During Scott Hartsman’s Ask Me (Almost) Anything Reddit chat last Friday, Hartsman gave his honest opinions and some rather large answers to questions that RIFT players were curious about. There were specifics about Storm Legion, for example, that he couldn’t reveal, but for the most part, he answered the questions very thoroughly. He delved into some interesting subjects including the different types of PvP players in RIFT, the MMO industry’s past, the MMO industry’s future, the future of the Bard soul, and Trion’s stance on one day turning toward a free-to-play model.

Massively published an article yesterday in which the author takes a closer look at the answers Hartsman issued about these subjects, and speculates a bit about what they might mean for the future of RIFT.

Trion Studios conducted their question and answer session on Reddit today with Scott Hartsman taking the stage. The Executive Producer took part in a RIFT AMAA, which stands for “Ask Me Almost Anything”. This meant that, unfortunately, some questions remained unanswerable, especially most pertaining to Storm Legion and patch 1.10. Still, some interesting questions did get answered, and similar to yesterday’s AUAA session with Trion’s Community Team, we received a rare glimpse into the work place where Telara comes to life.

The entire AMAA session can be found on Reddit, but for a distilled version with only the questions and answers, keep reading. Note: it’s still quite a long read, though I’ll do my best to cut out some of the unneeded fluff.

This week, Trion’s hosting a two-day AUAA (Ask Us (Almost) Anything) Reddit chat. Yesterday was day one of the chat, and Trion’s community team members– James ‘Elrar’ Nichols, James ‘Walsingham’ Weeks, and Amanda ‘Amary’ Fry answered a whole bunch of questions. The entire Reddit chat can be found here, but in case you want the short version, here it is, with only the direct questions and answers. That said, it’s still quite a long read, and you can definitely tell the team had fun with some answers!

Not all questions asked were given answers, unfortunately, but there’s still one more day of questions and answers to come. Today, Scott Hartsman is supposed to be among the team members answering questions from the community, so it’s possible that we’ll see answers to some of the more design and developer-focused questions then.

Yesterday afternoon two developers from Trion, Andrew Krausnick and Will Cook, logged onto IRC to chat about the World Events.

Seraphia asks: will players of every level be able to participate in Phase 2?

Cook: Yup. That’s actually my primary goal when designing these things. I scream and holler if there isn’t chunky content for all levels to participate in. Although I wouldn’t suggest lower level people should run all over the world without friends, the native monsters in the zones may pounce them. In the future we’re going to look into ways that lower levels players can view or even participate in some of the more high end story elements, but for now we’ve provided everyone with large pieces of content to play during the various phases

bootsnack asks: besides the new Raid coming soon are there any more new PVE options coming out for the End Game players who are already done with everything to date?

AndrewK: While I can’t give you any concrete details on this (yet) and it likely won’t be in front of you as soon as our next round of instanced content, we definitely intend to support our level capped players with content that isn’t just instanced and plays to strengths when it comes to big messy open world content.

For the full transcript please visit RiftIRC.com.

It’s been a while hasn’t it? We’ve got today’s IRC Dev chat courtesy of RiftIRC, where Gavin Irby and Aaron Hooten of the Scarlet Gorge team answered questions.

Introduction:

Aaron: Okay, Hi! My name is Aaron Hooten and I’m in pod 2 (also known as the Dragoncats).
Abigale: And we are also joined by Gavin. It’s his first time with us here. Gavin, tell them a little about what you do.
Gavin: Hey – I’m the team lead that brought you such hits as Freemarch, Stonefield, Scarlet Gorge, Droughtlands, and Stillmoor.

On Faction Balance:

KroBa asks: What difficulties did you encounter while trying to balance the terrain and layout for two rival factions’ quest hubs?
Gavin: Scarlet Gorge was a challenge from a design standpoint. It’s long and linear and we had to get enough content for both factions in there. In the end, we decided that we’d start the factions on each end and make them meet up in the middle that way, if players decide that factional competition isn’t their bag, they can move on to the next zone and continue their leveling. It was too narrow of a zone to have both factions quest hubs progressing the same direction down the zone in a single direction .

For the rest of the transcript please take a peak at the Telarapedia.

As per usual, we had another IRC Dev Chat this afternoon. Today’s guests were Berenger Fish and Adam Hetenyi. It was a long chat so here are some interesting questions and answers. If you want the full transcript please visit RiftIRC.com.

Josh asks: How many players does it take to fill a raid? Are there multiple sizes?

Adam: We will launch with 10-player and 20-player versions of each raid

Debase asks: When designing raids, does the knowledge that players can shift their soul spec rapidly on the fly make designing unique encounters more or less difficult?

Adam: It makes designing unique encounters easier, but designing encounters period a bit more difficult, if that makes sense. Because players have access to so many different builds, right?

Unforgiven asks: When raiding can you use one pre-set soul to buff, and then change class to fight; or do the buffs disappear when you change your soul?

Berenger: They are removed. We don’t want “buff” builds. That would be silly.

Kelrath asks: are there dungeon lockout timers after completing one? How long do they last?

Berenger: There not any lockouts on the Standard dungeons. The expert dungeons will have one. But we have enough of them that I don’t think players will feel too bad about it.

Kriddle asks: Will you need to clear a standard dungeon or raid to unlock the elite version? Also will you need to clear one dungeon to unlock another dungeon? Progression style where dungeon A is tier 1 then Dungeon B is tier 2 etc.

Berenger: There are no hard progression locks. Once you hit level 50 you can technically go into every expert dungeon. You might not be geared for them though. Expert modes provide materials you need to craft openers for Expert Rifts, so players will see and a progression tie-in there.

I was away for the weekend, but did everyone catch the IRC Dev Chat from Friday with Aaron Hooten, Content Designer? Here’s the transcript and a snippet just in case you missed it.

Aaron: Hey everyone! Let me give you a quick intro on me and we can get down to business. So previous to working for Trion I was a Fire Sprinkler Engineer. Completely un-related to game design, unless you count the 30 hours a week I was clocking on various mmos. It’s a good job, and every building is different so you have new and exciting challenges with each new project. I liked it. I applied here at Trion, and much to my surprise I was packing all my Spider-Man toys to move here within a week.

Mira asks: Is it hard to come up with content to fill in a zone?

Aaron: It definitely can be. One of the things I like about our pod structure is it really helps the idea process. I’ll get an idea and start to get excited, and then someone else will pick up the torch and before you know it we are all high-fiving and dancing like egyptians.

Check out today’s IRC Dev Chat Transcript with Cameron McNeil.

Cameron McNeil: So I’m the Lead Systems Designer work on Rift. Basically that means working with the numbers of the game including items, souls, npcs, crafting etc. We of course have a whole team to handle it but that’s a general overview. So in 50 words of less it means I spend all of my day in Excel trying to make sure Pyromancer’s aren’t too OP

Each class has about 20 abilities available to it.

Ancient asks: How important was synergy between souls withing a calling?

Cameron McNeil: Very important, the core of the Soul system is giving players the choice of how they want to spend their points. Making sure Souls play well together and that there are reasons to branch out is something we look at every time we examine them.

In case you forgot there was another Dev Chat on IRC this week with Abigale, Rift: Planes of Telara’s Community Manager. If you missed it you might want to check out the full transcript and read about Abigale responding to questions about community events, beta, rift events and her time inside the game.

Friday IRC Dev Chats are back, brought to you by Telara Central. Today we got a chance to ask questions to Will Cook, who is the Lead Dev on the dynamic content, along with his pod teammates Andrew Krausnick and Larry Boles. If you were interested in learning more about rifts and how they worked. This was the place to be Friday afternoon. Here are a few highlights.

Arithion asks: In regards to the 20 man raid forces. Will there be Raid sized Rifts and Invasion – and if so how will these operate. Will they simply appear and be a raid Area until it’s cleared or will you know when they’re a tear if they’re Raid sized?

Andrew Krausnick: as you might assume from us answering the previous question: the answer at least to ‘raid rifts’ is: YES, we’re actually developing a lot of this functionality right now, so I don’t have specifics: but philosophically we want them to be both rifts and raids, we want there to be the sense of social gameplay and ‘jump in and play’ while also having the level of challenge and coordination you’d expect from a raid encounter

Ciovala asks: Do Rifts spawn in set locations and do invasions follow any predefined sets of paths?

Will Cook: So, not to look too much behind the curtain but, we have a placematting and highway system that is pretty sweet. We can run events off of a more handcrafted placemat or even off a single reference point depends on how “sticky” the area is (a lot of rocks in the way?). The highway system is for dynamic events that travel, like invasions, it’s their preferred way of getting around, and it’s more realitstic than just having the mobs path over mountains. Between the placematting, highways, and mobile scripting we use for dynamic events, our dyanmic content really never gets location-locked

(Full Transcript)