Rift: Planes of Telara

Convo_sl said:

Rift 2 should just be what Rift 1 was suppose to be.

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Maybe they can hire ponytail and he can fuck that up too.

Trion's current business model will never allow them to make a good MMORPG ever again. Which is a shame, considering that I think Hartsman actually has some pretty good ideas.

I tried to get Scott in to participate, and I think he will but he implied not until after GDC. Hopefully he can add some nice discussion to Trion's current stance on MMOs.

Trion has gone to hell in the last few months. They must be in some kind of a cash bind because they changed all of their games from sub to F2P to squeeze every last dollar out of the customer.

Earring slots and plane of water attunement used to be bought with an expansion pack or with in game currency, now credits. Super minion missions? Now Credits. Want to queue a specifc warfront or dungeon? Have to be a patron.

Worst has been pushing out raid tiers before they are anywhere near done just so that they can sell the current tier items on the cash shop for money to the overwhelming majority of the player base who haven't cleared the current tier. (A Trion pledge was that they would never have the top tier gear for sale)

This has led to a mass exodus of the top tier raiders and the population in general. The only website dedicated to the game closed up shop because of the direction the devs were taking the game. People who used to make guides left for the same reason.

Right now they keep loosing players so they do these changes to eek more cash out of the current players, which then makes more of them leave, creating a never ending cycle.

I'd stay away.

gogojira_sl said:

I tried to get Scott in to participate, and I think he will but he implied not until after GDC. Hopefully he can add some nice discussion to Trion's current stance on MMOs.

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Has he posted here before? Would love to pick his brain about several things. I have theories/guesses on what happened to Trion after Rift's launched and I wonder how much of it he would be able to confirm as true.

Ceowulff_sl said:

Trion has gone to hell in the last few months. They must be in some kind of a cash bind because they changed all of their games from sub to F2P to squeeze every last dollar out of the customer.

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So here's the short version of my (conspiracy) theory on what happened at Trion Worlds after the successful launch of Rift:

• Rift launches successfully, everyone's happy
• Execs at Trion get massive egos and line up three big projects: Defiance, End of Nations, and Warface
• Defiance is being developed in-house, execs decide to give them their own studio in San Diego because the hands-off approach worked for Rift
• Meanwhile they're working on publishing End of Nations and Warface
• Eventually it's time for Defiance's release and it bombs hard, just absolute, massive failure
• Trion execs jump to the conclusion that hands-off was the wrong approach, and now decide noting is allowed to be hands-off
• They tell the original End of Nations devs to fuck off and buy the IP from them to be developed in house which changes the game into a generic MOBA clone cash cow that never leaves Alpha
• Crytek gets pissed at Trion and pulls the plug on the Warface deal, opting to publish it themselves
• Hartsman and Elrar leave Trion for unknown reasons, my speculation is exec bullshit
• Everything is failing, Trion is doomed
• Board of investors fires current execs, rehires Hartsman as CEO
• Hartsman had a religious experience while he was away from Trion and discovered Kickstarter
• Huge restructuring of Trion happens, including a three month period of silence where the San Diego office is closed and Defiance is relocated to Trion HQ
• Trove gets released with Founder's Packs, the response is more money than Trion has seen since their inception
• Rift becomes F2P cash chow, board of investors is in love with Hartsman because the company is actually green again even though the players are pissed
• Trion finally moves forward on ArcheAge, exploiting Founder's Packs for more buckaroos
• The board of investors are worshipping Hartsman and have converted to Kickstarterists as well
• Red Door finally gets finished and rebranded as Glyph but it's absolute shit so no one cares
• Every future Trion game will sell Founder's Packs because money money money, but secretly, I think Hartsman knows that this isn't what his gamers wanted

I know he's posted here before and didn't Draegen run one of the more popular Rift sites? Pretty sure he had contact with him or the devs.

Out of the Trion stable I only really played Rift. I played about 30 minutes of AA and Trove, but not enough to count. Of all the people running MMO companies, Scott always seemed like one of the only ones that wasn't selling a load of bullshit. I'd love to support another of his projects.

Rift, at least in my mind, is hurting for a sequel. Gathering the finances for that might be a rather tricky task, but that's where Scott comes in!

I like Hartsman as a game director/producer. I don't like him as a CEO, though I'm sure his investors love him because he basically saved Trion and is the main factor behind its money-printing status today.

I know this is going to sound dumb for a game called Rift, but I kinda wish there weren't rifts. Maybe just leave out the Rift part and focus on Telara.

Hartsman used to post quite a bit (for a dev). He even responded to private messages. Talked with him briefly about the split in design philosophy with Rift in that it seemed torn between being a group-based explore-and-conquer game and a solo-friendly quest-on-rails. He seemed slightly disappointed it went in the quest-on-rails direction and pointed out there was still a ton of group content in Rift, even open world stuff, but of course most people ignored it because everything about the game ushered you from quest hub to quest hub. Rift had a ton of potential and had some of my favorite pre-raid content, but any chance of being a meaningful long-term game was killed with the must-have-quests-at-every-stop mentality. Not to mention world pvp that was pointless in favor of instanced pvp that was even more pointless.

I want the first option you mentioned.

Scott used to say overland dungeons were a waste of dev time. Wonder if he still feels that way?

Convo_sl said:

Scott used to say overland dungeons were a waste of dev time. Wonder if he still feels that way?

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I dunno if he ever really felt they were inherently a waste in any game design, so much as a realization the type of game they started making didn't fit with overland dungeons. There's no point in having overland dungeons if people don't ever explore off the path of quest markers. And there's no point in open world group content when you can just queue up for an instanced dungeon and be instantly teleported there (if one player is camped out or made the run) and not interrupted and have it scripted, etc. Ironically, the rifts themselves were complained about heavily for impeding on people's questing and progressing. Open world objectives or dungeons were at least not complained about, just ignored, making them the height of wasted dev time.

I think Hartsman is smart enough to incorporate open world dungeons if that was the direction of the game. Hell, Rift was on the cusp of being an amazing group-based challenging PVE game and/or open-world PvP. Then they succumb to linear questing and controlled instanced content and Scott is smart enough to know if you offer either of those things you can't really have the same type of open world challenges, as they're different games and time and again it's proven these opposing philosophies don't co-exist very well.

I would have liked to see what would have happened if Rift cut out the dual faction bullshit and focused development more on the open world, cutting out quest hubs and the linear crap. The dungeons were fun and challenging. The rifts could be fun and challenging. There were open world points that were fun and challenging. The class system was fun and flexible, so people who wanted to solo could find builds and manage instead of it being possible for anyone and everyone despite the build and you could switch between builds as needed without sitting around LFG. It was primed to be an amazing game with actual group content and a somewhat meaningful/challenging open world, with a least a little bit of dynamic in the rifts. But instead they catered to the quest hub mentality and with that came nerfs when people complained they couldn't quest effectively because all the things I'd argue that made the game interesting and challenging and fun would get in the way of people mindlessly soloing unchallenging quest-hub content.

But anyway, maybe Pantheon will turn things around.

Pyros_sl said:

I don't know if Rift 2 would be well received regardless of the quality of the game at this point, given Trion's reputation now. After Archeage, Trion basically became the worst F2P company, comparable to Nexon and worse than NCsoft, at least that's what I gather from various mmo boards/reddits. Rift 2 would very unlikely be a sub game and would probably just be straight F2P, which would paint a huge black mark on it right from the start. And it wouldn't even be wrong, most likely.

On the reminiscing part, I think Rift was pretty ok overall, but being in beta for a long time before release kinda burned me out especially since we did a bunch of the raid content there before it was released. The game also lacked some engaging content to do other than the raid which was too short initially. The class balance was also fairly poor and the entire concept of being able to mix and match souls was ruined by souls being class specific and shit, so many classes only had some of the roles and could only use one soul for the role(chloro for healing as a mage, justicar for tanking as a cleric etc). Something about bards being too good and way too boring to play too, from what I heard.

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There was a lot of super sweeping balance changes shortly after release. I played... 3 months? Or something afterwards, and they absolutely gutted a lot of the free-form build concepts because the game is very (jfc, I hate that I'm even referencing this) DIKU based with specific roles, and having a tank that literally just gathers mobs and gets -stronger- as the number of bad guys increases is not allowed within that paradigm. Same with the Rogue Saboteur path, and a lot of other big nerfs because of either community outcry or being obviously overpowered (31reaver/10vk/10war I think comes directly to mind) that lead to the breaking of a lot of really neat and fun builds. It became very watered down and your choice of specialization depending on role were much more limited to be "effective." It's what lead to the silly warrior/beastmaster builds that out-dpsed everyone with a simple macro because they neutered everything else in previous balance patches.

I'm sure that's all changed and stuff, but the modability of the system (the primary non-rifts driving point) was completely gutted, especially with the very tight tuning of the high end 5man content. If you didn't have a soul spec devoted to being completely useful in your role, you were a liability in many of the dungeons.

The chance for Trion to build another "almost AAA-MMO" is probably 0%. Way to risky in the current extremely saturated market.

Rift will get engine upgrades this year (true multi-core support and a 64bit client) to make the game run better. After that, a "relaunch" with a big expansion and real marketing would be a good idea in my opinion. The expansion could be effectively Rift 2, move the timeline up a bit, do a gear reset and start a completely new storyline. Do it like Blizz with WoW, sell the expansion with a free (current-max-lvl) char and nobody has to play the catchup-game. The expansion would have to be really big content-wise for this to work, i dont know if they could pull it off.

Re: overland-dungeons
As long as all dungeons scale to your level (mobs AND loot) the more dungeons the better. The technology is pretty standard today. Maybe even do some kind of scaling for overland zones to make them relevant at max level.

Where should I begin? Let's go from the start, shall we?

I played Rift in beta and it was very fun, despite being the standard theme park MMO. It felt rewarding to participate in the rift events, you got a lot of planarite, in fact just enough to purchase a couple pieces from the vendor before moving to the next zone. So if you were doing world content, possibly with other players, you got better gear.
Rifts and invasions were interesting and aside from major events, you could claim back a camp on your own if you wanted, given enough time of course.

Then came release: planarite drops were nerfed into the ground (less than 1/3rd if I recall correctly), rifts weren't popping often enough, people complained that their precious quest hubs were overrun by mobs and they couldn't follow their sleep-inducing path to level cap (where they usually dropped the game right away). Later on there was a remake of the talent trees, where hybrid builds were discouraged and rendered basically pointless.

Fuck, beta Rift was actually a decent game, I'm sorry it became what it is now. I played that game quite a lot, I had a level 50 cleric, rogue and mage that I enjoyed equally. I tanked, healed and dps'ed with a lot of different builds. The world was nicely done and the dungeons were top notch.

Rift 2? Depending on their design docs I could either love it or hate it. Black Desert made me discover again the beauty of a world where I just live in and feel immersed, no instant travel, no istances, maybe wishing an eventual Rift 2 could go this route is too much, but why not? Isn't everyone sick of theme parks by now?

Miele_sl said:

Then came release: planarite drops were nerfed into the ground (less than 1/3rd if I recall correctly), rifts weren't popping often enough, people complained that their precious quest hubs were overrun by mobs and they couldn't follow their sleep-inducing path to level cap

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I was one of the people that complained about that. Why? Rifts were worthless. The exp was bad and the rewards were bad. There were a couple of very dynamic ones which had some cool mechanics but most of them were a bad version of a Diablo game. Kill monster after monster for 5 minutes.

Kriptini_sl said:

Has he posted here before? Would love to pick his brain about several things. I have theories/guesses on what happened to Trion after Rift's launched and I wonder how much of it he would be able to confirm as true.

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I would doubt if he did come back and post that where he talks about that stuff. It would be like shooting yourself in the foot. As far as I know he still wants to be in the industry, no one wants to hire a guy who spills dirty laundry when he leaves.

I agree, the rifts were awful as far as rewards go which just made them a nuisance