We took a break from the Game Developers Conference to head to Trion Worlds' studio and talk with the producer about Rift's launch and beyond.

During our time at the Game Developers Conference, we had the opportunity to swing by the Trion Worlds studio in Redwood City, CA and speak with Producer Adam Gershowitz and Senior Community Manager Cindy "Abigale" Bowens about the recent launch of Rift.

To kick things off, Editor-in-Chief Darryl "Togikagi" Gangloff talked with Gershowitz about Rift's smooth launch, the process of adding new servers, team members playing the game during work (hey, wouldn't you?), and the fact that experience from rifts is getting a boost. He also hinted that players can expect to see all sorts of new content added in the first couple months of updates.

Keep reading after the jump for the full interview with Adam Gershowitz, and check back with ZAM tomorrow for our interview with Cindy Bowens!

ZAM: What was the Rift launch like from your perspective?

Adam Gershowitz: It's weird. People kept saying, “launch is coming up, you must be overwhelmed!” The answer is it was a little bit anticlimactic. To be honest, we launched the game like eight times before we actually launched it. All things considered, launch day went really smoothly. We were really excited. We were more interested in beating the queue than anyone else. Yes, developers have to wait in queue. Launch day for us was a lot of just playing with the players. Admittedly, we did have hiccups here and there, but it went really smoothly.

The past couple weeks have been very exciting for us, but we've been able to move on as well as start looking at what we're doing post-launch. With MMOs, launch is only the beginning. Launch was a lot of fun. We've all been cramming to get to 50 just like everybody else. We're now looking forward to next month, and the month after, and the month after, and six months from then, and all that other fun stuff.

ZAM: So you work on Rift all day, and then you play Rift during your free time as well?

Gershowitz: We definitely have problems with people playing at work from time to time (laughs). We try not to frown upon those things. All of Thursday and Friday, for example, my entire group and most of the design group... actually, I think the entire studio was playing. A lot of people play during their launch or for an hour or two before or after, and generally everyone keeps a reasonably high amount of play. It's kind of tough when you're working nominally eight, realistically 10 to 12 hours a day on a project, and then you've got family and other things to juggle along with the game. Myself in particular, I'm not going to be the first person to level 50, even though a gave a good try the first weekend. I try to put in a couple hours a day.

ZAM: So what calling do you play?

Gershowitz: A bunch of different stuff. Being one of the guys involved with the game systems, I tend to mix and match everywhere. The current character that I'm playing, the first character I'm leveling up, is a cleric. Everybody loves a healer and I know that if I'm lagging just a little bit behind everybody else, that's the one nice class healer-wise that I can go ahead and join in a dungeon if I'm not quite the right level. That's my first character through the game. My second I plan on running with a rogue, and my third will be a warrior or mage. Hopefully before six months I'll have all four to 50.

ZAM: So getting back to queues, a lot of servers were added during head start and launch. What goes into choosing to open a server? It's obviously a big commitment, since you may have to deal with merges at some point if too many are added at once.

Gershowitz: Yeah, it's one of those things that is super tough. Scott and Victoria, two of the big brains of the operation in terms of running the live service, poured over the numbers. You wouldn't believe how many numbers and metrics we use to determine how many servers we need to open. We carefully watch and monitor the queues and the populations, but it's a tricky situation. On your launch week, you'll have 75% of your players who actually bought the game wanting to get in. Whereas realistically, when the servers settle down a little bit, the number is lower than that. It's one of those things that if you want to make sure after your launch you have a very healthy population on a server, queues are kind of a necessary evil. But at the same time, we want to make sure that everyone can get in and play the game. It's kind of a juggling act.

I think we've done a pretty good job at this point of opening new servers, especially now that we've settled down a little bit after the frenzy. There are very few servers with queues, and none that have extraordinarily long queues, although they do happen from time to time. And then we have more than enough servers where there is no queue at all. Of course, down the line we are looking at things like character transfers and everything else. That's really important to us, but at the same time we want to make sure that the live service settles down before we start flinging characters all over the place.

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