Rift Interview

Strategy Informer offers an interview with dynamic content designer Will Cook about the upcoming Rift MMORPG, with only a handful of questions but with meaty answers.

Strategy Informer: The last major MMO release was Final Fantasy 14-

Will Cook: Was that major? Hah! Sorry. (Ed: Burn).

Strategy Informer: Well, you could argue they’re still dealing with all that. But what lessons did you take from their launch?

Will Cook: What lessons did we take? Hmmm… If you’re going to release in the US and Europe, don’t make it a grind fest? If you’re going to talk about innovating make sure you do it? Make sure you don’t release a buggy game because we should have learned that twenty years ago? Those are all very negative things about a game I was really excited about, and some of it was beautiful I loved some of the stuff they did. I don’t like to denigrate someone who I might work for some day or someone who I think had great ideas, just got stuck between a publisher and a budget or something.

But… lessons you learn: You’ve got to release a finished game. We didn’t talk about release dates, we didn’t talk about what we were going to do until we HAD it. Until we knew when we were going to launch and what we could get done. BETA’s are such a weird kettle of fish these days. One, you can’t have a closed beta anymore as you’re just releasing information to the public, so it might as well be an advertising period so BETA’s have become marketing nonsense.

So I think we took the best strategy we could, and we decided to run Alpha forever, much like WoW did, make sure the game’s really solid, do some stress teats… And then Beta, if it HAS to be an advertisement, if there’s no choice in the matter for us, let’s try out this service model. We keep talking about it so let’s do it. Since we’re still in Beta if it doesn’t work we can go back to the drawing board. Luckily the Betas have all gone well and we’re really happy where we are.

We started off with modest goals and it’s now like we have really hype, which is weird for us because we were trying to stay away from hype. We’re quietly confident, I guess.