Designing a Rift

First of all, let's start out with an introduction! Who are you and what do you do at Trion?

I am Simon Ffinch, I am the design director for {Rift}. That basically means that I lead the content design team. So, I'm the one that manages all of our awesome designers and sets the general direction, solves conflicts, plays the game a whole hell of a lot. <laughter>

It's been two months since the game officially launched, how have things gone since then?

Amazingly well, I mean... It's been very, very exciting. As I said, I play the game a lot, ever since our office servers went up, which meant I got to play with a very small group of people. That was fun, but it was just amazing when we actually released the flood gates so to speak and went live and suddenly I was playing with not hundreds of other people, but thousands. The game really comes to life when you got that many people running around. I mean, just yesterday I was doing a huge event in Shimmersand and was just having the best time. It was a huge group of, I don't know how many we were - over a hundred for sure - all riding on a variety of different mounts, charging from one place to another and having a whale of a time.

So it's been really fun, and the community has reacted so well and it's just been great listening to the feedback, looking at suggestions, of getting to react to a live game. It's been one of the best experiences I've had in a long time in the industry.

Any particular feedback you've been getting a lot?

Well, people really, really love the giant events. So we've certainly been working on figuring out ways to do more and more variety of those. In fact, there's actually three new ones are going to come online in the next update. So I think that it was just nice to see that thing we thought everyone would react to best is the thing that everyone reacted to best, so it kind of vindicated where we spent the majority of our effort.

How is it different designing a Rift or an event after the game has gone live, compared to the way it was back during development and the different beta-stages?

Not really a huge difference. It is a very difficult thing to do, obviously, because the amount of testing we can do is limited by how many people we can get. You know, even if we ask our community to come and try out a new event on Alpha, we will still get a fraction of the players that will actually be there when the thing goes live. So we sometimes find that things behave differently in a live environment than they did in all of our testing however much of that we managed to do. But that really isn't that much different than before we were live, we had the same difficulties, and all we do there is just the day anything new goes live there's a great number of us monitoring, ready to react at a moment's notice if things aren't working the way we want them to.

I'm guessing asking you for specific numbers, such as box sales and subscription numbers, won't get me much of an answer?

You know, that absolutely is out of my sphere of knowledge. I hear that it is great, but I don't know any actual numbers. I'm just very much focused on creating new content, continuing to roll out new updates as well as working on features that are coming in a longer time-frame. So I have a very full day already! <laughter>

Worth a try, I had to ask!

Absolutely!

The first big live-event you guys had. River of Souls, kind of fizzled out for a lot of players. The first stage went well, but stage two and three were over before a lot of people even had time to react and there were a lot of server queues so people couldn't get in to see the end of it. What did you guys learn from doing River of Souls?

Obviously, as you pointed out, it could have gone better. We certainly would have liked things to work out differently. But we learned a heck of a lot! <laughter> In fact, we made some drastic improvements to the way the servers handle large loads of players during that as we reacted to various things. We do do a lot of testing with what we call "bots," where we have thousands and thousands of bots that are trying to play like players, but they never actually do what players do do. Though we did make them a whole lot better with the data we got from River of Souls.

So the thing with that was that we knew we were pushing the envelope, we wanted absolutely to push that as far as we could and perhaps we pushed it a little bit too far for one month after launch. But you know; nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? We wanted to try to do something that had never been done before and it didn't work out quite how we wanted it to. We learned a heck of a lot and the next event will be structured somewhat differently to make it so that players can spread out a little bit more and there's more stuff to do in a larger variety of places, so that we get sort of like knots of players rather than the entire server all in one place.

At the same time, we're continuing to work on figuring out how we can start creeping back closer to what we wanted to do originally, because that's always been a goal for us - we can already support far, far more players in a single area than anybody else. And we just want to continue to push that boundary and see how far we can go. So even though River of Souls was a learning experience, I think you can expect to see the lessons we learned from that manifest themselves in some really awesome events in the future.

MMO-blogger Stargrace, of MmoQuests.com, wrote that she thought the River of Souls should be have been "a learning experience" for you guys and that she "appreciate[d] the effort that went into putting on an event like this, but I think simply handing out rewards diminishes the importance of the event to begin with." Was that anything you guys considered, or was that never part of the internal discussion?

You know, the amazing thing... One of the things that has definitely been interesting for me as well is that you're going to get... When you got so many thousands of players playing a game you're going to get opinions ranging the entire gamut, you know, from one extreme to the other. And yes, we certainly did discuss that. But at the end of the day, we thought that it was a learning experience, also our players are paying to play the game, so it's unfair of us to just expect them to just suck it up when things don't go quite right. So we want to make sure that they feel compensated and that they had a good time. At the end of it, if they were not able to accomplish certain achievements through no fault of their own we felt that it was unfair to rob them of that, and have that one little achievement in their achievement log staring them in the face, kind of taunting them for the rest of time. So we felt that this was going to be something a large majority of the players would like.

But yeah, we have a certain number of people, and I certainly empathize with that group of people, that were like "no, no, it is what it is" and just be totally hardcore about the whole thing. <laughter> But yeah, you know, that's what we decided to do.

So this whole thing hasn't scared you away from doing world events in the future?

Oh, absolutely not, no! We knew we were taking a risk the day we started, so no - we will continue to improve the tech and the methods we use for designing these things and we're absolutely going to be doing more and more and more of these and continuing to try to push what is possible. I look forward to some fabulous successes, but I don't for a moment believe that we aren't going to have a few more, shall I say, "learning experiences." <laughter>

In 1.2, you'll be introducing a wardrobe feature that will allow players to dress up their characters regardless of the armour they are wearing. Any other plans for more personal expression possible by players, say housing? And I know, the standard answer is "we're talking about it"...

Yeah, I'm going to give you the pet answer, "we're talking about it." <laughter> But we actually do talk about it, that does come up quite a lot. Not only is there a lot of players that want that, but a lot of us here in design that want that as well. It's just that, as you can appreciate, the list of potential features that we could add to the game is pretty much infinite and it's just a question of prioritizing our time and resources and effort to which ones we think make the most sense to launch first. So player housing has been on that list for longer than we ever went life or before people even knew about Rift. It's just a question of when do we think it will bubble to the top of that list and be the most important thing that we can be working on next.

Just like everything we do, we want it to be absolute triple-A quality, we want it to be the best housing system players have ever seen, so that would take a lot of work. We want to make sure that's something that would be worthwhile to invest our time in. So it's not on any immediate patch that is coming up, but it's certainly still on our list and... We're talking about it. <laughter>

Good, I really want my Meridian apartment!

Absolutely, I know! <laughter>

Interestingly enough, I've interviewed a lot of people from Blizzard over the years, and that's more or less always the answer I get from them as well, about wanting to make the "best housing system" and that they are talking about it... Rift is what is usually referred to as a "theme park MMO", but it does have some sandbox elements - any more plans to add that kind of content, not only housing?

There are definitely some plans for that. That's actually a personal sort of favorite thing of mine, I'm the one who puts all the puzzles and stuff in and stuff for the explorers to find and stuff that is off the beaten path, that is absolutely my passion. And I have some very interesting and fun things coming up that I don't want to give away what they are.

So you're the one that put in the dancing squirrels and the puzzle near them?

Yeah.

You have no idea how much time I spent jumping around up there, I kept getting stuck in the waterfall and dying, I had no idea you could walk around the big rock!

<laughter> I win!

But back to patch 1.2 - you'll also be introducing a couple of new Rifts, including one aimed at crafters. What does a crafting Rift actually look like? Attacking workbenches? Nestling your way out from a planar loom?

Well, you know... I don't want to give away too much, because I want to let players enjoy that. They are essentially Rifts, they are still invasions from the various planes, but they are in one way or another themed around a certain crafting skill and the rewards that will be dropped out of it are usable for that particular crafting profession. They are designed to be done solo, so any particular crafter can go and do it, but with players being the intelligent bunch they are they will soon discover that it is worthwhile to group up as a little team with a few of these special openers, these lures that will open these particular kinds of Rifts and do them as a group and actually reap a larger harvest, so to speak.

Crafting is generally an important part of sandbox MMOs, do you want to give crafting more love in the future?

Yeah, I suppose there is a correlation. One of the things we like to do, and it's not only in crafting but in the game in general, is to make sure that players have a variety of methods to accomplish the same goals. So you can get the rare crafting currency from dungeons, and now you'll be able to get them from various types of Rifts, and we will almost certainly... Actually, anyone who is playing the game today will discover that there are also some quests that they have right now that they can do that will give them a chance at some rare crafting drops. We like to give the player a variety of methods for accomplishing all the goals, because even if your favorite thing is perhaps questing, we make it so you can complete the game solely doing that, the same if you're favorite thing is instances or dungeons and you can complete the game solely doing that we find that, ourselves included, most of our player base actually likes to have a bit of variety to switch between "maybe I'll quest today, maybe I'll Rift today, maybe I'll do some instances, or some Warfronts" that any one of those methods will still allow them to progress some of their secondary goals - like collecting plaques for crafting recipes or things like that.

1.2 will introduce a LFG tool which will allow you to set up dungeon runs, group quests etc. Some would say that the cross-server dungeon finder tool in WoW helped to make the game less social and some would probably go as far as saying that it helped kill server communities. How did you approach the design of that tool?

Well, first of all let me say that that particular feature is actually more in the purview of the mechanics team which is another group other than mine. Obviously we are one big team so I certainly overhear a lot of their discussions and can't help jumping in myself in a lot of them as well. And you're right, that is a big point of discussion! In the end though it was felt that this was something that a majority of the community wanted, that it just made sense for the game, we have something similar for Warfronts and that works really well. So in the end it was actually a pretty easy decision to go ahead and do this. I think you'll find that it is pretty cool.

One criticism that often pops up against Rift on various forums and blogs is that it is "too similar to {World of Warcraft}" or even that it is WoW in another skin - the two games do share similarities in various systems and end-game. What is your reaction to that criticism?

Yeah, I mean, that kinda goes back to my comment earlier about how you're going to get comments that run the board from one end to the other. We certainly read all of our comments and look at it all, you can't get hung up on one particular type of comment. I mean, one of the things we always said from the get go is that we wanted to make sure that Rift was immediately accessible to anybody that had played MMOs. There are certain conventions that are set up in MMOs, not just in World of Warcraft, but just MMOs in general. You know, as basic as using WASD to move around, there's no point in changing something... If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

We knew we only had a certain amount of resources and time and development to put into a limited number of features and we didn't want to spend that on inventing a new bank. I mean, the bank works just fine, I mean, how are you going to innovate on a bank? We may have polished up a couple of little features here and there, area looting for instance, that was a tiny little feature we added because we thought it would make looting better...

Can I just jump in and say "thank you so much for area looting"?

<laughter> You are most welcome. That is one of the things I really miss when I go to different games now! But where we really wanted to spend our energy was on the two key features that we knew differentiated us - which were the Rifts and the dynamic content and the big events, and the Soul system allowing you to mix and match and create a class that suited your style of play. So those are our two key differentiators and that's where we spent all of our energy. Everything else, we just basically thought, "OK, let's just do it the... Make sure that it is done as best as it possible can be, but no point in reinventing the wheel." And so, therefor you're going to see some similarities, but I know you'll see similarities between lots of other games as well, so...

How about class balance? I mean, some people were really upset at what they thought of as the great "mage nerf," and some people do feel that their role is diminished by the fact that rogues can tank and mages heal, for example...

I already am happy with the way the different classes work, to be honest. We will continue to tinker with them and it's an ongoing thing, not just in our game, but in any live environment. You know, you want to continue to balance for fun and playability, but we've always said that with the variety of our class system and the versatility of it we're never going to try and make it a perfect rock, paper, scissors. I mean, it's just not possible. If you wanted to do that, you would just make every single class exactly the same and there wouldn't be any variety. It's a task that we knew was impossible so we weren't even going to go there.

What we did do was to make it so that players have the flexibility and ease of switching things around so if they find something isn't working for them, they can tweak their roles and souls to the point where they can make it work for them. So, even though we will continue to toy with various aspects to make sure that things work for fun and that there aren't any obvious kind of exploits, perfect balance is not a goal we're trying to achieve. We just want to get "fun."

Again, this is... You're asking questions that are better directed, to be honest, at the mechanics group. But it was always a goal of ours to sort of break out of the box of the, you know, what people normally think of as the archetypes if you like, and to do a lot more of a cross-over. So even though a mage can do some healing, the cleric is still probably the best healer, but we definitely wanted to give all of the roles opportunities to play a little bit out of what they would normally be thought of as their role.

I'm guessing a question about how contribution in Rifts work would get me the same kind of answer?

Yes, you would get almost exactly the same answer. <laughter> I mean... I mean, or philosophy in general, we're not scared to do something that is generally not done before if we think it's going to be fun. That is our yardstick, always, it's like "is this fun?" One of the things we did was, that I think was quite a big risk, has been... You'll get people that don't like it, but for the most part we've had really positive reactions to the fact that we were not afraid to kill our quest givers. You know, if a particular hub gets invaded, then you're going to have to deal with that, you're living in a dynamic world. It is different from a lot of games, you would have played before that wouldn't do that. We went backwards and forwards a lot on that as we were developing, you know, should we make the quest givers immune to this and we just decided that, you know what, players want something different, we're going to take the plunge, and it's been received very well. So... "Fun" is always our yardstick.

Some players have been posting quite angry forum posts about having their questing interrupted by roaming invasions and Rifts...

We're now getting into sort of anecdotal things and it's tough to really know. I mean, like the funny thing I've discovered is that you'll often actually maybe ask that same person that said something negative in the spur of the moment because they were mad that they couldn't turn in their quest, but ask them how it turned out an hour later and you might hear a story like "oh, it was so awesome, my friends came over and we managed to beat back this invasion, I got some really nice loot out of it, and I turned in my quest later on that night". It was something that we made the decision that our world was going to be truly dynamic, that we were not going to shy away from it and for the most part players are playing and love the game, so...

Sadly, this interview is coming to an end, but let's wrap things up with mentioning the new zone events you'll be introducing in patch 1.2. What can players expect from those?

Well, they are zone-wide events, one for each of the top three tier zones, so that's Iron Pine, Shimmersand and Stillmore. Other than that, I would rather not tell too much detail, other than that they are trying out some new mechanics that, you know, while they may be recognizable in other ways they are they are not something we've done in zone events before. This is just the way we're continuing to tinker with what we can do, and play around with what we can do, and give the players new things to do in these big zone events. And we will continue to do that!