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

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 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 official Rift forum.

---

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.

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 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.

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.