on for those
other roles. That way, we can make souls that two or three abilities.
We can do all kinds of cool stuff with that.



Ten
Ton Hammer: If you put your points into three different souls, do you
lose out on special abilities that you should have? For example, if
you’re playing a paladin, and you spend your points in that,
but you also spend them in two other souls instead of pumping them all
into paladin. Do you not lose out on some awesome abilities that
you’ll need in PvP or raiding? Are you losing out by
spreading your points out or is there a special thing you get from
spending points in all three souls?



Scott
Hartsman: That’s a
very smart question. There is the ability to create good combinations
as well as the ability to create less-than-optimal combinations, and
that’s ok. It’s all part of having fun with the
system. There are so many games out there right now trying to make sure
that people stay on rails so they’re the most evenly balanced
as possible. That works for some games, and if that’s what
they want to do, that’s fine. We’re very
intentionally not doing that. In order for there to be choices at all,
there has to be good choices and bad choices. With this number of
combinations of souls, there will be people who find things that we
didn’t even intend and they’ll find ways to use
synergy between the souls that will turn out to be more powerful than
we expected. Bluntly, that’s ok. The thing is if
you’re a warrior and I’m a warrior, if you discover
the warrior combination that is holy-crap, awesomely powered,
that’s fine. I have a path where I can either go to a trainer
or go out and earn more souls to bring myself back to your level.
It’s all part of the community experience and information
sharing and the difference between skilled and not-skilled, which is
the reason why a lot of people play MMOGs in the first place. Those
community interactions are actually fun.



Ten
Ton Hammer: How do you keep the game balanced with all these options?
If I come up with an awesome paladin build that runs around kicking
everybody’s butt, how do you balance something like that?



Scott
Hartsman: With any online
game ever, no matter what anybody says, balancing is always going to be
an ongoing activity. The important thing is to make sure that you
don’t just make everybody have the same capacity with just a
different colored spell effect. It’s ok for there to be
inequality among these things. It’s just a matter of the
extent of the inequality and the customer’s ability to be
able to fix any problems that occur themselves. Our system gives people
enough tools in the tool box such as go to a trainer, pick up new
roles, pick up new souls, respend their points, and they’ll
be just fine. People tend to get angry when they feel underpowered and
they feel that they have no way to deal with it themselves. Our system
is all about giving them ways to deal with it themselves. That being
said, there will be ongoing balancing going on.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: When we talk balancing, the next obvious question is about
PvP. Can you give us a hint of any PvP in the game and what
it’s about?



Scott
Hartsman: Game wide, we have
both PvE ruleset servers as well as PvP ruleset servers; worlds where
there’s no PvP action in the open world as opposed to worlds
where there’s tons of PvP going on in the open world. We also
have PvP instances called war fronts, which are objective based PvP
instances where it’s side by side and ideally cross-server,
which would be wonderful to get in before we launch. We’ve
got our war fronts in testing right now and we have people playing in
them every day. They seem to be having fun with them, which is cool.
Those are the two primary forms of PvP. On top of that, we expect,
especially on PvP servers, that the rifts with their dynamic content
will have a magnetic effect on concentrating PvP. People will know that
in this Guardian zone over here, chances are that there’ll be
a lot of Guardian players around this rift that in encroaching on the
area or this invasion that is invading this town. We fully expect
Defiant players looking to make mischief will flock to those flash
points for PvP also. At the core, the important thing is that we have a
lot of PvP options, but once you decide to be on a PvE server, PvP is
from then on a consensual activity. To borrow an analogy from an era
gone by, we are not the play to crush game. We are not a hard-core PvP
game, but yes, it does have a lot of PvP elements in it where
it’s fun to play.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Can you tell us about the rift system? How does it work?



Scott
Hartsman: I’m not
going to get into the internals of how everything works. Once you pull
back the curtain a little bit too far, you lose a bit of the fun. We
have a lot of different types of social events in the game, and rifts
are one of them. By social, I don’t mean that you sit around
chatting and playing dress-up. I mean that they are gathering points
where you can expect to have positive interactions with people of your
own faction. The rift events themselves are set up intentionally such
as if you are the first player there, you want to see other players
come by because you’re going to end up facing more waves of
creatures, you’ll end up getting better rewards, and
you’ll all be rewarded based upon your contribution.
That’s what we mean by massively social.



Traditionally, if you run into something cool while running overland in
an MMOG, chances are that if you’re the first,
you’ll want to guard it. It’s your precious. You
don’t want others taking away your thing. Our events are
about the exact opposite. If you’re there, you want other
people to come by because you’ll be able to do better, be
able to do it faster, and you all will be getting rewarded. One of the
core things about MMOGs is that you’re supposed to be playing
around and with other people. Well, that should be fun and should be
reinforced. We designed the game around the concept of more people
equals more fun equals more rewards, which seems like an obvious step
up for me.



We’ve got a bunch of different types of individual events
too. There are the invaders from the Plane of Death constantly changing
the appearance of the world around them. The world changes, the sky
changes, the objects change, and the world is being changed in real
time. Then there’s fighting off waves of creatures and
bosses; having some of these creatures spawn and take off into the
wilderness to destroy things in the world and even crossing zones
because this is a fully seamless world. All of these create events. At
the place where they set up their camp, you have to prevent them from
getting a foothold. At the place they’re heading off to
attack, you have an event there to defend the town. Following the
invaders themselves, you have an event to assassinate the invaders.
There’re a lot of different types of encounters in our
dynamic content in our world system, and it’s all about
taking this core feeling of the world is literally changing and
bringing the players together to do cool things.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: Let’s say my group goes out to check a rift and
we run away. What happens if we completely ignore the rifts?



Scott
Hartsman: It all depends.
You’re not the only folks in the world. Maybe nothing
happens. Perhaps the invaders get what they came for and they leave
“peacefully.” Maybe somebody else comes along and
beats them up, or maybe they decide to stay longer and they set up a
permanent foothold in the world. They then hang out, put up their
foothold, their general arrives, and then their general starts sending
out lieutenants with invasion forces out into the world to cause
mischief that way. Now you have a problem because maybe those
lieutenants go out and set up even more footholds. Eventually, places
may get so overrun that they actually take over a town. The towns have
these protective structures, called ward stones on the Guardian side,
around them, and their sole purpose is to repel invaders. If enough
invaders slip around, who’s to say that they can’t
overcome the ward stones and take over a town?



 We’re looking to create some really great emerging
behaviors here, because when everything isn’t fully hand
scripted and everything isn’t fully predictable, you have the
potential for some really interesting interactions that, a lot of the
time, can be even cooler than anything we could have conceived of.
We’ve been testing it in alpha and so far, it seems to be a
lot of fun. We’re still working on it. Nobody wants to log in
and see that the entire world has been overrun. To us, it comes down to
how we can balance it internally. How we can tune it to the number of
people in a given area, and how do we set up interactions where more
interesting stuff is likely to occur and people will be able to see it,
appreciate it, and be able to do something about it. The great thing
about the system is that the next thing people ask is, wow,
isn’t that thing risky? We say yes it is, which is why
we’re working on it now since we launch next year.
We’re actively iterating on this in front of real players.
The way that it is headed is that it should look pretty damn good by
the time we launch.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Rift style="font-weight: bold;">.



Scott
Hartsman: style="font-style: italic;">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.



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