Part Three of My Visit to Trion: The Roundtable Completed!

Let’s continue where we left off!  I have a whole lot more to go over, so buckle up and get ready for a ton of information!

 

The State of Raids and Expansions

Starting off with todays post with a question from Draegan (of Rift Junkies) in which he asks about a comment that Trion recently made about having more raid content than they had originally planned for launch and what allowed for that.

Scott stated quite simply that the team kicked ass, simple as that.

Hal: Yeah, what he said was right.  The team said, “you know what, what we have is good.  We can make another one, I had this dream….

Hal, Scott and Russ then used this to illustrate a point about their team.  Basically, because the servers are so stable and they are not having to put out huge structural fires the team is able to work ahead.  A byproduct of this, Russ says, is that the morale of the team is so high that the team works that much harder.  He goes on to say that they receive emails from the team at 2:45 in the morning talking about a new raid idea they had.

Russ:  At 2;45am I have people working on my game.  Not because I am sitting there, kicking them in the nuts saying you need to work on this game.  Its because they love this game and that is how you make a great game.

Arithion (Of Rift Podcast)  moves the conversation along by asking about the UI in raids and the possibility of a guild calendar.

Scott says that he has a Power Point presentation with an entire list of things that they want to add into the game at some point, it was just a matter of prioritizing it and getting it organized.  He says that most everything that players have been asking for is on the Power Point presentation.  I, of course, asked to see the Power Point presentation.  He said no. 😦

I go on to ask what their expected release schedule was in terms of content patches and expansions.  Scott replied that they have an outline of how they want it to go for the next few years but it entirely depends on release and what they see afterwards.

Scott:  Very literally, its promise nothing right now, until we see what happens when the rubber hits the road.

The Racials

Arithion asks if the racials in the game currently will be the racials at launch.  Scott says that the abilities will be but not the +stat modifiers.

Scott: From the start we wanted to make the racials impactful.  We aimed for impactful but kind of went the wrong direction.  I will say that flat out.  We made them as impactful as like an incredible activated high level trinket.  So where, your racial was magically ten percent of your power.  Holy crap that was not what we wanted to go for ever.

Instead they wanted to shoot for impactful fun.  I had to ask who came up with hibernate, the single worst racial ability ever.  Scott is quick to take “credit” for that, to much laughter.

Scott: To give you an example of development teams not always agreeing with one another; Hey, Russ, what did you think of Hibernate?

Russ:  Oh, my God….

The conversation immediately after this was really funny.  Russ says that the original idea was good but that they kept changing it with things like not being able to be used in combat and then killing you after awhile.

Scott:  But, wait!  We’ll put zzzz’s on it!

More on Future Content

Draegan asks if content planned after release will be solely raid content or do they plan five man and solo content as well as new zones.  Scott says that their immediate plans are to extend raid content but they do have other content as well.  They are wanting to make sure that raid content is solid, fun and complete first and then build from there.

Scott: We’ve been in production on post-launch content for quite awhile now.

Russ: Oooh, yeah…

Scott:  Again, its a weird luxury to have, honestly.  I’ve never worked on a game where we were this far on post-launch content pre-launch.

I ask if they are planning on EQ2-style progression, in which the expansions come with a level cap raise or DAoC-style progression, in which the expansions do not increase the level cap but give you other types of advancement.

Scott says that they have not gotten that far yet because they are so focused on launch and content immediately after but that they are fortunate to have members on the team that have created both vertical and horizontal advancement.  He also adds that his first job in EQ was the design of the AA system but that they have to be really careful with any type of AA implementation.  Due to the way AAs worked it could get really confusing as far as who was more powerful than who.  You would have one guy who was level 72 with `26 AAs and another that was level 75 that had only 4 AAs, causing confusion and problems in content design.  They want to avoid that.

Draegan is next up with a question and this one is a really good one.  He asks how long it takes to implement new dynamic content, from design to actually getting it onto the server.

Scott:  It depends entirely on the complexity of the Rift.  Anywhere from an hour to a month depending on how complex the thing is.  I mean, you could build an entire zone out of our Rift tech right now.

He goes on to state that they could create a smaller event in an hour and implement it immediately onto the server with no patches.  The toolset they have allows them to do some really crazy things in real time without even turning stuff down.

Draegan continues with questions by asking if they have plans for GM led events.  Scott says that they can and are doing that right now.  GMs can spawn events and so can the server itself.  He says that they have decided to make the big events a top down decision and not solely a GMs discretion.

Scott: The interesting thing with doing it with GMs manually is that it really doesn’t scale to success.

He says that in the early betas they had developers playing the role of GMs and doing it manually to prove to themselves that it doesn’t scale well and they found out that it did not.   They still can schedule events for a certain time but the world is not dependent on it and the servers handle most of it themselves.

The Soul System

Draegan continues to monopolize the questions (Just kidding, Draegan!  They were great questions!) by asking how easy or hard it was to implement a new Soul.  Russ says that it depends on the Soul and Arithion says she wants a ninja in the Rogue archetype.

Russ:  A ninja in the Rogue class?  Only if a pirate is the warrior class!   So, a new soul is not simple.  One that is a fully, honest to God new Soul and integrates into all the other things.  Just for balance.  That will take awhile.  If I wanted to make a soul that allows you to dance in the city, I could do that pretty quick.

This seems like a perfect opportunity, so I use this to ask about the fluff Souls that they had talked about earlier in interviews.

Scott: We’ve been concentrating on getting interesting things out in the world through collection rewards, story-line quest rewards, the racials.  So, we’ve been focused on that.  We only had certain amounts of bandwidth to do the fun stuff.  So, we are trying to get the fun stuff integrated into all the right places.

Russ continues by saying that the tricky thing about souls is how it works with all the other souls.  They want to make something thats fun, not just something that is an add-on.  Scott says that it would need a lot more planning before they talk about that.

Scott:  I mean think about it.  Imagine you are sitting around as your Reaver/Paladin warrior and you decide you want to run your cook soul that puts on your chef hat and makes you run around yelling “Bork, bork, bork!!’, wouldn’t it be really annoying to have to swap out your warrior soul to do that?

The conversation then takes a turn into talking about what things Trion can track in the game.  Scott says that every single thing that you do in the game can be tracked.  How many times you respec and anything that affects yourself, the economy, a creature or another player can be tracked.  I ask if that means if they know how may times I have ganked somebody.

Scott: Oh yeah.  I can’t tell if you ganked them or just killed them legitimately but we know how many times you killed them.

Come on, Scott!  Ganking IS legitimate!  🙂

My next question was about the PvP souls and whether they should get their own slot and not take up one of the three slots as they do now.  Scott says that there goal is to not make them a required Soul for PvP.  They want to make them available if you want them or want to do a specific thing but not completely necessary.

Scott:  Thats the other reason you can only put 21 points in them.  They are not full 51 point souls for that reason.

Auto-face and Auto-run

Arithion asks if they plan to implement an auto-run feature like Lineage II and Aion.

Scott: No, no, no, no, no, no.  We are also not doing auto-face.  Don’t get me wrong, the first time I saw a game with auto-run and auto-face I thought that it was really cool and useable.  And then, the bots came.  And anything that bots make that much easier, we really won’t do.

Okay, I have to admit, at this point I cheered.  I am so very tired of the auto-face arguments on the forums.  Hopefully they will quit now, once and for all.  No auto-face people!

Scott says that they understood that seeing your target during a fire rift was difficult so they changed the target UI and they added the tracking abilities.

Next up, I ask when we are getting to go to the Planes themselves.

Scott: So, I won’t answer that question but I will answer a different one.  The thing that is always tricky to do when introducing new content to any game, is that you always need to make sure you are always showing something ‘cooler than’.  So, if you are interested in our game today, what we show you tomorrow should probably be cooler than whats there today.  You want to make sure that the next thing you are releasing is cooler than what you just released and, speaking as a guy that actually did release and expansion that was all about Planes at one point, its really difficult to go to a place ‘cooler than’ once you go all Planes all the time. Our plan is always show more and greater, without jumping the shark.  You don’t want to do the Arthur Fonzarelli moment a month after you launch.

After some talk about Guild broadcasts and server broadcasts (they are doing Guild and server broadcasts but they are not doing world-wide broadcasts, as in first time a raid is completed.), I asked if there would be an Armory type feature.  Scott says that they have thought of one but that they wanted to get the game working first before they put effort into something like that.  He says that if they had one today he could think of about ten features that would not be in the game.

Scott then says that he would not be surprised to see an IPhone and Droid app soon.  It seems they have devs in-house that have done apps before.

Gold-Sellers/Spammers/Botters/Hackers

I ask how Trion intends to deal with Gold-sellers and spammers.  Scott says that they already have a spam filter in-game that gets more intelligent as spam is reported.  Similar to the spam filter in your Gmail account. As far as hackers:

Scott: We already do things like track speed hackers.  Track people who are trying to do bad things to our client that I can’t really go into detail about.  I mean we already get reports on them six times a day and CS is even banning them in betas and even canceling pre-orders.  That is fifty dollars we do NOT want.

Character Customization

Arithion asks about character customization and if we will see more of it in the future.  Scott says that we will see more skin tones, hairstyles and other things but they have to be very careful with adding to much because of the impact on performance.  Everything they add to character customization can have a drastic impact on frame-rates and they have to guard against adding too much and ending up running like Vanguard.  Since they support these open, huge events it would be a shame to open up character creation and then no one could play the events because of performance.

Scott: We can’t de-rift Rift by making cooler characters.  By the end of the day if its Rift gameplay versus characters, Rift gameplay has to win otherwise we don’t have a product.

Scott does say that they will have to do a “barber-shop” type feature in the future.

Wrapping Up

The rest of the Round Table slowed down a bit as we asked more questions that they really could not answer.  I am going to do a bullet point for the remainder of the info.

• They have plans for more World PvP and an extension of the Wardstone system but they are unable to reveal much about it yet.
• They have thought about doing a Darkness Falls style contested dungeon but they want to see how popular it might be.  (hint, hint!)
• The game currently supports X-Fire and SLi, as well as multi-core processors.
• Port Scion can not be talked about yet but it will be a big deal. They have big plans for it that they are not quite ready to release.  I am expecting an open PvP zone with a major twist.

That about ends it.  There were more questions asked but they could not be answered or released.  I am assuming that the answers are all in that damn Power Point presentation.  Damn you, Scott!

Again, I want to thank Scott, Russ, Hal and the rest of Trion for this opportunity to sit down and ask these questions.

Also, I should have my final thoughts on stuff covered by the embargo later today and my final thoughts on the visit!  See you all then!