Scott Hartsman Interview

MMORPG.com:

And will players be able to keep the characters they’ve made so far for future beta events?

Scott Hartsman:

So far, yes. There’s been nothing that’s forced us to make that not be the case.

MMORPG.com:

While players seem to be enjoying the Rift s system, one criticism that has been leveled is that the Rifts are over too quick. Has this simply been the result of the sheer amount of players showing up to them?

Scott Hartsman:

A lot of what we had previously, we had intentionally set up for very small audiences. Now that we’re getting into larger scale testing we’re able to actually turn on the scalability of the system, such that the creatures are far more difficult and that they’re over a lot more slowly. The first beta was more about, “Will the system hold up at all?” The second beta was more about taking all the feedback from beta one and tuning it correctly and making it population scale correctly. Beta two was the first time we showed off the true population scaling in terms of strength of all of the creatures in all the events, as well as the mass scale event itself, which was very definitely not over quickly. There were a couple of tweaky things with it that let some folks get through it quicker than they actually should have had they had to defeat all the objectives, but on the servers that played it legit, I mean we’re talking an event that was taking an entire zone of people an hour to play through. So, don’t think of it in terms of a single Rift having to be interesting, think about it in terms of Rifts being a component of a larger type of gameplay.

MMORPG.com:

Both beta events featured dungeons for level 20 players. What sort of feedback have you received on these dungeons? How often can players expect to tackle new dungeons in the full game?

Scott Hartsman:

There are new dungeons in almost every zone in the game, which is good. We try to make sure that there’s something every few levels all the way up to the top, and then some new stuff that you see only once that you’re at level cap. The feedback so far has been very good, people have called it epic, called it a great crawl. We’ve had some people blowing through it in 45 minutes, other people playing it for two and a half hours as they learn their souls and the rest of it. Same thing when we did the Guardian side, we had people playing through the Realm of the Fae, people really loved, it seemed like they loved it, it seemed like they were enjoying it. We had a lot of activity in there, but yeah, I think the instance for the second event actually got downplayed a little bit by accident when the zone events turned into such a huge attraction that they turned out to be. There were people shouting, it’s kind of funny, as if this was being hand run by a human being, instead of, people weren’t quite getting that no, this is the game doing this, this isn’t a Game Master sitting there spawning stuff, this is the game. And so they were shouting things in global chat, like, “GM! Wait! We’re still in an instance!” and so people were really wanting to come outside and see what the world change was all about.

MMORPG.com:

On the more technical side of things, what is the status of NVIDIA SLI support / AMD Crossfire support for Rift?

Scott Hartsman:

It’s still something that we’re trying to get nailed down for launch, we’ve got some time to do that yet. Those same engineers that would be working on that, have actually been working on hardcore optimizations in the time since, actually, even as far back as pre-beta, but like, one of their big changes that we called out in the beta two announcement, was that we just introduced new types of threading into the client to handle multi-core systems that much better and get a whole lot better performance. On machines that were high-end, high-end, sorry, mid-to-high-end machines we saw the FPS increase anywhere from 15-to-20 percent just from that. So, working on some more specialized support for people with dual hardware is something we totally want to do, but our priority has been dealing with issues that impact 100% of everybody first.

MMORPG.com:

Finally, would you like to leave any thoughts for our readers?

Scott Hartsman:

Like I said, if there are two things that I think we’ve taken away from this beta cycle, it’s been if you haven’t seen a zone event, you just haven’t seen Rift. It’s that kind of a game changer, it’s really really fun, and it’s not something going on anywhere else. And then the other thing being, if people have tried the Soul System in the past, and thought it might have felt a little bit too restrictive, or wasn’t giving them enough options sooner, look, we agree, and we’re happy to put the next iteration of it out there for people’s reactions, pretty damn soon! In about a week, actually.