Rift Interview

With the launch of Rift being an unexpected success for many, GamePro talks with executive producer Scott Hartman, looking back to the game’s launch as well as to the future, in a big four-page article-style interview.

Probably a good thing, since balance or more importantly, the lack thereof seems to be a constant thorn in MMO developers’ sides. But even within a system designed around game mechanics where balance is less of an issue, isn’t there always some tipping point where lack of balance can cause issues? First, I ask about the issue of balancing a game’s level of challenge to a very broad player base, from the hardest of hardcore to the super-casual.

Scott recognizes the difficulty of the issue, (That’s always a hard thing to balance for. You end up with this audience of people who will take air force pilot drugs to make sure they’re the first one in the game to level up, versus people who play hardcore but only for perhaps three hours on the weekend, versus people who will play just to noodle around and don’t particularly care, and they’ll play for a year before they get to level 30. Making a game for all those distinct audiences is a challenge.)

(Our choice for how to design for that was to make sure, very early on, that the leveling experience shouldn’t feel like a grind. We want it to feel good. We want you to feel rewarded, even if you were a weekend warrior or a 20-minutes-here, 20-minutes-there kind of person. That’s another reason that we wanted to make sure to give real experience for PvP — even if you can only sit down for 20 minutes in a session, great! If you can play a lot of 20-minute sessions, you can do some quests and you can maybe do some invasions too.”