Jonathan Cooper: Hi Scott! I saw the game last year at E3 when it was called Heroes of Telara, and it seems like a lot has changed. Can you give a basic rundown of the newly named Rift: Planes of Telara for those who might not have heard much about it?

Scott Hartsman: Sure, sure! The general concept of the game is this: we have this world, this unsuspecting little fantasy world, where there’s already an incredible civil war going on. Suddenly, the planet is under attack from six different directions due to the fact that it’s at the center of its own little universe, where different dimensions and realities intersect. All of these other forces that are either trying to use the planet for their own devices, use it as a passageway to attack other dimensions, or use it in other ways. Essentially, the world has turned into a really scary place, and it’s up to the players of the game to come on it, join the civil war that’s already going on, and try to make their way in this world whether that’s for good or evil.

Jonathan Cooper: Now, this civil war, will players be able to choose which side of it to be on?

Scott Hartsman: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. One of the first choices you make when you roll up a character is choosing to be either one of the Guardians or one of the Defiants. The Guardians you can kind of think of as the avenging angels of the gods. Telara has a pantheon of its own, it’s a part of the war, with its own story that will be rolling out over the next couple of months.

Essentially, the gods got the short end of the stick here and they need an army. They’re taking on the players, which we’re calling “Ascended Souls,” so the gods are trying to come back and build their army. On the other side, we have the faction called The Defiants. The Defiants are those who decided to go off on their own and try to resurrect magical technologies that have long since been abandoned and forbidden, and through their backstories you find out about how they caused some bad stuff in their own world, but they’re pressing ahead anyway.

What that lets us do, is it lets us do some really cool things with some interesting visuals which you don’t really see in other MMOs, it kind of gives us our distinct visual style. For instance, on the Defiants side, you have some steampunk/cyberpunk elements. When you blend magic and technology you get some cool stuff to play with there, too.

Jonathan Cooper: On the note of visuals, in the past, most MMOs haven’t tried to push the envelope visually, and it appears that developers are finally taking that leap. Do you think that visuals are becoming a more important element in MMORPGs?



Scott Hartsman: I think they are. To me, visuals have always really been critical. Anyone who has been around MMOs a lot, especially some of the western MMOs of the last few years, knows that as soon as you get that the complaint that the game is too brown it’s the first of a thousand cuts that will kill any game. Everybody knows this at an intellectual level, but people seem to forget that when you’re playing a game for hours on end… you’re looking at it. Visuals are everything in that case, and so it’s about two things: having a good style and being high quality. Developers need to figure out the style they want to go for, have it be distinct, have it be something that’s cool and uniquely theirs, and then be the best at it.

In our case, our style plays to the strengths of many members of our team. It’s very HD, with high detail and high quality. This style plays to the strengths of our team in both art and engineering. They’ve been making high quality visual games on console platforms and other PC platforms for the last ten years in a lot of cases. We take that experience and combined it with the other 50% of our team, that’s worked on…  last time I added it up, over two-dozen MMOs and online game platforms. You take those two kinds of experience, have them learn the right lessons from each other, put them together, and you get something that’s really cool.

Jonathan Cooper: And it ends up paying off. One of the things that makes Aion so popular right now is how good it looks, and how that might actually give it more legs.

Scott Hartsman: It’s entirely possible. Good quality graphics get people’s foot in the door and has them take notice for sure. But at some point, with any MMO especially, it comes down to the gameplay. Once you’ve seen all of the pretty over the first few weeks… pretty will only take you so far. That’s where the MMO experience comes in. We know the audience we’re making it for. In a lot of ways, we are the audience. We’ve made these things, we play the hell out of these things. We have a pretty good sense of what the market in the west here is looking for in the next evolution of fantasy MMOs.

Jonathan Cooper: While we’re on that subject: what is the game doing to set itself apart in terms of gameplay?

Scott Hartsman: For starters, the style and the IP was chosen to give us lots of cool opportunities to let us do unique and unexpected things the entire way through. Before I get into some of the unique stuff, the one thing I need to point out to folks is that all the things I’m talking about next all sits atop a world that has all of the major MMO elements that triple-A MMOs have had, and, that bluntly, players depend on. Once you have a world like that, you say, “Ok, how can we make this more interesting? What is the next level for this?”

And to us, the next level is layers of active content that are woven into the entire experience. Interesting things of all sizes that are occurring. The one example I love to use a lot is the merchant that wanders the globe and has her own wants and desires. She wants to go from point A to point B, she gets bored if nobody shops with her, she goes home and restocks, you know, those sort of things. On the other end, we have larger events, all the way up to massive planar invasions that offer really cool social gameplay. I don’t mean social in the “happy, huggy” sense, I mean social in the “kicking ass with a whole lot of friends together” kind of sense. And then some other, even more drastic events that we’ll be talking about over time.

Beyond that, we have our own unique class system. Right now, since we’re pre-alpha, I get to say, “It’s really cool, and I can’t wait to show you and explain more later.” We’re about 95% of the way there, so it won’t be too much longer. We have a class system that we think players will enjoy. We’re returning some class customization into primary gameplay in a way that’s fun and unique, and gives people a whole lot of ability to customize their characters. Then we have the general feature set that we’ll roll out as they get fully baked, and we have really cool visuals to show off as well as words. To us, though, if I had to sum up the entire effort, is to make sure that the things we do ship is AAA across the board. Our goal is not “different for the sake of different.” There are a lot of games that have done that, lots of them are sitting by the wayside. Big MMOs fail because they overreach. Players don’t want “different for the sake of different,” either, they want quality.  To us, it’s figuring out where the important places to innovate are. For example, I guarantee you, right now, that we don’t have the most innovative in-game mail system in the history of in-game mail systems. It doesn’t need to be. It’s a utility function, that’s fine. We’re trying to double-down on the places that players are going to care about and get a lot of play out of.

Jonathan Cooper: Is one of the areas the dynamic events that were shown off last year at E3?

Scott Hartsman: Yes, but the words “dynamic content” doesn’t get anyone excited. What gets people excited is hearing words like, “your planet is being invaded by extraplanar creatures! You have fun, you kick ass, and you get great loot.” That’s what will get people excited.

Jonathan Cooper: Are there any other elements of the game that people excited about the game should know about?

Scott Hartsman: Yeah, I mean, really, the only thing I can say to people is that people who saw the game before should look at it now. We’re putting our money where our mouth is. It’s large scale fun in a world of conflict where we expect people to find some great things to do that they’re going to enjoy for a long time.

Jonathan Cooper: Alright! What’s the current release window?

Scott Hartsman: Right now? 2011 for Rift: Planes of Telara.

Jonathan Cooper: Fantastic, and we hope to hear more at E3 this year.

Scott Hartsman: Of course, we'll see you there!