Armed with many reader submitted questions, Ten Ton Hammer’s
own Ben de la Durantaye delved deep into the topic of dungeons and
raids in the upcoming style="font-style: italic;">Rift
MMOG. Talking to Berenger Fish, the design lead for dungeons and raids
for Rift,
Ben was able to loot a treasure trove worth of information. Whether
your calling be that of Guardian or Defiant, the information unearthed
will be of vital use to you in your quest to save Telara.



If you have any questions you wish us to ask Trion Worlds in the
future, please post them in our href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=742">official
Rift
forum.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: Are there lockout
timers for raids and dungeons?



Berenger
Fish: There are two different
difficulty settings for our five-man dungeons. There is our standard
dungeon that I use for players leveling up in the game. Those do not
have any lockdown timers and you can run them as often as you want to.
There is also the expert difficulty of the dungeons which are for our
level-capped players, which add more bosses, greater difficulty, and
have an expanded storyline. Those do have a daily lockout. As for our
raids, we’re expecting that our raids will have a weekly
lockout. However, we may change that based on the size of the dungeon
or player feedback.



Ten
Ton Hammer: What is the main
difference between the expert dungeon and the regular dungeon?



Berenger
Fish: The first thing we
looked at was expanding the story of what was going on in the dungeon.
For example, we have a dungeon called Deepstrike Mines where the first
time you go in, you only see the mine section and the final boss is in
front of a half-buried door. That’s a low level dungeon and
that’s the complete story for the dungeon at that time.



When you go back as a level-capped character, you’ll find not
only what was there before, but you’ll have access to what
was behind the half-buried door. You’ll see the further
storyline of that dungeon. We try to do that where it makes sense. We
didn’t try to force anything. With some dungeons, it
didn’t make sense to expand them that way. But every single
expert dungeon has more bosses, increased difficulty (not only in
stats, but also in mechanics and encounters), and better loot.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: Expert dungeons
are available to level-capped characters only?



Berenger
Fish: That is correct.



Ten
Ton Hammer: And not all
dungeons have an expert mode?



Berenger
Fish: Every single dungeon
has an expert mode.



Ten
Ton Hammer: How large are
raid groups in style="font-style: italic;">Rift?

Berenger
Fish: Our raid groups are, at
the moment, ten man and twenty man raids, being two or four groups of
five. Every single instance raid will have both a ten man and a twenty
man version.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Will there be any
dungeons for small parties of two or three people?



Berenger
Fish: We’re not
planning on instance content for groups of less than five, but we feel
that there’s plenty of content out there in the normal world
for smaller groups in the form of rifts and individual storylines
within the zones themselves.



Ten
Ton Hammer: How large a role
will crowd control play in dungeons and raids?



Berenger
Fish: We try to take into
account the abilities that a player has within a given level range. For
example, we wouldn’t expect players to use Purge or Cleanse
abilities early on. For our lowest level dungeons, we assume that the
player won’t have those abilities. If they do, great as that
will help them, but we won’t rely on players having those.



As the level ranges rise and we start introducing more mechanics of the
game, or expecting players to have more abilities at their disposal,
then we’ll ramp those in. Once you hit the expert level
dungeons as well as the raids, you can expect to see some encounters
that will require, or highly suggest the use of, crowd control.
However, it won’t be every single encounter.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: We understand
that at end-game, we’re going to see expert level dungeons
and raids in the forms of instances, but we also hear about rift raids.
What’s the difference between a rift raid and an instance
raid?



Berenger
Fish: An instance raid has
its own play space that is private for your group. The raid boss and
encounters can be perfectly tailored to the environment. You can
basically have a lot more scripted control over what is going on for
the experience that we want to show. A rift raid takes place in the
world and not necessarily at the same place. It’s a lot more
chaotic.



In theory, other players and NPCs can interact with the rift raid at
the same time the group is working to defeat that raid rift. That can
be both a positive and a negative. If you’re on a PvP server
and you’re trying to defeat a rift raid boss, you can fully
expect to get interference from the other faction. It’s a
different dynamic.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Would rift raids
be locked to a certain amount of people or would anybody be allowed to
join in?



Berenger
Fish: The more the merrier,
really. The way they’re being set up, difficulty wise, some
won’t necessarily require a full raid, but there will be ones
that will. The most that a rift raid will ever require is the size of
our largest raid group, which is twenty. That doesn’t mean
that other people can join in and help.

Ten
Ton Hammer: How will rift
raid rewards compare to rewards from instanced raids?



Berenger
Fish: The tack
we’ve taken is that the rewards you get from whatever path
you’re taken, such as PvE or PvP or rifts, we try to make the
rewards as complementary as possible. That way if you only do one
thing, you’re going to limit yourself. This is more of a
broader approach. We don’t want players to feel that they can
only do the one thing and that will negate doing something else. We
don’t want players that play raids to feel that
there’s no reason to do warfronts.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Are there any PvP
dungeons where the Guardians and Defiant will race each other to kill a
boss while fighting each other?



Berenger
Fish: There are no PvP
dungeons per-se, although you will probably see something like that in
one of our warfronts.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: What happens if
someone gets disconnected while they’re in a raid or
instance? Will they be able to rejoin?



Berenger
Fish: Definitely. As long as
there is still room in the dungeon and weren’t replaced by
somebody else or as long as they’re still part of the group
that is still inside the dungeon, as soon as they log back in,
they’ll be back in the same place they were when they were
logged out.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Conversely, can
latecomers join a raid or dungeon?



Berenger
Fish: Yes they can.



Ten
Ton Hammer: How many dungeons
and raids do you have planned for launch?



Berenger
Fish: We’re
planning, at least for our five man dungeons, on having ten dungeons at
launch, which means that there are ten standard versions of the
dungeons and ten expert versions of the dungeons. As for the raids,
I’m not allowed to talk about that yet. I can say that there
will be plenty of content.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Those ten
dungeons, are they available to both Defiant and Guardians?

Berenger
Fish: Yes, although there are
dungeons in each of the starter zones in the world. Those might be
harder to reach, but there’s no reason why the other faction
can’t go in there if they want to.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Will they have
quests in those dungeons?



Berenger
Fish: We won’t lead
into a dungeon from the other faction in the case of the low level
dungeons. We don’t want to encourage a lower level character
to go into hostile territory. If they go inside the dungeon, they can
pick up a quest or two inside the dungeon.



Ten
Ton Hammer: How are the
dungeons spread out, level-wise?



Berenger
Fish: They basically cover
the entire leveling range of the game. When players reach the top end
of the level range of the first world zones they are in,
they’ll be able to do dungeons from that point up to level
cap.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Will there be any
pre-level fifty raids?



Berenger
Fish: We’re not
planning on launching any raids below level cap at this time.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Will there be
requirement and level limit for dungeons? By level limit, I mean can a
level fifty join a level twenty dungeon group?



Berenger
Fish: We don’t have
any upper limit in terms of the max level that a character can be to
enter a dungeon. We do have some minimum requirements, which I believe
are fairly low in that it’s lower than the level content of
that dungeon. We just want to protect the newest players from going in
there. For expert dungeons, you have to be level fifty.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Just to clarify,
a level fifty can join a group of level twenty characters in a dungeon?



Berenger
Fish: Absolutely.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Is there any kind
of xp penalty for bringing in somebody that is higher level?



Berenger
Fish: Actually, I believe
there is a small xp penalty, but I don’t know what the exact
number is. This applies to anywhere in the game that if you have a
higher level character, so whatever penalties we apply would also apply
to the dungeon.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: What is the time
commitment that you’re aiming for with dungeons and raids?



Berenger
Fish: They vary a little bit.
We have a general target for dungeons ranging from thirty minutes to an
hour. Some dungeons are taking longer than we’ve expected due
to the skill of the players or familiarity of the game. The expert
version takes longer because there is more content.



The raids will vary as well. Some will be, in terms of bosses, a small
handful while others will have a significant amount. Those with a
higher number won’t be expected to be cleared in a single
sitting, so we expect it to take several days, at least in the
beginning. As players get geared up, they’ll start clearing
content faster.



Ten
Ton Hammer: If you have a
group going into a dungeon or raid and they can only complete part of
it, can they come back the next day and finish it off?



Berenger
Fish: For our expert
dungeons, they will reset in the middle of the night, so in theory, the
next day you’ll be playing a new dungeon. If, however, you
play in the morning and then come back later in the day,
you’ll come back at the point you stopped. For our raids,
they will reset once a week. As long as you come back during the week,
you’ll have the same progress you had when you left.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Is there anything
you want to tell our readers about style="font-style: italic;">Rift?



Berenger
Fish: I would like to say
that we’re very happy with the way that our dungeons have
turned out in terms of quality compared to other games. We think that
people will enjoy them quite a bit.

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Our thanks to Berenger Fish for this interview. If you have any
questions you wish asked in a future interview with Trion Worlds,
please post them in our href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=742">official
Rift
forum.