Design Director Simon Finch and Lore Lead Nick McDowell reveal some of their perplexing puzzles and lush new locations in a Zones roundtable with community members

Is there an achievement similar to Warcraft’s ‘Insane in the Membrane’? We know someone who wants to feel physical pain when earning a particularly tough achievement.

Finch: We’ve got some achievements from Classic RIFT that people haven’t actually accomplished yet! So yes, there are definitely some that need an immense amount of gameplay, if that’s what you’re getting at.

The landscape in Storm Legion is huge. Do you have any plans to add flying mounts?

Finch: One of the things that we really like, and we work hard for in RIFT, is to get people to play together. You’ll notice there are easy ways to group together - we’ve got Join Public Group, we do everything we can to make people enjoy playing together and make it easy for them to play together.

If you’ve got half your population flying around in mounts up in the air, then they’re not going to run into the people doing instant adventure or onslaught on the ground and, instead of joining in on that for a while, they’re going to be flying off to their destination and just ignoring all of the fun they could be having if they were joining groups on the ground. I’m never going to say it’s impossible because we do the impossible all the time, but right now we’re not planning to do that.

McDowell: We also have a lot of quests and zone events which use leap tech, and that would be a lot less fun if you’re constantly flying around. The punctuating exuberance of being shot into the air, or man-cannoned out during a zone event, would not be as memorable if you can hop onto your flying mount every time you’re going to another part of the zone.

Finch: We have put a lot of things in to make it easier to navigate around the world, particularly with the size of the new continents, but flying mounts aren’t part of that.

Will we have mounts that are faster than the 150% variant from the vendors in beta?

McDowell: Those are our starting mounts

Finch: I know that during beta there was an error on the tooltip that said 150%. I believe that it was actually only 130%. The ones there are only at the start of the expansion, there are some faster ones.

Volan the Colossus is great! Do you have any plans for more encounters like that?

McDowell: We would love to put in as many Volans as we can, but he takes a lot of time to craft right. I think that as we see how it works out and how people respond to it, we can improve upon it. But to do Volan we put one of our best designers on to it.

Finch: Nick nailed a really important point there about seeing how players react. That is something we do a lot - we put something in, and then we will observe what our players like, dislike, and how much they participate in it. We’ve had only one thing I can think of that we ended up taking out because players didn’t like it but, for the most part, we like to see how players react to something before we drop more of them in.

Having said that, there are other zone events that have interesting mechanics around them. Maybe they’re not mechanics around a boss, like Volan, but there are others that have some very interesting mechanics. A lot of our zone events are a lot more integrated with the environment than they ever were in Classic, because we knew we wanted to do a lot of them. So we worked with the artists to make sure that the areas we put these things in impart the experience of the event.

We all love Volan, he is awesome. We love playing Volan, and we’re confident our players will too. So without making any promises or guarantees, I would expect to see more things like that in the future.

Have there been other inspirations for the zones, beyond the overall Life and Death feel?

McDowell: Yep, there are always inspirations. Like Pelladane, we really wanted to get an air-touched view, and what would happen if Crucia comes and takes it over, and the lightning and eye of the hurricane came out of that. With Cape Jule, we really wanted to have this feeling of raiding lost ruins, so I think we did a good job of having a giant lost temple that you don’t see until you’re right on top of it, and I was really quite surprised when I got the zone back from the artists.

There are other little things, sometimes from conversations between design and art. We would describe various feelings that we want to get - a lot of the Brevane stuff is reminiscent of villas and estates. A lot of the life in Brevane is a life after people.

Finch: The artists like to just pull stuff that they are fascinated about and interest them. There’s some amazing stuff in Ashora for instance. When I saw that whole zone, I could see the inspirations that the artists had - when we were looking at different desert landscapes, and that incredible frozen volcanic theme that some of the areas have.

They just go wild. The artists are asking themselves what they can do that’s going to look cool, and that basically is their driving force - does it look cool, does it look epic? It’s just the same way for us in design - is it fun, are players going to enjoy it? We don’t really shackle them in any way; they come up with some stuff that makes our lives incredibly difficult, as we do for them, but together they look amazing and are fun.

What’s the process that you use to create a zone?

McDowell: It’s often that we get a finer and finer view of the zone. It first might start off with a feeling and a theme, and then we talk about what types of things art can put in there, and pitch ideas about that. Then once we have the landscapes that they think they can actually work with, we then map out the zone, we get more of the flow, we work on how the quests will go through there, and then you kind of iterate for as long as it takes to produce it. There’s design whiteboxing, how the zones work, how the story should go and how the action should flow, and then it’s a big negotiation process because design will need changes and art will need changes.

And so every pass, every iteration, it gets better and better, and you discover new things. Sometimes you’ll find something that the artist did that inspires you in needing to have a quest there. In Pelladane, for instance, we have a lot of jokes about pumpkins, because it was the one crop in Pelladane that grew in all the fields. So we started riffing off of that, because it was getting to be Halloween and we were like “Oh my God, look at these great pumpkins!” Shepherd pumpkin pie was one of the jokes from that.

Finch: We have a bit more of an iterative process. We will start out with a high level plan, as you suggested, but we have found that we end up with a much more satisfying player experience by just being a little bit more organic. We have the main theme, and we pretty much go from there, as Nick was saying, with each of us inspiring the other to do things.

You may find some interesting little crevice or some secret place that the artist put in when he was bored at 2 o’clock in the morning, and you go “wow, that’s a really cool place, I’m going to put some content in there”. And there are similar things when they discover some of our content and they improve the atmosphere with some decoration and color. So we have a very organic process that’s worked out well for us. 

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