In
our third exclusive interview with Trion Worlds, Ten Ton Hammer
continues to ferret out the details of the upcoming href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/2035"> style="font-style: italic;">Rift: Planes of Telara
MMOG. In this interview, we talk to Producer Adam Gershowitz, who goes
into great depth of the Ascended class soul system that is the hallmark
of the game. Along with the discussion of this flexible system, Adam
ventures onto the topics of the various roles that players choose and
the endless number of builds that can be constructed using the soul
system. If you have a question that you wish answered in a future
interview, please post them in our href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=53660">official
Rift
forum.

---

Ten
Ton Hammer: Can you briefly describe the Ascended class soul system to
us?



Adam
Gershowitz: The class system
in Rift
is known as the “soul attunement system.” The
player is an Ascended soul. They’ve come back from death, and
as such, they have a number of special powers. The strongest power is
soul attunement. What soul attunement does is that it allows them to
attune their own soul with the souls of others throughout
Telara’s past, present, and future. Each one of these
individual souls represents a unique class. Where other class systems
allow you to be a rogue or a shaman or a slayer or a bard from life to
death, in Rift,
you choose to take one of four callings: warriors, clerics, mages, or
rogues. Then you mix and match the variety of different souls in
different ways. For example, each one of these souls have their own
full feature to it; it has their own soul tree that gives players a
number of options to allow them to customize that specific soul,
unlocking a number of passive and active abilities. Then you can mix
and match those souls together to form different roles. Because each
soul has kind of a specific purpose, you can build out a variety of
different roles per calling. For example, even though you’re
only a cleric, while you can build out a healer role, you could also
build out very easily a DPS role or a support role or a more defensive
role.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/85704"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 354px;"
alt="rift: planes of telara"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/85704">

Ten
Ton Hammer: Can you mix the callings together? If you pick a rogue
calling, do you only have those rogue souls available to you?



Adam
Gershowitz: In the class
system for Rift,
your calling is your one definitive choice that you make. You
can’t switch your callings around, so once you’ve
created a character with a particular calling, which is what is that
character’s calling from birth to death. It defines a few
things. Obviously, it defines what souls you can use. But it also
defines the type of equipment that you can use as well as your gameplay
mechanic. Mages will use mana, rogues will use energy and combo,
warriors will use action points and attack points, and so on. The nice
thing about it is you don’t really have to change your
calling to play a different style of character. Like I said before, if
you like playing a warrior and you like playing that type of gameplay,
you can play a warrior that is a tank or a DPS warrior or a support
warrior without changing over to a cleric because you want to play a
support class.



Ten
Ton Hammer: How early on can one get all three souls to fill up their
tree?



Adam
Gershowitz: We’re
still playing around with the exact details on when exactly that
happens. I can tell you that you’ll get your first two fairly
rapidly. Your third will probably come along farther in the game, but
we’re talking hours of gameplay, maybe a day of gameplay as
opposed to days and days and days. So players will get the opportunity
to acquire souls fairly quickly. The nice thing about acquiring a soul
is you get to pick the ones you want in the order you want. So instead
of going this is the quest that gets you the paladin, we have a variety
of events and things that players can do in the game that says
you’ve completed this kind of undertaking. I’m not
going to say heroic undertaking because there are a lot of different
undertakings in the game. You can get a soul through crafting, for
example. Because you’ve done this thing, you have access and
pick one of the souls that you don’t already have. To answer
your question specifically, you get your first soul at game start. You
get your second soul within hours of picking up the game. You get your
third soul pretty quickly after that; you’ll definitely get
it before you reach the end of the game. You’ll then pick up
the rest of souls throughout the game after that, with each one getting
progressively harder as you attain more and more of the total souls in
the game.



Ten
Ton Hammer: You mentioned that some of the souls you can unlock through
quests. What are the different ways to unlock souls?



Adam
Gershowitz: The first couple
of souls you get, the first three, are mainly unlocked through quests.
As for the rest of the souls in the game, there are a number of
different activities or accomplishments in the game that you can do for
which you’ll be awarded a soul. It’s not all always
a quest. It can be raiding, doing dungeons, getting a specific
achievement, PvP, and like I mentioned before, crafting can potentially
unlock one for you. There are a variety of different activities in the
game. What we’ve done is that there’s more
activities that will give you opportunities to gain a soul than there
are souls in the game. So regardless of your play style,
you’re not forced into doing something that you really
don’t enjoy doing just so you can fill out your allotment of
souls.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/90210"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 363px;"
alt="rift: planes of telara"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/90210">

Ten
Ton Hammer: With a system like this, there’s obviously a
potential for over-powered builds and exploits. How do you prepare for
that from a design perspective?



Adam
Gershowitz: From a design
perspective, the first thing we do to prepare for that is what we
talked about before. We kind of segmented the game into four macro
callings: warrior, cleric, mage, and the rogue. At a high level, we
kind of balance around that and the various roles in the game. What we
say is that certain things need a healer, certain things need a DPS
class, certain things need a tank, or certain things need a de-buffer.
What we try to do is balance the different combinations of roles or
souls into those roles. So when we say we need a healer for a dungeon,
we make sure that we’re building out the various souls for
the callings, which anything that we establish as a healer role (or a
combination of souls that create a healer role) can actually succeed at
healing throughout a dungeon. What that gives us is kind of a macro
level of balance. The nice thing about this system is that unlike a
more linear system with more fixed choices, it is a little bit more
self-governing because we’ve designed things in such a way
that different souls are good for different things, players
haven’t yet found a build that is an end-all of builds. There
are builds that are good at one thing and horrible at doing other
things. What we’ve found is that players actively go out and
collect all the souls, so they can have the greatest variety so that no
matter what kind of encounter or situation they come across, they can
switch around and be a little more agile and pick the thing that is
best for them.



Ten
Ton Hammer: We see that there is a list of class souls on the href="http://www.riftgame.com/en/index.php"> style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Rift style="font-weight: bold;"> href="http://www.riftgame.com/en/index.php"> website.
Is that a complete list?



Adam
Gershowitz: Not close yet. We
haven’t even uncovered half of them yet.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Do you plan on adding more as time goes on after launch?



Adam
Gershowitz: In fact,
we’ve already added more and we haven’t even
launched the game yet. The designers really do play around with the
ideas of souls. We have a lot of class souls that didn’t make
it into our launch list that are sitting in our back pocket. More
importantly, a soul doesn’t have to be a player class that
kills monsters. We’ve got lots of ideas out there, especially
for post-release content, for things like vanity souls, like
wouldn’t it be neat if there was a juggler soul that just had
abilities that would allow you to do emote juggling and dancing just
for fun. A lot of those things aren’t necessarily things you
need to launch the game with, but it reflects the flexibility of the
system and things that we’re looking forward to in the
future. We have lots of time and money to play around and do lots of
fun things because everybody is having a blast playing the game.

Ten
Ton Hammer: Are there any advantages to specializing in a single soul?
Do more powerful abilities become available the deeper you are into the
soul tree?



Adam
Gershowitz: Yes. Basically,
the deeper you go into the soul tree, the more specialized you become
at one particular thing or one particular set of things. We expect
people to cross-spec to do more generalized things. We designed it in
such a way that if you go all the way down a soul tree and you pick out
everything on the soul tree, you are pretty much “the
guy” for doing one particular thing. The unfortunate side
effect of that is that you’re probably bad at doing other
things. So, really focused specialization on a single soul is more of a
thing for organized groups that have a very specific purpose in mind,
because you can have a group of generalists or you can have a group of
specialists that are there for one specific thing.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/86647"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 359px;"
alt="rift: planes of telara"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/86647">

Ten
Ton Hammer: Can you respec later on in the game?



Adam
Gershowitz: Yeah. As I
mentioned before, we’re about flexibility and choice. We want
the player to have fun. You do make meaningful decisions throughout the
game, such as choosing your calling, which is a pretty big decision.
You choose the order of souls that you want. The more you choose, the
more options open up, but it gets harder to unlock further options. But
once you’ve chosen a soul, you can respect whatever your soul
attunement is, but we also give you the opportunity, and I keep saying
the word “role.” Role for us is a specialization in
another game. We give players that opportunity to unlock additional
roles. While you start the game with a single role that has three soul
slots on it and you slowly get more souls to put in there, later on,
not only are you going to unlock additional soul slots,
you’ll also unlock additional roles, which you can switch
between, within reason, as you play the game.



Think of it that you can have a bunch of builds in your back pocket,
and if you ever want to change those builds, you can. Obviously, there
is a cost to do that, but it’s not crippling.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Can you save templates of the builds then?



Adam
Gershowitz: Yes, that is what
a role is. A role is basically a template of three souls and the soul
levels of each of them. The easiest way to think about it is if
you’re familiar with style="font-style: italic;">WoW,
a role is a spec and multiple roles are like a multi-spec.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Do you have a limit on the number of roles right now?



Adam
Gershowitz: Right now, we do
have a limit and I think that we’re sitting on three or four.
We’re still playing around with what that upper limit is. It
really depends more upon how many combinations come out and how many
times a player wants to hold their combinations. Originally, we only
had two and we found out in alpha that it wasn’t enough, so
we extended it. We’ll see how long that cap holds.



Ten
Ton Hammer: What limits the type of gear that you equip? Is it your
calling or your soul?



Adam
Gershowitz: Your calling
limits your type of equipment that you can use as well as the mechanics
for how you play the game.



Ten
Ton Hammer: What about cookie-cutter builds? Is that a concern while
developing?



Adam
Gershowitz: It’s
always a concern when you have a system like this and it’s
going to happen. There’s nothing you really can do to combat
that. What we’re trying to do is to make sure that there are
a lot of viable options to get you to the end route. There may be a
best choice that the min/maxers pick, but that doesn’t make
every other choice a bad choice or a choice that can’t
fulfill what needs to be done. In our current alpha testing right now,
because there are so many permutations and combinations, we have yet to
see a particular build come to the top for more than one activity at a
time. People may have a build that they really prefer for one activity
such as running a dungeon, but they won’t necessarily use it
to solo or for PvP.



The other nice thing about the way the system works is that those
cookie-cutter builds come of ebb and flow. Because there are so many
combinations, people are constantly discovering new combinations that
are better at doing things. Obviously, the more players that we get
into the game and the more mature it gets, the more people will
gravitate towards one thing or another. But that’s going to
happen anyways and it’s one of those things that ongoing game
balance will work against.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/87179"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 580px; height: 359px;"
alt="rift: planes of telara"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/87179">

Ten
Ton Hammer: From a new player or casual player perspective, picking out
your souls and going through the trees might be intimidating because
there are a lot of choices that you can make. What kind of assistance
is available to help players decide what souls and abilities to choose?



Adam
Gershowitz: We’ve
made all the souls in the game and we’re playing through the
alpha, and we’re going through the process of making the game
more user-friendly right now. You’ll see more of that in the
next couple of months or so. They’ll be talking about it, but
we do things like the souls are split up into two types. We have our
Ascended souls, which our players can choose at the beginning of the
game. They become more specialized the deeper you go into them, but
they are much more user-friendly. They have a lot more of the things
that they need at an early level to ensure that they survive. They are
very solo friendly. We make it such that you can’t pick a
non-solo friendly class right off the bat. When it comes time to choose
another soul, we try to make sure to educate the players on what they
do. We have things like tool-tips of the souls, which will give you an
idea at a glance of the background of the soul and what it does, what
types of abilities it has, and we even suggest pairings. That way, even
if you’re completely at a loss and are going, “I
get to pick another soul and I’m a nightblade right now, what
goes really well with that?” We give you some recommendations
there. So it helps ease the player into it.



Ten
Ton Hammer: What can players do now to help them prepare for choices in
the game?



Adam
Gershowitz: Right now, we
haven’t put up anything like a soul calculator yet.
We’re waiting on that until we have more of the system
fleshed out and finalized. For right now, go back to our href="http://www.riftgame.com/en/index.php">website
and look at our callings page. Get familiar with each of the
calling’s general play style and take a look at their souls
and the different things they can do. Start imagining what kind of
combinations you can build to prep for beta. I’m sure that in
the near future, we’ll continue to update the website with
even more tools to help people build out their characters and figure
out how they want to play the game at launch.



Ten
Ton Hammer: Is there anything else you want to tell us about the
Ascended soul system?



Adam
Gershowitz: It’s
always exciting to play the game right now. There are constantly new
combinations coming up and we’re having a blast with it.
I’m really looking forward to getting more players the
opportunity to play with us because we’re really excited to
see what they come up with.



Our thanks to Adam Gershowitz. If you have any questions you would like
answered in a future interview, please post them in our href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=53660">official
Rift
forum.