GamerZines: Do you think it will be possible for people to find that optimum build in Rift, as the game allows so much freedom when creating characters?
Will Cook, dynamic content lead: Back when I wasn’t in the industry 24/7, when I was just on internships or mostly an armchair designer with all my favourite people on the forums. There was a lot of talk regarding the ‘Build of the Day’ threads and how you stop them arising. A lot of people, and this still happens, will say they want no respecs ever. Nobody is ever going to do that, but if there was a stance of no respecs ever people would always be loyal to their character, they would take their decisions seriously but all that does is paralyse you. That’s going to guarantee you check the internet before committing to any role.
The only times I’ve ever seen people experiment, ironically even though it didn’t matter that much, is Planetside. I could change my character’s spec every twelve hours, and they eventually changed it to six, where I could change my certificates up and you could grab anything you wanted from the beginning of the game. What that did was; ‘I was a pilot today’, and I wasn’t just a pilot because I wanted to copy the build of the week. I wanted to become that persona and I was roleplaying in a game which really didn’t have a lot of content. I was roleplaying because I had the ability to experiment and that’s what we have given back to the player.
There is a minor cost respec-ing just to keep our economy in check, but there’s four different specs you can try up. You can switch to a different role at any time and having that experimentation that’s how you get loyalty to the things you create. That’s how you will role play, that’s how you are going to propping up via best builds.
GZ: When we saw the Soul System for the first time I just thought how easy it would be to add to it without breaking the game, but at the same time it must be an absolute nightmare to balance…
MC: Everyone says it’s a nightmare to balance, but it is a sandbox. We wait for players to come up with something that is going to beat up everything and we see whether it is in the realm of DPS (damage per second) that we deem acceptable and if it is we’ll wait for somebody else to counter it; that’s the way it works. If we add more souls it would get harder, but it is already hard, we’ve already opted into that challenge. I don’t know where the Soul System is going to go. We could make deeper skill trees, we could make them shallower, or make more trees and take out the more redundant abilities to allow players to create their own. There are crazy ideas around the office and there will be crazy ideas in the community.
It’s exciting because this isn’t a strict publicity game like it is with WoW (World of Warcraft) and their classes. I think they (Blizzard) are the best designers in the industry and they make the best choices, but it isn’t the same debate for us. It isn’t the same debate with our community – it isn’t a war. Our community will hopefully learn to embrace change rather than fear it, which is odd because MMOs are all about constant updates. The MMO community doesn’t always respond well to change, but our game is all about dynamic content and a dynamic class system, so hopefully players will be able to adjust dynamic updates as well.
GZ: Does the size of Trion Worlds allow development of Rift to be a bit more nimble than your competitors?
MC: Nimble is certainly definitely what we are. We have a certain number of people which work on any given thing which is easy because you co-ordinate, but it is really the skill. The skill of that team is incredible. I don’t really have much of a skillset, I’m lucky that I get to make games. I’m not an engineer, but I work with some of the best I’ve ever seen. Even though I worked on Warhammer and I’ve shipped a game before, I know about open quests, PvP, and cool ideas, but I’ve got guys that have shipped fifteen console titles, worked on World of Warcraft, worked on Aion, worked on every SOE game and that’s humbling. You know that’s why we can invent open-grouping in three days in the manner we want to do it and we’re small enough that we get to hire more help at this point, rather than lay people off.
We have a lot that’s familiar, we hope to introduce people to the game and we hope that they give us four hours to enchant them. Hopefully the difference is that we’ll hopefully get other people involved as well. Who’s to say we know who we are shooting for, all we know is that we have a solid game. Dynamic content is the way we’re going and that lends itself very well to a good gaming experience.
If Trion Worlds does have a motto, it’s service and updates. MMOs and online games should be all about change, all about updating, all about making the game better and a content update every three to six months is not a rapidly updating game. I think consoles game with DLC are actually updating faster than a lot of MMOs.
GZ: Many thanks for your time Mr Cook.
Tags: Rift
TERA, Guild Wars 2, Dust 514 and Defiance previews plus a review for Tribes: Ascend and an exclusive interview for Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Download Now!
