We interview Design Director Simon Ffinch about creating content for one of the most frequently updated MMOs.

ZAM: Have you had any inspiration from people’s dimensions? I know that players have tried to put things like jumping puzzles and stuff together in dimensions, and then challenge other players. Have you been inspired by anything you’ve seen and thought ‘that would make a really good puzzle’?

I haven’t really seen anything in the classic sort of puzzle way yet. I’ve seen quite a few mazes, some of them absolutely amazing. I’ve seen a lot of slides that I’ve found really entertaining, when people discovered that they could set up slides in their dimensions, there have been some fantastic ones of those. And the jumping puzzles and things that you mentioned.

So definitely, we would love to look at providing a few more tools for those particular dimension players.

ZAM: Is there anything in the initial launch of Storm Legion that you feel didn’t work as well as you hoped, or a particular design that seemed like a great idea at the time, but didn’t work out as well as you’d hoped in live.

There are always things that that we would like to have had work better. This time around, there’s nothing that we felt so strongly about that we removed it. Any players that have been playing RIFT for a long enough time will know that we’re not shy about trying out something. We’ll try something and see how it goes, and if we don’t like it we’ll get rid of it, and we have done that in the past.

This time around, nothing didn’t work so much that we took it out. There are things that we’re continuing to tweak and play with and refine, based on our own and player feedback, just to make them better and more fun. I guess Carnage might be an example of that, although people liked the system, I liked the system; I’m a completionist, so I’m still working on that achievement. But it was felt by us and our player base that maybe they weren’t rewarded well enough, that if you were going to go out of your way and kill those extra few creatures in your questing area above and beyond what you were being asked to do for the  quest, that we should reward you a bit better.

So we’ve been tweaking that and making it better. But nothing that I felt totally fell flat, no. I was actually really pleased with 99% of everything that went out.   

ZAM: At launch we had a big raid with Crucia, and in Patch 2.1 we had a big raid with Regulos. Was it a deliberate pacing decision to ease things down in 2.2 with the Carnival of the Ascended?

I guess so. There’s still a heck of a lot of content that we’re releasing in 2.2. I do understand that it’s not, as far as the story goes, about punching dragons in the face, it’s more about having fun with the Carnival, so if that’s what you mean by easing it down a little, definitely. We wanted to give a little breather for the players to just have some fun, have some tongue in cheek things go on.

But we’ve added five zone events, four of them are carnival themed and somewhat tongue in cheek, we unlocked tier 3 for PvE Planar attunement and tier 2 for PvP, we added a new warfront mode, tons of quality of life and bug changes. We started rolling out the Silverwood and Freemarch changes that we’re doing, using a lot of the things that we’ve learned over the last two years. Anyone that starts an alt or is new to the game will find that the beginning of Silverwood and Freemarch are a lot more in-line with where you started doing things in Ember Isle, where we started rewarding quests just out in the field.  We plan to continue working on that.

So I would say that there’s still a heck of a lot of content in 2.2. It is just more of a fun, punchy type of update that’s not meant to be an ‘oh my god, Regulos is going to eat the whole world’ kind of thing.

ZAM: That’s exactly it, I didn’t mean to say that you’d been slacking off or anything; it just didn’t feel like the world was going to end.

[laughs]Yeah, it is an interesting balance that we have there, because we have actually discovered in the past that we’ve ended up releasing what seemed like too much content. We would end up with players getting a bit overwhelmed, or certain parts of the content just not getting picked up because they were busy doing something else.

Amazingly enough there is such a thing as too much as well, so we continue to play around with what the right balance is, making sure that our players feel like they’re getting bang for the buck, but without being overwhelmed. So we have some patches that are bigger, and some that are smaller, but overall I think that I’m very happy with the pace that we put stuff out. I know that’s something that our players seem happy with too, so we intend to keep doing that, and beginning to figure out how to strike the right balance.

ZAM: RIFT is known for pushing out content regularly – it’s one of those things that’s often cited when comparing theme park MMOs to sandbox MMOs. What’s your opinion on that whole content treadmill?

We work hard, I’m not going to even joke that we don’t, but the thing is that we planned it from the start. Our architecture, the way that everything is set up in RIFT, was planned to make it as easy and streamlined as possible. Those tools that I talked about earlier that I use are absolutely phenomenal. They’re some of the best tools I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve been working in games for an extremely long time.

So we planned to do this, we always considered RIFT to be a service, and so we wanted to make sure that we saw as a service and what our players wanted. So yes, that is something that I’m glad to say has been recognized, and it is something that we intend to continue doing. We love doing it, we love our game; pretty much everyone here still plays the game and enjoys the game. We’ve got lots of amazing ideas – I wish you could see some of the playtests we’ve been running recently with some of the new content that we’re preparing for the next update. Some pretty amazing stuff in the works.

ZAM: That’s one of the things that crops up when someone’s been running a game for a year and more: the systems start to get a bit creaky, the tools start to get a bit out of date, and they can’t keep up with the rate of progress. As you develop more, does it reinforce that original design you came up with?

Yes, and expands on it. I was really happy with the foundation we put in. Since that day, we’ve added so many new toys, so to speak, that we can play around with and expand on. We’ve always been top of our game with the dynamic content - I absolutely love what we managed to do there. We have an extremely passionate group of people that just want to take that in some insane directions, and some of them are really amazing - I can’t wait till our players get to see those.

We added other things – things like slivers. Even though, on the face of it, it’s a fairly simple thing, it was a really great story device. If we want to tell part of the story that basically breaks the main story, then we can do that, because what slivers are is an alternate viewing of what might have happened if something else had happened in the main world, if you follow what I’m saying there.

A prime example is one of the old dungeons, the Fall of Lantern Hook for instance, that was one of the early ones. But just introducing that concept has allowed us to think like when one of our designers says “I really want to tell this story”, even though it doesn’t quite fit into the main storyline that we’re planning, we’ll say “that’s totally fine, we’ll put that into a sliver”. Our players are now used to this being an alternative viewing of what might have been, what could be if some event did or didn’t happen.

Things like that have given us an amazing variety and toolbox that we can play around with and just keep things fresh. The passion that I see in the playtests we have, I always love the debriefs after a playtest, they are just brimming over with people laughing and talking  about what happened in the playtest and how we might be able to make it better, and how so-and-so trained me with four hundred different mobs and got me killed, yay!

And so I would say, does it feel creaky? No, not at all, because whenever we find a bit of a creak, we get the spackle out, and we start getting the engineers. It’s like “Hey hey, were having this problem with this tool, do you think you could look into fixing it in this way?” or “We want to be able to author this other kind of content, could you please add this feature?” and stuff like that, and we have a very accommodating and talented engineering team, so we continue to improve what we already have. 

Next Up: Future Content and Opening the Gates on Page 3 ->