Developer Round Table with Scott Hartsman and Russ Brown

In the last hour of Gamer Day at Trion Studios, the press and the fansites sat down with Scott Hartsman and Russ Brown for a round table Q&A session. There were a myriad of topics discussed that encompassed almost the whole scope of MMOG development, ranging from looking for group tools to why you can’t customize the shape of your character. If you want to learn what the main difference was between Heroes of Telara and Rift and how the evolution of the philosophy of dynamic gaming has come to it’s current status, keeping reading and find out what happens when you stick six fansite operators in a room with some Trion VIPs.

We all know that Trion has invested a lot of money into creating Rift and that was obvious during the tour of the studios. The game has gone through many different phases over the last few years, first starting off as Heroes of Telara and then hiring Scott Hartsman. Now the game is called Rift and some of the biggest changes comes in the form of dynamic content. Originally Heroes of Telara was a world that was always changing. Demons would spawn and burn down villages. Those villages would be gone for quite some time. The world was always in flux. Many people might think this is an amazing concept, but it turned out it wasn’t.

Scott Hartsman tells us that “[m]aking a game that is 100% dynamic all the time, turns out that isn’t even a fun game. There needs to be touch points where people know there is a thing they know they can do, and then having this other half of the game that is dynamic, now that actually turns out to make it fun. For example it wouldn’t be nearly as compelling to have invaders come raining down if they weren’t able to chase off and kill some people. And those people are quest givers.”

We were told by Russ Brown that when areas in the game were changed dramatically, people got frustrated. When your friends tell you to go check out something awesome in the game and you head over to go check it out, more often than not, it wasn’t there anymore. That didn’t sit well with many testers.

“You need to have some concept of a shared history. You need that whole Player to Player lore that people build up over time on their own in the world and there needs to be some amount of permanence for the world to make sense to people,” remarked Scott.

Since then, the development team has been crafting the game, inch by inch, to what you see today in Beta. The server and content deployment technology has been such a major focus for this team. So big, that when asked, Scott Hartsman told us that the biggest change for him was when he stopped having to talk about the technology of the game and start talking about the story and the world. This doesn’t mean there weren’t other changes along the way. Scott mentioned that he has a white board in his office that has a checklist of over 400 items that needed to be done and now they are all checked off and he was quite proud of that fact.

It’s easy to figure out why he’s proud too. Every single chance either Scott or Russ got, they mentioned the fact their team kicks ass. In a podcast last week, Scott Hartsman mentioned that they are implementing more raid content than they thought they were going to have. When asked why, the reason was that the team works so hard and with such enthusiasm, that they completed content way ahead of schedule and wanted to make more. So they did.

The development team is so finely tuned that they can create dynamic content on the fly with relative ease, and the look of confidence is very prevalent on Scott’s face when he told us they could. For the more simple invasions or rifts, Trion can fabricate and push different events into the live game in a matter of hours. They are just not saying this because they’ve got plenty of practice during Beta.

This isn’t a singular experience though. Scott also brags about the engineering team and everyone else that has to do with server stability. “The fact that our servers are so stable, which is weird for a prelaunch game, and the fact that we haven’t been chasing around structural fires, people have been able to work ahead.”

Russ Brown gave us a recent example of an email he got a 2:45am from one of the devs saying they fixed one of the bugs they had on their list one night because he couldn’t sleep. It goes to show that the morale is high and the people love the product and their jobs.

Many controversial topics were discussed during the Q&A session. The topic of social interaction vs. convenience was a big one. Scott made a comment that “we weren’t terribly concerned about how many hours it took to get to max level, because we wanted the journey to be fun, and we knew we had a healthy end game at the end.” A few people took this statement on some of the forums that Trion doesn’t care about the living world. However his response is that “the amount of time something takes and the fun you have while doing it are not things that are tied together.”

We were told that a LFD or “Looking for Dungeon” tool will be in the works, but won’t be in ready for any time in the near future. Would it be cross-server? Possibly. Scott mentioned that he might be the only person on the dev team that had shipped at least two games with some sort of looking for group tool. His experience was that you would spend two months of development time to put together this tool and it will be used for two weeks and then forgotten.

In order for a tool to be a success, it will have to form the group for the player. If a player has to log on and sit in a chat channel screaming for 45 minutes to look for a group, most likely not find one, and log out; then that would make for a bad gaming experience. So development time has not gone into a simpler system. Once they survive launch and keep turn more of an eye to the future, projects like these can begin.

Recently the racial abilities were changed and moved away from major unbalanced powers to more fun or fluff abilities. Scott Hartsman remarked, “Very early on we wanted to make sure the racials are impactful, and we kind of aimed for impactful and went the wrong direction. We made them as impactful as like an incredibly high level trinket. Your racial is all of the sudden 10% of your power!” So to combat this they put in abilities that increased your level of fun, like the Bahmi Leap, instead of increasing your level of power.

Also, just in case you were wondering, the racial stat bonuses will be changed before launch.

A few more random topics were brought up that deserve to be mentioned. A WOW-Like armory is in the works, and by that they meant it’s in a powerpoint list somewhere, but it’s still a ways off. Right now the team is focused on the game’s launch and creating a fun game at it’s core.

Launch day servers are still being numbered and named. They will monitor and be careful about opening to many or too few. Scott wants to avoid “fall[ing] victim to the temptation to open more worlds because you are getting hyper active players at the beginning.” Players at release time are usually playing 10 times more the first week than they are the second. Look for launch day servers to be announced some time before the Head Start, but they will not be the same as the Beta servers.

If you were wondering if we will be taking the fight to the Planes themselves, we’ll probably have to wait some time. “We always need to make sure the next thing you are releasing is cooler than the last thing you released”, remarks Scott Hartsman. Nothing can be cooler than fighting the Dragon Aspects on their own turf. So there will probably be years of build up before we can do that.

One last tidbit is for the Crafters out there. You might of noticed that you haven’t been getting any rare materials from harvesting nodes. There is a reason for this. Trion has purposely done this to decrease the incentive for bots to “hoover” up all the nodes in a zone and create a lopsided server economy.

The whole Q&A session ran just over an hour and much more was discussed. We got great insight into how a game was made, how things are prioritized, and how a team thinks from the top down. We hope we get a chance to talk about Rift again with Russ Brown and Scott Hartsman in the future. Both guys are incredibly enthusiastic about Rift and it comes through by the effort given by the whole development team and the quality product they have shown us already.