Rift: Planes of Telara

Arcaus_sl said:

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.



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.

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The rewards were only bad if you didn't contribute enough. I got tons of good loot from rifts in beta.

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.



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

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Eon, defiance etc were in the pipeline before rift launched.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

Highlighted the relevant info there.

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We were talking about beta, a_skeleton_03. And how they nerfed them from beta to launch.

Flipmode_sl said:

The rewards were only bad if you didn't contribute enough. I got tons of good loot from rifts in beta.

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The person I quoted was talking about release. My statement was about release. What I quoted had release as the third word....

That actually sounds like a smarter plan; releasing a major expansion after 64 bit client and multi-core processing support sounds like the best fit. Make it more like a Rift 1.5, instead of a releasing a whole new "Rift 2.0". Then start patching in newer models. WoW also got smart about content revision with Cataclysm, they redesigned zones where they needed to.

Dandai_sl said:

I disagree about Cat content revision being smart. These are purely out-of-ass numbers/speculation, but I'd wager they lost way more veteran subs than subs they gained from new player subs during Cat. There was a dearth of end game content that was explained away by the revamped low level content. Anecdotally, Cat is the only expansion I only played for a month and then came back the month before MoP.

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Yeah, i didn't even make it a month in Cataclysm

Dandai_sl said:

I disagree about Cat content revision being smart. These are purely out-of-ass numbers/speculation, but I'd wager they lost way more veteran subs than subs they gained from new player subs during Cat. There was a dearth of end game content that was explained away by the revamped low level content. Anecdotally, Cat is the only expansion I only played for a month and then came back the month before MoP.

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I dont like revised old zones. They may be really good, but i cant help it, it always feels like i have already done the zone, not interested to do it again... Simply copy WOW again and do an expansion like Legion. Gear reset, big new continent, new story, new max lvl, level-scaling mechanics, free boosted char. Its like a Rift 1.5 and everyone can start with the expansion right away. And redo the souls system. Either scrap it and make it standard classes or change it back to more real variety.

I was at Rift Studios before release with a bunch of gamer "press", and they were a bunch of casual fucks who maybe played WOW to level 20. I was told a story, which I've told before here, that before Scott came on board they had a dynamic system that would take over the world and you had to fight it back. That was basically the game. If you remember devs talked about how rifts could basically destroy zones and you had to fight them. This was all turned around after Scott came on board.

I've heard from devs that the game was complete dogshit. Systems, classes, content was just broken or fucked. They had one system and the rest was crap. Scott came in, plunked down a quest system and turned a game around inside a year or two and release a moderately successful game. He kind of saved the game like he did with EQ2. Essentially Scott did the best he could do with a short timetable and the resources he had in hand and he did a pretty damn good job of it.

Now, for Rift 2 or whatever the fuck it is. If it's a tab target/quest based game it's going to flop and if he's reading this he needs to just pull the plug. No one is playing those games anymore.

If I were going to make Rift 2 right now, with the way games are trending (diversity, niche online markets etc) I would make it a persistent H1Z1/Survival kind of game with Rifts, classes and levels and gear. Make it more action based than anything else. I don't know if they have a talent to create a BDO/TERA/B&S combat system that works well over a network. But FPS systems are relatively easy to do and they have the Defiance tech at least to try.

That's my half ass prediction.

Rift Beta was a pretty damn good game. remake that game put it on PS4 and I am in.

It was the same game except Rifts were turned up and you actually got great loot from them. The neckbeards at Trion (and there were a lot of hardcore eq1 folks there) tuned down the rifts and rift rewards. Never knew why.

haha blame it on the neckbeards! Scott is basically the anti version of neckbeard by the looks of that released game.. If he wanted that shit to stay it would have.

My guess is the neckbeard devs made the dungeons which was the best part about that game until they got nerfed.

The invasions are still there and are boring as fuck once you have experienced it once or twice.

Yep because they are the same. The premise was great but they ruined it with the nerfs in the first 2 weeks. They needed to do more with it and stick to the original idea but too many pampered wow players bitched early and they caved. In doing so they were made into a wow clone that was not as good as wow. Also the first few zones were polished and the invasions worked. But too much was broken as you got into your 30-40s they fixed it but none of it had the same flair as the early zone invasions. Just rifts opening and sitting static because of the 10 minute despawn nerf.

Shame really.

Whatever you do Trion, please no more of:

sandbox, survival, pvp, moba, esports, hardcore, online-shooter, online tcg...

we got more than enough of those (released and in development)

If you need money make a console port for Rift 1.5/2 (buy to play). If its any good you will make enough bucks to cover development easily...

Eh, the invasions in Rift that shut down locations were usually bugged in early release. As in, you'd have an invasion over some little quest hub/along the only way to get to some location, and it would start chain spawning on top of itself. You'd have hundreds of npcs stacked onto each other and even much higher level players would get instagibbed trying to kill them, esp. if they had to melee. I was bleeding edge on my server and running around fighting the various non-elite tier rifts solo and opening up content (before they started resetting the servers a bunch to fix the spawning issue) was really fun at first. But the bugged invasion spots were just really rampant, especially in whatever the Dark Woods zone was in the 10s/20s for Guardian side was. The werewolf city area (it's been a minute; can't exactly remember the name of the area) had some hub right before the only bridge leading into the place, and it would trigger an invasion that would just chain spawn stacking mobs. Had literally dozens of people in the level range (and eventually lots of higher level people) trying to kill it but the mobs were basically insta-respawning as well as stacking. If I remember correctly, this was also some major questline requirement and you basically had to wait for a server reset to clear it. They were resetting the server I was on every few hours because of it during the first couple of weeks, and I think the despawn was more because they couldn't get it to work right early on so they just had them go away a lot faster in case it was bugged.