Rift: An MMO success story

It depends on where you look. In general things are pretty good. We don't have anybody who's an order of magnitude off where they're supposed to be, as has happened in basically every game in the history of MMOs.

The extended alpha and extended beta is what we've got to thank for that. That said, you do have to make changes once you see what's happening for real. Some of these things plain got overlooked by us in beta.

We've got a particularly troublesome ability on Saboteurs that's causing them to do better damage in the game than anybody else. We've got a couple of tweaks to make to Warriors who are currently able to take an ability and be a ranged class in plate armour.

But that's the thing; part of the coolness of the system is that they invented that play-style themselves. We like the idea that players invented that style.

So what we're working on is instead of taking a fun toy away from them, we figured out how to give them the ability to play that way if they choose by adding stuff so it's now happening in a more balanced way.

I like the fact people have invented stuff that, bluntly, we hadn't thought of.

No - yeah. In practice what it's doing is adding far more charges to their target than the ability was supposed to add.

We have Ancient Wardstones in the game right now, which are a baby version of a land-control game, in the sense of whoever owns them gets content and if you get all of them you get a special encounter. But those aren't messaged well and we're doing some updates to the UI to make sure they're clearer and play more clearly. So that's for the short-term.

In the long-term, we've mostly talked about what could we do to support more overland, shared PVP, because that's generally the sort of thing you need world space for. And world space is something that takes months to build.

I don't want to get into too much on that other than yes, we're absolutely paying attention. I don't want to say absolutely because it's not something that can be expected in the immediate future. These things take time to build.

We're taking those one system at a time. In general, performance has been far better than we would have expected. For a deferred rendered with as many assets as ours has, the fact that we have people who are able to get 60-plus frames a second is astounding to me.

It's absolutely a consideration. Every story in an MMO needs a climax, and then you need to move onto what's the next book in the series. If you look at where we are right now with Rift 1, we've got a story laid out, we've got the chapters laid out, and we're aligning our updates to when we want to tell the next chapter in the story.

And at some point after that it is realistic that it will be time to launch into a new story, both to get new people into the game as well as to get people rallied around the idea of seeing what comes next.