The
Rift team
may be the hardest working in all of the MMOG industry,
churning out high quality content additions at a pace never before seen
in the genre. So imagine our surprise when we were able to wrangle one
of the Design Producers, Adam Gershowitz, into sitting down with us for
a quick chat with our own Jason Bolton about what’s coming in Update
1.7 and beyond.

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Ten Ton Hammer: Update
1.7 is packed with additions, updates and improvements; which ones are
you most excited about?

 

Adam Gershowitz:
We consider 1.7 a content-light but feature-rich update and while we
aren't rolling out a bunch of new dungeons or raids what we are working
on is a ton of quality of life changes. This patch has been really
focusing on cleaning up a lot of little things that we have
been getting consistent feedback on from the community. The team is
really excited to finally get those things taken care of. For me
personally, I am really excited about the PvP changes and the
introduction of the mercenary system. The reason I am really excited
about that is that I am just like everyone else and I hate waiting in
queues. We are constantly battling and making sure that we can provide
rapid gameplay and we think this will be an interesting way to do it
and it will add an exciting dynamic into the game.



The other thing that I am really excited about it, and I can't speak
too much about it under threat of death and dismemberment from Hal, is
the new event that we are going to be launching with 1.7. It won't
happen immediately when the patch hits, but shortly after. It's still
under wraps but it will feature some brand new gameplay that we haven't
done before.



TTH:
Some players are worried about the difficulty level of end-game being
reduced too dramatically due to some proposed boss changes in
Hammerknell. Can you give us some insight into the process behind these
changes?

 

Adam:
That's a tough thing, it isn't tough to give you insight but it can be
tough to make people understand why we are doing it. We have a variety
of different players playing the game and in the case of Hammerknell,
or any top tier raid, you have those initial world first guys who want
to do everything as fast as possible - and for them we like to make
sure the content is as challenging as possible. But over time it
doesn't make sense for us to keep that content that hard because those
players are going to move on to something new and more exciting and
other players wont get a chance to experience that content. Our initial
tuning is always about challenge and difficulty but over time we ease
up on that and will continue to do so to make it more accessible for
all players.



Most of these changes are happening because we have a new raid coming
out and we want to make sure that those hardcore guilds as well can
finish gearing up their members or get those final few drops to make
sure they are ready to go for that new raid when it pops. We also know
that many guilds are bringing new raiders into the zones and this
should help them get those players up to speed quicker. style="font-weight: bold;">

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TTH: What can you tell us
about the PvP rank changes?



Adam: The main reason we went from 8 to 40 and removed
some of the restrictions from the items wasn't to necessarily tamp down
the curve, but it was to give players more to look forward to in every
play session. If you're familiar with how the old system worked you
know that with the eight ranks that the first rank went pretty good and
I got a bunch of items, the next rank was a little longer and I got a
bunch of items, the next rank was oh my god I've got to wait a while to
get a bunch of items. Then it started to get to the point that you had
to grind a *LOT* of time and then when you got there you got a ton of
items and rewards all in one fell swoop.



What we did with removing those restriction and expanding the ranks
allowed us to dole out the rewards in smaller increments even though
the time from start to final rank is essentially the same. It feels a
lot better, people feel more rewarded and it also helps with the
balance because you don't have situations where people spike, your
consistently getting upgrades and getting better.

TTH:
Roleplayers got a nod with the addition of in-game weddings and while
the feedback from them seems very positive it seems that some members
of the community feel these resources could have been better spent in
other areas of the game. Can you tell us more about the development
process and any other plans for greater immersion?

 

Adam: 
The game is a really diverse one and there are lots of things we want
to do with it.We map out at a high level which things are more
or less important in terms of release and we move things around at
every milestone. We also pride ourselves in being able to rapidly
respond to the needs of the game, but at the same time there are things
that, even though they are lower priority, that we have wanted to do.
Non-stabby actives as we call them, and one of those was weddings. So
this has been something we have been working on and planning and kind
of moving along at a stately pace while, yes, we have been working on
what some players might consider higher priority issues.



The other thing to note when dealing with features like this that our
development team is a pretty diverse
group that has various skill sets and strengths.When it comes down to
it you don't want a podiatrist to do your brain surgery, even though he
is a doctor and went to school for a lot of years, but he isn't really
good at taking apart a brain and putting it back together
again.  The same thing can be said about designers, artists
and engineers. The designer who is really great at providing a
top-notch roleplaying experience might not be the same designer that is
good at fine-tuning a raid or balancing a class. We really do play up
to the strengths of our team and that effects when we decide to do
which feature. Overall there are definitive features we want to get out
and some have a longer horizon of when we want to get them out, like
weddings, while some have a shorter horizon such as fixing major bugs
or more popular main stream content like Ember Isle or a new instance.
We try to cater to all players as fast as we can get to them



To answer your other question, we absolutely have a lot more non-stabby
activities planned in the future. Weddings was a real big first step
for us and we want to see how popular they are with the community. So
far on the test shard they have been really popular and based off that
we will see which activities to release in the future. We look at
everything our players are playing and make our design decisions based
on player feedback.

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TTH:
The new Chronicle, River of Souls: Chains of Death is packed with lore,
are we going to continue to see greater lore elements in future
Chronicles?





Adam: We
have experimented quite a bit with different lore elements in each
chronicle, from the initial Chronicle of the Ascended which is loaded
with lore to Greenscale's Blight which is more of a mini-raid and
features less lore. River of Souls is the evolution of that, we found
that players liked a good amount of story and they enjoy a good set of
encounter challenges so we have done our best to balance the two. We
have gotten a lot of feedback on it and if we continue to get good
reception on it then we will probably continue down that path.

 

TTH: What can you tell us
about the new 20 player raid Infernal Dawn?

 

Adam: That's
the big question right? It's coming pretty soon as far as raids go. We
have just started internal testing and at this very moment there are
folks here playing through it here and on our PTS through private
invite that are testing some of the encounters. The zone isn't done,
the encounters aren't done, we are still tweaking the art and balancing
the game so it will probably be a couple of months before its ready.
The main thing we are doing with this raid is to make sure that we
learn from some of the mistakes we had on earlier raid releases. We
have a lot more players with a ton more expertise and knowledge of how
the game works now than we did earlier. After the game has been out for
a year you gain some really good players that know the finer points and
our designers are a lot more experienced, so we are able to give it a
really high level of polish.



Even though we had considerable player involvement in developing
Hammerknell it was released within a few months of the game being
launched and even with the experience of prior raids, most players were
barely ready to hit Hammerknell. One of the nice things with Infernal
Dawn is that we have a lot larger pool of players to pull from for
testing. It's no longer just 3 or 4 top guilds, but we have a lot more
people that have gotten through a lot more content, that are helping us
test this out.

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New Pre-made Calling
Templates

TTH: Can you talk to us
about the new Calling Purposes that are going live in 1.7?
style="font-weight: bold;">

Adam: Of
course! The premade soul templates are a feature that we have been
talking about since before the holidays. One of things that is
important to us is keeping our high end players engaged and keeping
them happy, but we have had a lot of players come and go through style="font-style: italic;">Rift and we still
have a lot of new players trying the game everyday and we want to make
sure they have a great experience. One of our biggest strengths is our
Soul system with its number of options and the power and complexity of
what you can do with it, but it can be very daunting for our new
players. A lot of the feedback we have been getting from newer players
is that while they love the game and love the Soul system, they would
like a bit of a leg up on it. A lot of these players don't know to, or
don't want to, go to various sites and read about the latest and
greatest builds. So the whole initial idea there is to give them a
preset build that will help them figure out how to get the sort of play
experience that they want. We have found that the more you help people
out with it and hold their hands a bit, the more excited they get about
it and will start to experiment on their own.



The second part of this system is that even though someone may have
played all the way to 50, they may not have tried a lot of different
builds during that leveling process. Now that they are at max level
they want to try new roles; for instance you may have played a DPS
Warrior and now at level 50 you want to try your hand at tanking.
Starting at level 50 with a completely empty soul tree and trying to
figure out where those points need to go is pretty
daunting. We wanted Calling Purposes to fill that role for
them. Depending on player feedback we may implement more features, such
as player created and shared templates of more complex builds for
advanced players.



TTH: Can you tell us
anything about what to expect in 1.8 and beyond?

 

Adam: Yeah,
I can give some general teasers. We have Infernal Dawn, which is our
new raid coming soon. Expect some awesome stuff around our anniversary,
I can't say too much about that, but the one year mark is huge for us
so we have a lot planned around that. We are working on a variety of
non-stabby activities. We've got some more raids, some more
dungeons, some more Master Modes, and some more Slivers
planned.  We are really happy with how Instant Adventure
worked out so we are looking at how we can spread that more throughout
the game world and how we can improve that experience as well.



So yeah,
the first year has been chocked full of content and the second year is
going to be no slouch either. We have no plans to take our foot off the
gas;
So yeah,
the first year has been chocked full of content and the second year is
going to be no slouch either. We have no plans to take our foot off the
gas; I've never worked at a studio where more people have played the
game and they have stuck with it and love it. Because we are players
and are passionate about the game, we have no plans to slow down our
content development - we aren't just making a game to sell, we're
making one that we want to play and our developers never want to stop
creating.

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We want to thank Adam for taking time out of his busy
schedule to go over the
upcoming patch with us and we can’t wait for the next one, which at
their current pace should be in a few more weeks! For more on
the game, be sure to check out href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/rift">Rift at Ten Ton
Hammer and the Rift
official site.