This weekend at PAX Prime 2012, Trion Worlds put on quite a show with all of the goodies they had to offer. The company showcased RIFT a great deal, naturally, diving into areas of Storm Legion that we haven’t seen before. We were also shown some of the new Bard skills in action. On top of all that, we also found out some new details about the expansion! It was a good weekend, and thanks to Trion’s TwitchTV page, it’s possible to view the footage at any time.

There’s a lot of footage to cover, however, thanks to three days of live streams. That’s why we’re here to offer up some of the best highlights of the three-day event, show off some screenshots, videos, and all the juicy details that were new information reveals. As a warning, all of the footage below was originally captured from Trion’s live streams, so graphical/sound quality may not be the best. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Oh. My. God. Finally! Rogues and Bards alike rejoice! We finally get word from the man in charge himself, Scott Hartsman, that they are actually looking over the bard and we should see some changes, or at the very least, some fixes to the much maligned Bard Soul.

Just for some background, Bards were a very endeared class in Everquest and Everquest. However in RIFT, they were relegated to a Buff Bot, a class that essentially hit 4-5 Motifs, every 30 seconds, cast a few buff spells pre-fight, and used Verse of Joy for mana/energy regen. They have gained a few debuffs that were useful since release, but almost no one wanted to be stuck playing the Bard in most raids.

If you were in charge of re-creating the Bard for the expansion what would you do? Leave a comment below with your ideas, and if they are interesting enough we’ll post them here on the front page! Here are some ideas we discussed over a year ago, what do you think?

Originally posted by Hartsman (Source)

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Hey, everyone.

Just got caught up and read through all of the excitement on the above subjects from the last couple days, and wanted to share some thoughts as well as let you know what we’ll be doing from here forward.

1) It’s a great idea to give people a direct line to share feedback on CS performance. That’s something we should definitely keep doing. The only way we can constantly be improving is when people let us know about their experiences, both good and bad. I’d like to repost the original request that started all of this, to make sure people still have it available:

In response to some recent postings, we have created a new e-mail address which can be used to submit GM feedback. The e-mail address is GM_Feedback@trionworlds.com. If you feel as though your issue was mis-handled or that you have received exceptional service then please let us know. Our goal is to set the standard by which other MMOs are judged. If we are falling short of that then we would like to know.

That is the company that we have a whole lot of people working incredibly hard to try to be.

Massively has recently gotten a chance to talk with Scott Hartsman on patch 1.2 and beyond. Here are few choice quotes that we think showcase which direction Trion is taking RIFT.

First we find that 1.2 is coming, potentially, May 4th.

On Looking for Group Tools

One of the biggest improvements with the update is the addition of a Looking for Group tool. This was something everyone wanted, Hartsman said, but the team refused to rush it out the door in poor shape. It does what you would probably expect: Players can queue up for an instance by role (the system recognizes which builds you have and offers options for tank, healer, support and DPS) and then wait as the tool assembles the group for a cooperative adventure. Once a group is formed, the system thenn throws them into the maelstrom automatically. The LFG tool isn’t just for dungeons, either; it’s designed to help players get together for world quest content like epic or arena quests.

The LFG tool will come in handy in conjunction with 1.2′s improved daily dungeon system. Trion’s tweaking the daily dungeon quests so that you can either do one per day or let them pile up so you can knock out a bunch at once. Hartsman said that this caters to the “weekend warriors” who want all of the special rewards of daily dungeons but can only make time for them once a week. The game will store up to seven daily dungeon quests for you at a time.

Emphasis is Rift Junkies above. Great news for those that can’t get on every day to do a dungoen. This aids casual and hardcore players alike.

Posted by Scott Hartsman (Source)

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Hey, everyone.

As you’ve probably noticed — We launched! Last week was four retail launches in four different territories. By and large, everything went extremely well. Nothing exploded, and we’re rapidly adjusting to the pace of being a live game.

Now that we’ve all collectively survived the process of taking a game from Beta to Live, it’s time to resume focusing on what’s coming up in the future.

In the next day, you’re going to see our first real update. (8AM PST Thursday for the NA servers, 2AM UTC Friday for the EU servers)

This first update does have some new content, and also includes a rather large collection of tweaks, fixes, and updates that come from a few different sources.

They’ve been picked out of what people have been reporting in game, as well as a number of beta-reported polish items that didn’t make it in time for head start, and also some further refinement and tuning after seeing what happens when people finally get the chance to play characters that’ll be around forever.

Some of the things to expect tomorrow are…

• Raid rifts!

• Improvements to Rift, Invasion, and Foothold experience gains

• See more quests at once in the tracker if you choose

• Better item stack management

• PvE end-game difficulty better suited to the power of real end-game characters

Making sure that we can do an update like this successfully is an important step on the road to doing even larger scale content and systems additions in the not-too-distant future.

Our team will be right here while this first update is going on. We’ll be checking out the servers alongside you, and will be here to respond to any surprise issues that do occur.

We also have a lot more in development than the first look you’ll be seeing tomorrow.

On top of ongoing new content and large feature development, many of which you’ll be hearing about on our site and others, there are some other, smaller improvements we’re working toward – I wanted to call these out specifically since they’re pretty frequently commented on.

• Mages. Yes, we’re both listening to you and paying attention to the post-launch gameplay data on our servers. While a well-played mage does do extremely well, and mages are very well represented in the overall number of active characters, there are issues with competitiveness in some low and mid level ranges and certain combinations of souls, due largely to mages’ overall fragility and cast times.

• Mail Spam. Chat spam protection has been going really well on the whole, which, predictably, pushed spammers into mail. We’ll be putting more protection in place there soon.

• Event Contribution. This system is being reworked to be more in line with the idea of events being massively social occurrences, and the focus on abilities themselves will be going away entirely.

• Anti-Hacker Protection. As a very high priority, we’re working on new and interesting ways to help you make sure your account is protected from password phishing and keyloggers. In the short time since head start, we’ve already banned a couple thousand spammers, hackers, farmers, and thieves. We’ll continue improving our detection and ability to take action on them well into the future.

• Dismount and Exposed. Expect some changes here as well.

Thank you all for your dedication so far – We look forward to this first small update, and a host of even larger ones in the future!

- The RIFT Development Team

The Rift community has responded en masse to Scott Hartsman’s recent statement that Trion will “add RvR if the players want it”. In just a few days a topic on the official forums intended to show the public support for RvR-style gameplay in Rift amassed over 3000 replies and 80,000 views. An almost unprecedented response that not only shows a very healthy interest in the game in the days leading up to release, but also the huge amount of players who wish to see this game succeed in the long-term as a PvP game.

Hartsman gave us his thoughts on Beta 4:

Hey, everyone! Thanks a lot for being patient with us this week on the VIP invites for those who preordered. We’ve been making sure to get people covered almost as quickly as they can ask for help, and you’ve gone above and beyond in your compliments to the folks doing the helping.

In fact, I can’t think of another time I’ve ever seen this level of concentrated compliments aimed at a CS group. Thanks for posting and mailing them in – You guys rock. We’re working with all of our sales partners to smooth this flow out for the rest of the preorder period, and should have some good news to share here in the next day or two.

From Scott Hartsman (Source)

(Evening, all. Your regularly scheduled Beta 3 wrap-up will come in the form of the Beta 4 preview because of the short cycle. In the meanwhile, here’s a brief new years recap and a heads up on a different kind of excitement in the week ahead.)

Since we unveiled this game and its universe as Rift last April, hundreds of thousands of you have joined us here on the site.

In that brief time we’ve gone from almost zero to this thriving, growing community. A community that’s helping improve a real game that’s having one of the best betas that many of us have ever been a part of.

You’ve been the ones supporting us as we’ve been rolling this game out, and helping us prove it can stand on its own. From the story, to the souls, to the rifts and invasions, to the overall quality, and most recently as we’ve pulled back the curtain on these fun, massive events that make the game truly stand out as unique.

Throughout all of the testing, we’ve tried to do right by you every chance that we get. When you call something out that we should address, we do our damndest to give you the best game that we possibly can, at full speed.

We really appreciate that you’ve noticed the efforts we’ve been putting in to get there.

There’s even more to success than making a good game and taking care of it. We’ve also got to make sure that new people hear about us.

The more that do, the bigger of a success it’ll be, and the better the game gets in the future.

When you really like a game, support it, spread the word, but don’t feel like the company behind it is doing everything they can to help make it grow, it can be frustrating. We’re trying to do right by you here as well.

You’ve no doubt seen the increase in coverage of the game lately, and the beginnings of ads on the web over the past couple months.

This week, it’s about to get even bigger.

If you’re reading this, we thank you for being right here with us when it all started, and we hope you get a kick out of what you see next.

Now, let’s go make the rest of the world stand up and take notice.

Originally posted by Hartsman (—)

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ONCE UPON A TIME in a land called Telara, 573 Guardian players were minding their own business in a region called Silverwood. They were frolicking and levelling, and levelling and questing, and looting and laughing, collecting and crafting…. Ah! What a peaceful time it was.

And then, the world exploded.

Dozens of rifts, invasions, bosses, real gameplay objectives (and rewards coming soon!), dramatic skies, music shifts — the whole package. Our first event on a truly massive scale.

Beyond the gameplay, what you’re seeing is part of the story of Prince Hylas Aelfwar, and the Battle for Silverwood.

If you were there, we hope you enjoyed it. If you missed one of the times it ran: What you’re seeing is the first of many, and we hope you get to see them soon.

We’ve been playing this pretty close to the vest. We didn’t want to go promising things until we were able to prove this all worked and was fun, in front of a full-size Beta audience.

There are a lot of ways to tell epic stories in MMOs. Cutscenes are cool (we have a few of those). Voiced vignettes can be neat (we have some of those too). Giving you your own private experience can work well too.

In RIFT, we’d like you to be able to play through these events yourself. (The first M in MMO does stand for “Massive.”) That’s where we’re going.

In the event above, there were 573 player participants. All in one part of the world, and the world held up like a champ. Different raids, groups, and soloists taking on different parts of the event.

As a long time MMO player, I’d call it “exactly what I’ve been waiting for.”

We’re thrilled to see the comments from people who were pleasantly shocked that this is what we had in mind when we’ve been talking about epic scale events.

This event was for levels 8-20, complete with group encounters and raid bosses, and the reactions were amazingly positive.

It was a lot of fun to give you this preview of the first of many more types of events — both large and small.

We’ve had a ton of feedback on other subjects as well — Time is short and we have a lot to do between now and the next beta. Here are a few other key things we’ve taken away from all of the testing so far.

Classes and Souls: People like the system. They want more of it. They want to be able to play with more options, sooner — Both in terms of the numbers of points they can invest, as well as the numbers of souls and how they roll out. We hear you, and we agree.

The system really does play at its best once you have a pool of points to play with. That said, those high-end 51 point abilities look like fun too. What isn’t fun is asking people to make that kind of choice at the high end: Do I forsake the fun of the system to get the power I feel that I need in that 51 point ability?

In our system, it’s possible to give people even more choices by getting more points and more souls, faster. We can let people get all the way to a top-end soul ability if they choose, and still be able to have points to spend elsewhere into two other souls.

In time for Beta 3, expect to see all of the souls available to choose from the outset, more souls available earlier in the experience, and more total points to spend. The system is there, and it’s fun, and there’s no reason to hide it from people.

We’re confident that it’s the right thing to do to get more fun into the system. It’s more work, but it’s the kind of work we’re betting you’d want your developers focused on.

Soul Preview: This one was always on the list of things we’d like to do. After Beta 1, it got promoted to the top of it. It made the “We absolutely need this” list after Beta 2. The goal is to get it out there in time for Beta 3.

Pet Naming: I didn’t call this one out after Beta 1, but it was already on the list then. Since people keep asking about it specifically, we’d like to add that it should be out in time for Beta 3.

The Silverwood Music Bug: Yes, we’re fixing this.

There will be more improvements beyond these in time for Beta 3, but there’s a really short cycle between now and then, and we’re trying to make sure we can do everything above and more.

We look forward to seeing you next round, playing with more souls, and more massive events and more zone boss invaders!

If you haven’t seen them, you just haven’t seen RIFT.

See you in Beta 3!

- The Rift Development Team

Originally posted by Hartsman (—)

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Hi, everyone! On behalf of all of us on the RIFT team, and at Trion as a whole, I wanted to say thank you very much for participating in our first beta test.

We’ve been incredibly busy both through the event and in the hours since it ended, poring over all of the feedback and data and making plans for the next one. Between forum posts and in-game reports, you submitted over 20,000 individual pieces of feedback.

We’ve had developers, community, and QA folks looking over it constantly since the event began. Please do realize that your feedback here absolutely does matter.

We learned a lot this weekend. Most notably, we got answers to some critical questions.

What happens when you put the full population of a server on a single side, and effectively keep them in one or two zones for a whole weekend?

Could we patch all of those people? How well would the game hold up technically? How well would it play? How would the rifts and invasions play out?

Patching

The pre-patch that started a few days before the event was immediately extremely loaded. Many people were getting the files just fine, but a good number of you had to restart the patcher a few times to get them all.

You helped us figure out the biggest issues with this, and we updated the patcher a few times during the event. By the time the event began, the vast majority of people were seeing successful updates on the first try.

We still have a couple more improvements to make that should make the update experience even better in time for the next beta.

The Servers

Before the event officially began started, it became obvious that a lot more people took us up on our invitation than we had originally anticipated. Within the first hour of the event, we had to double the available number of servers. Those servers all remained highly active throughout the weekend.

The population of Freemarch never dipped below “more than we’ll need to support in the long term,” and the servers stayed responsive and stable throughout the overload.

Gameplay

The starting area of Terminus held up really well. People started slamming in to the point where we got a solid test of the server queues. (Thanks for putting up with that.)

During the first day, it was obvious that the quest targets in Freemarch weren’t nearly plentiful enough, and we made sure to get an update out for that as soon as we could – Based on people’s comments, it looked to have reduced quest blockages by about 95%.

By Saturday, it became obvious that our “wildly crazy active” tuning numbers for rifts, invasions, footholds and the like weren’t getting the result they were supposed to. For the first half of beta, very little of the dynamic game layer was seen or heard from.

Where we had hoped and expected to see invasions rampaging across the countryside, instead the population density had become far too high, such that invasions weren’t even getting off the ground.

We updated the game with even more insanely active tuning on Saturday night to give the invaders a chance to come out and play too, and the response in chat and submitted feedbacks was overwhelmingly positive once that started.

By the time it worked, it was a hell of a sight — Huge invasions finally freed up, setting up footholds, wiping out the local populace, and eventually being repelled by defenders.

Expect a whole lot more iterations and improvements here in the future, both to rifts and invasions. More types, more activities, and a much better tuned frequency.

We’ve spent a large part of the day today working on our plans to make sure people see obvious improvements to the dynamic layer, both in terms of frequency and diversity in time for the next beta.

From here, we’re going to continue going over everyone’s feedback, and seeing what kinds of adjustments and improvements people really want to see in the game.

We have dozens of other improvements in store, largely thanks to your comments.

Thanks again, and we’ll see you in a couple weeks!

We couldn’t have gotten here without you.

Scott Hartsman
Executive Producer, RIFT