UPDATE: Here is the transcript.

TenTon Hammer’s Podcast was put out and this week they had Scott Hartsman on for an interview. Scott spent about forty five minutes with the guys and talked about the game in general. He started off with the basics, talking about the dev team and went on about the games class system, souls, how they are used, how things are balanced. For the pro-rifter, no new information was released in this podcast. Much of the discussion centered around information previous TenTon Hammer articles have already discussed. For those new to the game, check out the podcast and skip to the 46 minute mark (you’ll thank me later) and enjoy.

Cross faction communication has almost been a big topic for new games that feature one side vs. another where it is hard coded into the game. So, people all over the internet have been discussing, “Can the Defiant talk to the Guardians. Here’s what Scott has to say:

The way that alpha is currently set up, you can communicate across sides in chat that has spatial qualities (think of them as in-character) — /say, /yell, /emote.

Each side gets their own private comms for out-of-character channels (think: tells, zone chat, trade, etc). Places where there’s really not collaboration going on.

I think it would be great to be able to launch like this. I think there’s also at least a 75% chance I’m being naive, but we’d all like to give people a chance.

The core reasoning isn’t the abstract “that would be a customer service nightmare!” – It’s that we do have to set a bar for the experience of the service as a whole. That bar can’t be dominated by swearing and epithets aimed at people’s race/religion/orientation in a system-supported communications channel.

That’s not a good experience that keeps people playing premium games.

We’re not saying that all chat is expected to be all hugs and bunnies and people singing Kumbaya, but at the same time, we won’t be having our game turn into xbox live chat. If it goes that direction, the opposing sides won’t be able to communicate. Depends entirely on what happens between beta and launch.

TenTon Hammer’s part two of their Q&A with Scott Hartsman goes over the dynamic content of Rift: Planes of Telara. They take their time to discuss Rifts and how they work inside the game space and here is what we learned.

As we know already rifts start off as “tears”. Tears can be opened with Planar Lures (this is new information to me). We all have seen what happens next. You go through bonus rounds etc and close the rift. If tears are left alone the plane may build up enough energy to create an invasion and foothold. Footholds are exactly what they sound like, a foothold of power in the world. They often spawn generals and their troops or lieutenants to invade nearby NPC camps, hubs and/or towns. Footholds are an actually targetable item that you can attack. Inside the interview you can listen to the interviewer talk about his experience only one and a half hours in.

Another thing we have heard before was also discuss is that rifts do not like each other. So if there are different invasions near each other they will attack each other.

Make sure you watch the whole interview at TenTon Hammer.

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”.

Take a look at the latest Rift: Planes of Telara Q&A with Scott Hartsman from GameZone. The video is mostly a general description of the game and what Rift is all about and we don’t really learn anything new. However what we do get is some awesome new video.

Check it out.

Ethec, over at TenTonHammer got few hours to check out Rift: Planes of Telara. Along for the ride was Trion’s Chief Creative Officer for Rift, Scott “Gallenite” Hartsman to guide him through the first few levels of the game and also shared some bits of info that hinted on how Rift is different from the other MMOs out there…

Over on FOH, where Scott Hartsman is an active member of the community, he joined in the conversation about crafting in Rift: Planes of Telara. The discussion was about a comment from an author of a recent MMORPG.com article.

MMORPG Article:
Scott briefly touched on crafting as well. Players can expect an array of typical harvesting and crafting tradeskills such as mining or harvesting and they can have up to three of these active per character.

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.