Rift: Planes of Telara

**Isawa** · 2010-07-01 00:48

Phat lewt made me chuckle.

**Grey Jorildyn** · 2010-07-01 00:59

Dungeon Siege MMO? Sign me up.

Game looks good, but so do most other games these days. If it's gameplay matches its prettiness, I might check this one out.

**Purrrfect** · 2010-07-01 13:29

That last vid did look pretty good. I like the environment being dynamic at the rifts. Been signed up with their newsletter for a while now, but haven't heard much on it. Also like the public quests, those were great in WAR. I can see this competing with tera for my side game attention when I'm not in xiv. Need to get my single player backlog done by the end of the year or so it seems...

edit: lmao, paused and stopped to post here just before he said phat lewt. That shit was golden lol.

**Hyan** · 2010-07-01 13:35

Have they told us anything about the combat? Looks a bit generic to be honest, aside from the epic pokerface battle music.

**Lucavi** · 2010-07-01 13:59

Originally Posted by Merona

Dungeon Siege MMO? Sign me up.

Game looks good, but so do most other games these days. If it's gameplay matches its prettiness, I might check this one out.

/Hi-five.

DS MMO would be quality. The series already lends itself to the MMO format, just giving one toon instead of a party of 3/4/5, and more branching paths and places to explore/level at any particular range.

DS2 would have made for a fantastic MMO if they had tried to go that route. The skill trees, decent graphics for the time, great music, and a half-decent plot would have worked, IMO.

**Alderaan** · 2010-07-12 17:33

Ten Ton Hammer - Class and Callings Q&A with Scott Hartsman

TTH sits down with Scott Hartsman to delve more deeply into class choices in Rift
Every time Ten Ton Hammer had a chance to see Rift: Planes of Telera, the more excited we became. After getting our grubby mitts on the game at E3 2010, we tracked down Scott Hartsman, Chief Creative Officer and General Manager of Trion Redwood Shores Studio, in order to have him more fully explain classes and characters having multiple souls in the game. After some “persuasion,” he agreed to talk.

Ten Ton Hammer: The response to the E3 2010 class system seems split between those that think that Rift is simply co-opting talent trees with the soul tree system, and those that are a little overwhelmed with the possibilities. What would you say to the former crowd? Would you say it's your own take on talent trees?

Scott Hartsman: I actually kind of wouldn't. For those who say that it's just talent trees, the only thing I have to say is that once you play it you will totally understand. Just to give you an example from the character I most recently rolled, I chose a warrior. I still had choices with just the one soul up through the first fifteen levels, and it's cool and it's fun. It gets drastically different when you're faced with the choice of what your second soul is going to be - it's reinforced through the fiction and you're this awesome ascended being, therefore you have the ability to control multiple souls. You're making an active choice as to what the next path is that you're going to choose.

It's so different than staring at the same three panes that don't really involve a whole lot of choice at all. With our system, you can customize it down to which individual abilities out of these classes you're going to take. We err on the side of being a little bit too generous, intentionally, in giving you choices also. For example, say my first soul has a melee finisher that's okay, but my second soul has a melee finisher that's actually quite an upgrade, so when I get that second soul I can use one of my attack point builders from my first soul, add a finisher from my second soul, and it really drastically changes the results. By being smart, you can determine which abilities work together to give you the best damage. It's choices at the micro level like that, as well as at the macro level - which 2 or 3 of these choices do I want to have at any given time?

Letting people get a hands-on with it is about the best thing that we can do. All through E3, it was really cool to watch people's eyes light up as they play when they realized, 'Whoa, I was a healer up until five seconds ago, then I slotted this other thing and now my cleric also has this mage-like DPS ability too? This is actually fun! I totally get it now.' We're just looking forward to more people being able to try it out.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/86648

Ten Ton Hammer: So for the 'just a talent tree' crowd, the core message is that these abilities and enhancements interact with each other across souls? And that applies to all souls?

Scott Hartsman: Absolutely; lots of different interactions at different levels.

Ten Ton Hammer: I was going to ask if players can 'double up' on souls, but from your illustration it doesn't sound like that would make much sense.

Scott Hartsman: Doubling up in the literal sense - absolutely not. But what you can definitely do is effectively double up by just investing in one soul all the way to the end. That's a perfectly valid way to play also.

Ten Ton Hammer: So if players envision a very limited role for their character but want to be very good at what they do, they don't have to explore the myriad possibilities you're offering them?

Scott Hartsman: Yeah. If I have a tank soul, I can go all in. I mean, I can go all in on that sucker the entire way. That's going to give me root abilities that are only available to people who do just that.

Ten Ton Hammer: So with all of these choices at hand, let's talk a little bit about the inevitable - revising your choices with a respec. Could you describe the respec options you're planning to make available to players?

Scott Hartsman: What we're going for is, I think, pretty ambitious for a launch feature set, but this is one area that there was no way in hell that we were going to skimp on. What we are doing from the outset is, yes, you absolutely can from the outset go to a trainer and pay (with in-game currency) to reset your souls. You can then re-invest those points any way you choose.

Characters will also have multiple attunements - multiple specs - from the get-go, so you do have the ability to buy multiple specs immediately in the game. All of those have hotbars saved with all of your loadouts, and once you have those multiple loadouts, you can switch between them in the field.

For example, my current character has a high-end DPSing plate-wearer. He's got his 'I am übertank' spec, which is mostly invested in a single tank soul. He also has a hybrid soul where he's 50-50 with a DPS soul to really plow through soloing, questing, that kind of stuff. I can switch back and forth between those two anytime I want, and later on I'll go buy a third spec. And maybe later on when I find a different role for myself - PvP perhaps - I'll buy a fourth spec. The idea is to give players the ability to come up with loadouts that they like and be able to switch them at will.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/85697

Ten Ton Hammer: And you can pick up multiple attunements at any level?

Scott Hartsman: This is an open question for us - should we tie multiple specs to different level ranges - i.e. I can buy a second one at 15, a third one at 30, and so on. But the more I play the more I think we don't want to do that - just open them up all at once instead of trickling them out over time.

Ten Ton Hammer: How are players' ability points divided between these multiple attunements? Are you picking and choosing between abilities you've already bought, or is there a separate point pool for each of your attunements?

Scott Hartsman: You have one pool of points for your character. At level one you have 1 point, at level 2 you have two, and so on. It's which places you choose to invest those points is where it goes.

Ten Ton Hammer: In many MMOGs, players typically have their level-up build and their group build, but then at level cap, their chosen build becomes narrowly defined so as to capitalize on their class's core strengths. Is this how you envision things playing out with attunements in Rift?

Scott Hartsman: I think high-end is when you want to give people the most flexibility. For example, wouldn't it be neat if you could take your plate-wearing dude and have him be a cool soloer in one set, a great PvPer in another set, and an awesome raid tank in another set? I think it's really important to give players more things to do in the high-end rather than pigeon-holed into a single role. I think that's kind of boring.

Ten Ton Hammer: But players tend to pigeon-hole themselves, seeking that one über build, right?

Scott Hartsman: Sure, and I think it's on us to make sure we have a game where that's not the end-all-be-all game experience. You're talking about raiding, and the classic case of the tank that's built up and geared up to be a raid tank, and that is it, period, end of sentence. I think it's on us to make games that have more to do even when you're that guy.

Ten Ton Hammer: So from a class design perspective, are you designing with all that in mind? Will there be multiple paths to perfection in any given role?

Scott Hartsman: I don't know how close we'll get to this; I'm a very honest person if nothing else. But the goal is this: no matter what choice you make at character select on day one, the idea is that, yes, you should be able to go be the best at endgame-something, but that you should be able to successfully fulfill multiple roles in group, in raid, and in PvP. We don't want anybody to ever be at the point where they've put hundreds of hours of time into this character, and now that they've hit the end-all-be-all, they're a one trick pony. That's really not fun.

Ten Ton Hammer: So the idea is that there will be no bad class development choices, essentially?

Scott Hartsman: Don't get me wrong, we're giving players the tools to make all kinds of bad choices. But, none of them are irreversible, and sometimes the difference between good and bad is just moving a few points around. We expect there to be a lot of theorycrafting too.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/85694

Ten Ton Hammer: On the classes and callings page , we see nine of the 16 souls revealed. Are you pretty set in concept for what those classes will be?

Scott Hartsman: Absolutely, on all but one. And the other thing is: there's more than 16. That's all I can say on that right now. The thing that you should take away when you look at that website is that that ain't the full complement. There's more.

Ten Ton Hammer: Since not everyone has the time or desire to delve deep into theorycrafting to make the kind of character they want. Is it clearly laid out, or will we have to sit down and puzzle about our character out-of-game using detailed charts and graphs?

Scott Hartsman: I wouldn't worry about that too much, because we expect a couple of things to happen. First, when you have a system like this, and it's customizable, there will be many conversations, threads, etc. of what's your favorite build, what works well for this, etc. In any game, there's going to be some cookie cutters that everyone is going to like. That's fine.

For those who are just in Rift for the social experience and don't want to play the class system at all, that's fine. Just keep investing in the one class you picked. Chances are, you will come out okay. Alternately, built right into the game is the invest and preview ability. It's not a system where every time you click a button [your choice is] confirmed forever. If you go to respec all of your points, yeah, you can respend them nine or ten different ways and experiment with them in real time before you finally hit okay and accept all the changes. We're building that in from the beginning; I think you have to with a system like this.

Ten Ton Hammer: So respec'ing won't break the bank? It's not an escalating amount of money you have to pay?

Scott Hartsman: It's not obscenely escalating, we'll put it that way. We're expecting people to want to do this. Actually, we're expecting people to need to do this. We're tuning it more to be a token cost and less of a 'holy crap, I need to save up tons of money so I can do X tonight.'

Ten Ton Hammer: Some folks think class balance will be an impossible task with the system you've described. I'm not sure how anyone can talk balance prior to beta, but how are you addressing balancing concerns from the get-go?

Scott Hartsman: Sure. Here's the thing: I love when people say, 'Oh, this is going to be hard or impossible to balance' because, to me, that means they're adept at finding ways to cheat the system, which means they're going to have fun with it. That said, there are some people who think of imbalance as a universal problem. Imbalance is only a problem if it traps users into a corner where they have no way to make their situation better. This system gives you so many tools to help you help yourself. And if something is incredibly out of whack, of course we'll deal with it.

Ten Ton Hammer: It often seems to matter more that players have the perception that classes are out of balance, whether they actually are or not. Are there things you can do at this stage to address the perception of imbalance? Sort of work on your trusting relationship with players?

Scott Hartsman: The perception of imbalance I think is always going to exist. I'm actually more afraid of systems where there is no such perception because if you have achieved perfect numeric balance, congratulations, you've just made the more boringly overbalanced game in existence. That's actually far more deadly to the success of a game than making something that had the potential to be too interesting. A lot of it will always come down to how good an individual player is behind the keyboard.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/86647

Ten Ton Hammer: Have you toyed with the idea of class build presets? Sort of the old KOTOR-ish auto-level idea?

Scott Hartsman: It's something we've talked about, but that's the kind of thing where I'd want to see what happens in beta first to determine if we really need that. In our testing so far, we have our own fair share of newbies (on a dev team this size, we have lots of people who aren't involved with the class system at all, and we haven't seen the need for it yet). If we need it, we can go that way.

Ten Ton Hammer: That kind of leads into my last question. The soul tree is a purely level-based development system; you're getting points per level to spend on classes and callings. Will there be a skill-based component to character development as well?

Scott Hartsman: Not to developing primary skills like that, no. Our tradeskill system, however, does use learned skills over time. But for combat, it's all about the leveling. You allude to something that we've had lots of conversations about, continuing to add new dimensions to the system. But we realized we were already going to have our hands full with just the system as spec'ed - we'll try that first and then see if we need new complications. So far, I think we're good. We started out on the assumption that we'd need one full time class designer to handle all the souls, and very rapidly that expanded to 3 and 4. Most games that I've worked on in the past have generally had one person or two. It's rapidly turned into something that we wanted to double down on to ensure we come up with something great. We're trying to put our money where our mouth is on that one.

**Insanecyclone** · 2010-07-12 17:57

Podcast 3
http://www.riftpodcast.com/?p=23

**Alderaan** · 2010-07-16 04:06

PC Gamer Interview

Create three-class combos in Rift: Planes of Telara

You have died. That’s the start, not the end of Rift. You are simply too awesome to stay dead. Instead, you start the game fighting your way through limbo back to the land of the living, at which point you’ll emerge at an interdimensional crossroads, and into the game proper.

Rift is a fantasy MMORPG in a world that’s being invaded by not one, but about half a dozen other planes of existence. Through, yes, rifts. Game-wise, that makes it an unpredictable landscape of sudden attacks pouring out from these portals, and unexpected opportunities to jump through them and explore a completely different universe.

“The entire idea of the engine that the game sits on,” says development director Scott Hartsman, “is that it lets us do some interesting things with dynamic content that you’re not gonna see in other games.” So it’s not just a few ambling critters wandering out of a hole in spacetime – there are rival factions who can take over whole settlements depending on your actions.

http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2010/...-1-590x365.jpg

“Having the world reacting to what the players are doing, so that the balance of power can be pushed from faction to faction, is definitely one of the things we’ll be doing with this system,” says Scott. “There’s a system behind it that knows the state of all the players in the world, so we have ways of intelligently doing this without stepping on the poor level six guy who just wants to beat up the undead.”

Without seeing something like that in action, it’s always hard to judge how much of it is a nice theory and how much will truly make the game world a more exciting place to be in. So the most interesting thing about Rift, to me, is the way that they’re handling classes.

“Players are ascended souls,” Scott says, “and there are some souls that weren’t quite strong enough to make it. So when you begin the game, you choose what your soul was in its life – a Pyromancer, a Nightblade – and that’s the soul you begin with. That determines your abilities, your power system, the primary resource mechanic, and the gear you can use. Then later on, through questing or advancement with NPCs, you can discover other souls. You can collect and, not to sound vampirey but, embrace these other souls.”

You can ultimately embrace up to three different souls at the same time, and they can be different classes to your own. You then pick and choose how to invest your powers across them: spreading them evenly across three different classes, keeping your original as your primary, or even investing everything in one of the new souls you’ve picked up to completely change your character. “It lets players create their own combinations of classes and cool combinations of powers that even we didn’t really foresee,” says Scott.

http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2010/...-2-590x365.jpg

“In all the MMOs I’ve worked on, people have always wanted more and more ways to do interesting things with their classes, and what we’ve done is taken class play and class experimentation and almost turned it into primary gameplay.”

A quick way to find out if someone really loves the game they’re working on is to ask them how they play it. Scott immediately lights up at the question, then hesitates. “Hmm, am I playing announced classes, or classes that I can’t talk about? Right now I’ve been playing a Nightblade/Ranger combination that’s quite a bit of fun. So it’s a guy who has the ability to attack from afar, has the ability to have a buddy out there in the field, and then also has some throwing weapon abilities and an excellent melee finisher.”

Between them, Scott and his team at Trion have worked on 27 different MMORPGs. Sharing and analysing that experience has informed their decisions about Rift on every level, right down to the nitty-gritty like group size. “We’re doing five-man groups – and ten- and twenty-man raids,” says Scott. “The last few games I’ve worked on have been six person groups. The reason we ended up going with five-man groups is if you want to create challenging content, you end up having to solve what’s called the two healer problem.”

http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2010/...-3-590x368.jpg

In a six-person group system,” he explains, “if you make content that’s hard, people will bring two healers to it. Two healers, a tank or two, and a couple of damage-dealers. And what happens if you balance for that kind of group is that you just make it even harder for groups to get off the ground, since healers and tanks tend to be limiting factors.”

“So our goal is to not make it even harder for players to get into groups. It’s one of those things that you don’t really realise until you’ve been doing something the same way for seven years and you think: ‘You know, there’s probably a better way of doing this.’”

It’s nice to think that the sheer number of fantasy MMORPGs out there might actually start making them better, rather than increasingly hard to tell apart.

**Insanecyclone** · 2010-07-19 08:42

I hate that I'm more excited about this than FF14.

http://www.massively.com/2010/07/19/...nes-of-telara/

Video in link is them talking about the classes and the skill tree

You could be forgiven for not catching it immediately from our E3 hands-on with Rift: Planes of Telara, but there are some unique things going on with the game's class system. It's hardly the first game to allow you to change classes, but the game also goes into combining them, shifting aspects, interplay between multiple class types... it's a maze of inter-relationships. Luckily, we have an exclusive video developer diary from the staff at Trion Worlds that discusses the whole setup at length, giving future players a much clearer overview of how the system works.

When players start, they choose one of four Callings -- Warrior, Rogue, Mage, or Cleric -- which determines the player's core playstyle. As they level, they gradually acquire Souls, and it's there that the bulk of a character's abilities come from. It's a fusion of the talent tree system popularized via World of Warcraft with something much more interesting, and the possibilities for mixing the different Souls together can give rise to all sorts of interesting theories. But don't take our word for it -- watch the exclusive developer diary just past the cut.

**Kiarax** · 2010-07-19 08:55

Oh God everyone who works there is so bald. That's a pretty damn awesome class/skill system. Still no word on a release date, right? Might have to give this a shot depending on when it comes out.

**Insanecyclone** · 2010-07-19 09:17

Originally Posted by Kiarax

Oh God everyone who works there is so bald. That's a pretty damn awesome class/skill system. Still no word on a release date, right? Might have to give this a shot depending on when it comes out.

I read somewhere that it's coming out next year. I hope that means the beta will happen sometime later this year.

**Maguspk** · 2010-07-19 09:27

I am thoroughly unimpressed by everything except for the class mixing/matching they mentioned. That could be very interesting, that changes the number of 'classes' from about 8 to nearly 60 and then the allocation of skill points even further customizes each of those 'mixed classes'. The whole 'dynamic', 'world is changing around you', bullshit is just words until I see it working in practice, nearly every MMO claims this feature but none have truly implemented it well.

**Alderaan** · 2010-07-19 10:50

Insanecyclone beat me to it and i totally agree about being excited.

Also from an earlier interview Magus, they were saying that every server has the potential to be completely different depending on the players interactions. I think GW2 is also taking this same approach and it could be really interesting, provided it's implemented well like you said.

This will be interesting to see what direction certain servers take since they will be split up between PVE/PVP/RP.

**Insanecyclone** · 2010-07-26 21:03

Sounds good

http://www.massively.com/2010/07/26/...outgoing-type/

It seems as though one of the holy grails of MMORPG development is to encourage players to be social and group up without forcing them to do so like back in the olden days of yore. Rift's creative director, Scott Hartsman, thinks the dev team's found the key to this problem: "We want our MMO to be a social experience and we've realized that it's not that people don't want to be social, it's just because they don't want to be inconvenienced."

In an interview with ZAM, Hartsman details how Rift: Planes of Telara is hoping to change the minds of players about teaming up for the game's signature instances. While a character can solo through them just fine, the more players that enter a rift equals greater amounts of experience and loot for everyone. Rifts will adjust both loot and difficulty based on the number of players involved, and Trion Worlds expects that this will go a long way to combating antisocial behavior that MMOs have encouraged.

Guilds are another facet of socialization on which Trion plans to focus. "One thing we haven't talked much about is people getting together to build their guild up and build a structure (in the metaphorical sense) that provides you and all of your friends benefits," Hartsman said. You can read the full interview, including details on PvP, at ZAM.

http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=22861 2 page interview

**Lucavi** · 2010-07-26 21:06

FF typically goes the other way: the more people, the less XP and incentives for everyone. Good to see a developer that gets it. The most fun I've had in MMOs or MMORPGs was banding up and getting more xp/loot, ala. diablo, dungeon seige, ect.

**Insanecyclone** · 2010-07-30 22:08

Newsletter mentioned beta keys.

Join us at GamesCom and PAX for Rift Beta codes!

Players at GamesCom 2010 in Cologne, Germany expect to be awed by Rift: Planes of Telara, and Trion is coming through big-time. Anyone who visits the Trion Worlds booth will have their dedication rewarded with a free chance to join the upcoming Rift closed Beta. If you can't make it out to Cologne, fans attending Seattle's PAX will receive Beta codes as well.

Many exciting revelations await GamesCom attendees, including a chance to play the Guardians faction. The original Ascended, the Guardians have their own vision for Telara as they step up to confront both the all-consuming Regulos and the rebellious Defiant. Players will brave new zones and confront new creatures invading Telara through blazing Fire Rifts, all of which will be unveiled at GamesCom and PAX.

http://www.riftgame.com/en/classes/warrior/paladin.php

Paladins stand as a bulwark against their foes, deflecting even the most monstrous blows with their heavy shield and divine blessings. These glorious defenders of the weak deflect incoming damage and retaliate with devastating counterattacks. Martial skill and the blessing of their patron gods let Paladins extend their protection to nearby allies. Fans can learn more about Paladins on the Rift: Planes of Telara website.