Rift Launch Interviews

With Rift fully released worldwide and burning itself into our gaming minds, a couple of sites got the chance to sit down with its developers to discuss the game’s launch. Gaming Heaven has a combination interview and report from the Rift launch event, where they got to talk with lead content developer William Cook.

“Well we still have a huge list of things we’d like to implement in future – world events being one of them – and some of the features we have already implemented even I never thought would make it in. I mean, I never thought we’d be able to put invasions on the road and taking over quest hubs, you never do that, you never stop the player from questing and levelling, that’s dumb, that is a rule. But what we realised was that if you put enemies on the road the player doesn’t always have to fight them, sometimes he needs to take a new road like the hobbit from Lord of The Rings. It’s simple features like that which create a completely different type of atmosphere in-game and keep things fresh for players.”

Ten Ton Hammer published part one of an article-style post-launch interview with Trion Worlds COO Scott Hartsman, community lead Cindy Bowens and design producer Hal Hanlin.

Another worry that we had in regards to content was addressed by Hal when he answered our question about the challenge of keeping rift invasions fun for new players that come into the game later. As the majority of the playerbase moves through the content and becomes immersed in end-game, starter zones won’t have the same robust population to attend to the task of closing rifts. Not to worry says Hal, the system is designed to scale in difficulty based on the number of players in the area so it should be playable, and enjoyable, no matter how big the party size. Scott pointed out that no matter when you come into the game you will definitely get to experience plenty of invasion content and gave the example of Freemarch that has a minimum of 10 possible events that can crop up as well as the more static story based events that are running.