Rift: An MMO success story
"One of the players was taking air-force pilot drugs."
No, absolutely not a shock. When a game goes live, people bring their A-game in a way that didn't exist in beta. As one example of this: we have one of our guys who overheard that one of the players was taking air-force pilot drugs to be able to advance incredibly quickly.
Obviously we don't advocate that; we would hope nobody ever does that - but at the end of the day, people are going to go through some crazy things to try to be first.
I don't know about much longer, but to be blunt, much longer isn't always really the point. The point for us is to introduce people to the fact that we have the ability to keep shipping new and interesting content to play, whether they're high-end rifts, invasions or raid zones.
As long as people truly believe that there's more coming and it will continue to be fun, our bet is that they'll stick around.
Hypothetically, let's say [River of Souls] gets beaten the second day it comes out: OK, as long as people enjoy continuing to play it - remember people don't play a raid zone once, they play generally a lot of times - the bet is, as long as they know more is coming, they'll gladly hang around for the next bit.
We actually haven't announced dates yet. We are in internal testing on the next patch.
"I actually like the fact that people have invented stuff that, bluntly, we hadn't thought of."
I don't know the content specifics down to the detail. We've focused on system enhancements. We've had Guild Bank in development for a little bit, which is one of the things we will hopefully push out for that [next] update. And then narrowing down which other updates in development are going to be in their finished state in time for that update.
We've been working on a lot. The two I don't mind telling people we're working on are Guild Bank and a better looking-for-group auto-assembly option. Those are two things that people find fun and they help put more of the massive into MMO.
If you look at the sheer volume of armour we shipped, it's incredibly competitive if not better than most MMOs that have ever launched. Full armour sets - there are 13 distinct sets for each archetype right up the level range. I've done games in the past that shipped four, or two.
A lot of that [accusations of repetition] speaks to people being very used to playing a game that has been around for seven years and has that kind of development. If you look at just the base sets, we're more competitive than anything that's launched in the last 10 years.
More are always in progress, and there will definitely be more over time.
One of the things I'm really looking forward to doing - not in this update but in future updates - is figuring out and getting new types of those zone-wide events out there. It's a matter of what other building blocks we add to the system so we can create the next set of zone-wide events to advance the story even further.
We've gotten further down the discussion and we've got things in prototype, but we don't have the next round to the point where we're willing to say what we're doing yet. We know there will be more; it's just, what shape does more take? It depends on how well it play-tests internally.