TenTonHammer recently got the opportunity to visit Trion Studios in California and got their hands on the game. After playing they sat down with Scott Hartsman for a video Q&A. Follow this link to watch Part One. It appears that this interview was done before GamesCom.

If you’ve been following Rift for a while nothing will surprise you in this video. It goes over some very basic things. The interviewer starts off with his brief impression of the soul system talking about the Pyromancer, Saboteur, and the Beastmaster. Scott describes the Saboteur as a very unique (though not very overpowered now!) soul and the Beastmaster as a combo pet class and melee warrior. The rest of the video touches on a lot of lore describing the Guardians and Defiant. He emphasizes that the Guardians are exceptional souls of both good and evil men devoted to the gods. He wants to make it clear that Defiants vs. Guardian isn’t Evil vs. Good but more of Technology vs. Religion.

Here are a few other tidbits we picked out that reinforces what we’ve learned already.

1. Defiants start off in the Shadowlands and move on to Freemarch which is south of Port Scion.
2. Guardians start off in the Shadowlands and move on to Silverwood, north of Port Scion.
3. Port Scion used to be a mega center of commerce but is now a war front.
4. When you die you can either Soul Walk or “Come back somewhere safe”
5. Soul Walking resurrects you at the spot of your death where you can walk to safety. You can only do this every so often.
6. The death penalty is nothing more than losing a bit of your health that you can get back by “eating”.

On Friday, MMORPG.com did an interview with Scott Hartsman. The interview wasn’t very in-depth and told us much of what we already know. They touched on the dynamic content, the rifts and the ascended soul system. However, there were a few good nuggets in there that gave us some new information.

Yesterday we commented on the ZAM interview with Scott Hartsman, Creative Director for Rift: Planes of Telara, and today we get a chance to read the second part of the interview. Let’s take a look at what we can learn about souls, money and what you might be doing in the end-game. Keeping reading and we’ll see what we’ve learned today from Scott and ZAM.

ZAM caught up with Scott Hartsman, Creative Director for Rift: Planes of Telara, for an interview. In part one they discussed the basics of the game. They talked about the rift system and how PVP will interact with the game. Other systems of social interaction came up and the philosophy of how Trion will handles those was discussed.

Last week Abigale created a new thread on the Rift: Planes of Telara official forums asking the community to provide questions for Simon Ffinch, Sr. Design Director. A collection of questions were taken and answered. Here are the results from the Rift facebook page.

MMOGamer had the pleasure of sitting down with Russ Brown, Sr. VP of Development and Cindy Bown, Sr. Community Manager for Rift: Planes of Telara. They had some pretty interesting things to say. It was almost an informal interview among friends and you got a great sense how much both people love Rift. There were some nice tidbits of information as well; for example, after a focus test they did in 2009, they change a lot with the game.

Newsarama takes a look at the new comic Telara Chronicles. They also get a chance to sit down with Rick Sanchez and discuss his roll in the development of the comic for Rift: Planes of Telara and Trion World’s other upcoming title, End of Nations.

Newsarama: If you could, explain a bit how you started working with Trion Worlds — I saw on your site that you’re working as a consultant for them. So was this writing gig a natural extension of that?

Ricardo Sanchez: I was hired on for some general consulting help at Trion. Once I saw the games up close (and they really blew me away) I immediately saw they were ripe for comic books and recommended Issue 0s for both franchises as a great way to tap into the comic crowd and create something really compelling. Since I was already familiar with the properties, it just made sense to have me do the writing.

Make sure you check out the whole interview at Newsarama.com. From the same article you will find the following images.

You go away for the weekend and what happens? Scott Hartsman does an interview with Ten Ton Hammer and I have to find out about it on Monday. Anyway, I assume most of you have seen this interview already, but I’ll go ahead an pull out the pertinent information that we can gleam from it.

Abigale, the Sr. Community Manager for Rift, sat down and had lunch with Producer Ken Allen. She got a chance to ask Ken about his background and a ask a few questions from the community.

Here’s a quick blurb:

Osho: What are you responsible for by being a Rift Producer?

We have several directors on the team who have producer responsibilities. Each of these producers is responsible for a particular part of the game; game mechanics, game content, art, engineering.

My role is 180 degrees opposite of that. It’s more of an outward facing role.

On this particular project, I’m more involved with activities geared toward getting the game to a published state. This includes tracking our milestones goals, monitoring how well we address bug counts, producing progress reports for our executives, coordinating company-wide play tests and presentations, and basically being the guy on the team people can come to when they have a question and don’t know where else to go.

I’ve also had a big role in kicking off certain non-game initiatives and then handing them off to people hired to fill that role.

For example, I wrote the company’s first publishing standards checklist, supplied the first draft of a template for organizing text that will be localized, created the first installable game disc for play-testing, established initial relationships with ratings boards, reviewed public facing legal agreements (like EULA, Code of Conduct and Terms of Use), created the first matrix for compatibility testing, and so on. And in most cases, as Trion filled the various positions related to those initiatives, I handed off of that work to the new director.

For the full interview check out the Official Forums.