Trion Worlds is ready to unleash Conquest to all Rift players. We had the opportunity for a roundtable discussion with Trion's Scott Hartsman and Hal Hanlin to talk about Conquest and what it brings to the game. Check it out!

Starting with Instant Adventure, the Trion Worlds team has been finding this newer addition to Rift's game systems to be very useful on the development side of things because of its modularity. They're able to experiment with new ideas in a "safe" forum, rather than trying to tinker with something in a multi-layered 20-quest chain. For the four new lower-level Instant Adventures, the developers have been playing with different gameplay ideas and lessons learned from previous ones. Hal's favorite iteration in particular is the randomization element present in the new Instant Adventures, where you might think you're doing a standard kill quest, and suddenly a rare mob shows up, you get a cool temporary ability, or some other variation occurs. In terms of bringing Instant Adventure to other zones, Trion Worlds is planning to go much further with the feature, but want to first see how it pans out for Rift's current overall gameplay in conjunction with Mentoring.

Read more of Som Pourfarzaneh's Rift: Conquest Roundtable.

lookin' good Trion. keep up the good work.

Rift will also be getting global, cross-server chat, with which Trion Worlds is taking a wait-and-see approach to determine how well it works.  Rather than over-legislating global chat from the get-go, out of fear that it will be overwhelming to players' chat logs, they'd prefer to put it out there and see how it is used and received, and tweak it accordingly.  In addition, while cross-game chat a là Battle.net is certainly on their radar, the Trion Worlds team's overriding priority is the speed and quality of individual games' updates.

I was surprised Scott felt this way considering his EQ2 background

for the last 8 years, SOE has offered cross server chat and across different games  -- but maybe SOE didnt do much analysis for how chat was being used

"combat-ready ferrets" 

This is what I have been waiting on!!! Finally! Battle Ferrets! No more are they just cute, adorable marsupials. Now they are armed to the teeth, ready to unleash terror on Telara!

Originally posted by gbooster

"combat-ready ferrets" 

This is what I have been waiting on!!! Finally! Battle Ferrets! No more are they just cute, adorable marsupials. Now they are armed to the teeth, ready to unleash terror on Telara!

Ferret speciality move - climb up trouser leg - double bite attack - ouch!

All ferrets are already combat ready. 

Meh, I just canceled by acct again. Yawn.

@Nadia - The situation we were in my past job was a little different.  We had multiple games that were live already, and already in regular update cadences.  Having them add a common chat system was different than the situation we're in right now, where we have one live game and two in development. 

All I meant by that is that we're being careful not to add even *more* pre-launch work to those games. We'd rather that they each focus on being as much fun as possible.

I'd definitely like us to get to the point where chat et al is truly global, but not at the expense of the new games getting themselves launched at the best quality they possibly can be.  That's all.   Hope that makes more sense. :)

- Scott

@hartsman thanks, Scott!

@ hartsman - fix your broken c/c wars and gear grind since you want to release more pvp stuff without fixing all this broken terrible c/c that stacks. Ive never ever raged in a pvp game until I played Rift level 50 pvp nor cancelled my account based around it. And this is coming from a DAOC WAR Shadowbane player for years. PVP in RIFT is what truely holds this game back as a decent title. Not the creativity of the new stuff and warfronts but the broken class system and gear grinding so your not a 3 or 4 shot wonder. Its ridiculous...

Originally posted by mCalvert

Meh, I just canceled by acct again. Yawn.

Yep.  Most of people I played with came back a few weeks ago and all of them have already cancelled again.  I pretty much hear the same thing from them.  Its still the same game, not worth a subscription again.  While some people still enjoy this game, (and I am truly happy people enjoy the game) I won't be going back.

My point here isn't to discourage anyone and I want to make that clear. I am simply trusting the people I played with.  Ultimately if you find a game you like, play the heck out of it and enjoy it.  All that really matters is that the game is something you want to play and your happy playing it.