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

Why is the Haunted Terminal in Tempest Bay empty?

McDowell: The haunted terminal is featured very prominently in the Chronicle, which we will be releasing in the future but haven’t announced a date yet.

Finch: Another of the big things that we wanted to do with this expansion is give ourselves a lot more breathing room. Anyone who has been playing RIFT for any length of time knows that Trion put out a lot of content updates throughout the year. Since launch we’ve put out eleven huge updates with a ton of new content, and we were running out of space. So one of the things we wanted to do was give ourselves a lot of room. There will be some places that you might find that don’t have a whole lot of stuff there just now…   

McDowell: …and if something is cool or intriguing or inspiring, but empty, that means that there’s a good chance that future content will find a use for it.

Finch: Or it might already be used in a Sliver, or Chronicle, or dungeon, but we will be adding something out into the open world in a future time.

Does this mean we’ll be able to get into the upper levels of Tempest Bay?

[both laugh] Finch: Yes, there’s always a chance.

Are we going to see the world evolve over time, like the jungle being cleared or the monorail repaired? 

McDowell: Perhaps in future Slivers or things like that, we might see echoes of old Brevane, but I don’t think we’re going to evolve the world that drastically over time, because we want players who come in later to still see the story and evolve it. An MMO’s time is often a feature of geography - as you go through the zones and through the story, you’re seeing the plot evolve. Completely changing a zone like that means essentially rebuilding the zone. What we might do is vary targeted places, like the ship that has appeared in the old world, but probably as a matter of course.  

Finch: We’d rather put our efforts into creating something new for the players to experience rather than just revamping old areas. As Nick mentioned, we do have the ability to tell a different story through Slivers, where we can change up what is happening in the world, so you may explore the history of that transport system in one of our Slivers in the future. It’s certainly something that we all are very inspired by.

In Classic RIFT, Slivers were mainly for raiding. Are there any plans for solo Slivers?

McDowell: With unlimited time and resources, we’d have Slivers and Sliver Chronicles. A lot of it is finding out what the audience responds best to, versus what is easy and what is hard to do, and trying to find a good balance between all that. The Slivers tend to be a raid or dungeon environment because we get a really good return on that with the instance team, which really knows how to create that type of content. Once we see how dimensions go, maybe we’ll find that there are easier and more interesting ways to use that. But a lot of it is watching how you guys play it and responding to it, and steering our course from there.

Finch: Another thing we try to do is, in sort of a round robin way with our updates, is try to cater to different groups of our players. We might put something out for the raiders in one update, and something for the role-players in another update, and something for the explorers and questers in another. A lot of the updates cater to several groups at once.

But while we do have limited resources, we have unlimited ideas and requests, and it’s just a matter of which ones we think are going to be the most interesting for us and our players to explore next. So a lot of these things we get asked for, ‘do you think we might see x, y or z in the future’, the answer is ‘Yes, maybe’ to pretty much all of it.

A long time ago we saw an alternate Hammerknell Chronicle on the PTS. What happened to it?

McDowell: When the Chronicles were first introduced, there were a number of experimentations, and I think with the release of the River of Souls Chronicle, that was the last of the experimental ones that we felt was good enough to put out.

Finch: Ah, I know what you’re talking about. On PTS we put about 5 or 6 of them up there…

McDowell: Yeah, a lot of work that we’ll do is try out a number of ideas, and see which ones work, and some of them don’t make the cut.

Finch: We didn’t like how that one ended up, so it’s on hold really. It doesn’t mean that it won’t reappear again later, but that’s what PTS is for in many ways, to see which things work and which don’t.

McDowell: And sometimes names slip out, and they persist in the audience for ever; hence why Cliffside Vale is now an area in Cape Jule.

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