IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Rift Post-Launch Interview: Scott Hartsman Let's Us Know We're 'Not In Azeroth Anymore' [Exclusive]

Posted April 14, 2011 by M.H. Williams

Around a year ago Trion Worlds - having been mostly silent for almost four years - decided to announce not only a name change, but also the development of three big-budget MMOs. The failed launch of a single MMO can kill a company and Trion has yet to prove itself in the industry, despite hiring veteran talent.  In addition to its first MMO under development, Heroes of Telera, the company has added the MMORTS End of Nations and an unnamed action MMO for Syfy to its slate.  Heroes of Telera underwent a few name changes, becoming Rift: Planes of Telera before finally launching as Rift.

IndustryGamers recently got the chance to sit down with Scott Hartsman, Trion’s Chief Creative Officer and Executive Producer of Rift.  We talked about the success of the title and where Trion sees the game heading in the future. 

IndustryGamers:  So, you guys have had a very successful launch. I heard that you had 1 million registered users at launch. Has that number increased since then?

Scott Hartsman:  Fortunately, yes. We've had a whole lot of interest since the game launch.  Instead of having the typical pattern where you get this incredibly positive and huge open beta followed by the numbers going down when people have to start paying for the game, we actually saw them continuing to go up.  So, we got 99 servers live right now, more people joining every day and it doesn't show any signs of letting up.  So we're enjoying the hell out of it right now.

IG:  At a time when most people are going free-to-play, you went straight to a subscription.  Was there some fear about that?  Did you think about going free-to-play at any point?

SH:  We've talked about all different kinds of models and what it comes down to is the game you're making needs to match your model.  And both of those need to match your audience.  And we knew from the start that we wanted this game to be triple-A, MMO, and RPG.  It's aimed directly at that audience.  Because there's we feel it’s been awhile since a great quality MMO with as much scope, breadth and depth has been released in that space.  And we felt that the opportunity was there and people seemed to enjoy the model, so no need to go innovating in that direction when we had so many places we wanted to innovate in the game itself.

IG:  Launches can make or break an MMO.  What's successes did you have in launching Rift?

SH:  For starters, I would say the biggest success was the stability of the beta, more specifically stability in scope of the beta.  The fact is that we started running it like a live service for practice even through our internal testing, beginning about a year ago.  So every day between then and now was really a rehearsal for getting the kinks out, getting the process together for how to run a live service. 

It’s a really big challenge when you're trying to spin up all different parts of a company at the same time.  It wasn't just a development team; just getting a game developed is hard enough.  But then there are the operational processes, the networking processes, and CS processes.  Localization.  All of these things that were being built up at the same time.  And so, I'm really glad that we had that the most recent year of development to bring everything up to the same level of quality, the same level of operational quality.  And we're one week into live.  We just did our first semi-large update, and total downtime was about 40 minutes.  And everything was back up and playing.  We run two data centers, U.S. and Europe.  So we're able to update them at the right time for the given audience.  Everything just kind of works. 

IG:  Another problem MMOs have is retention. What are you planning in order to retain players on the production-side?

SH:  When you talk about that spike at the beginning there are two things that really go into that.  Number one is the overall number of people playing and that one you can combat.  The other one is more of a human nature thing, and that's the spikes of ‘something is brand new and shiny, therefore I'm going to play it ten times more than and ten times longer in a day than I will once I calm down and everything becomes familiar’. 

So the way we're combating the first is we've got a robust live update schedule that stretches out over the next very long while.  We're rolling out new story updates consistently.  We'll see how the first one goes and they all come with brand-new content releases.  So right now we're targeting every four to eight weeks, depending on what we need to get done at the time, depending on how big they all are. 

So we're rolling out both static content, dynamic content, and new gameplay systems.  With our first update after the first week, it was mostly a maintenance update, but it did introduce four new pieces of raid content.  It's advancing the story; it's giving more stuff to do all the time.  That's what we're hoping to get done.

IG:  With that content strategy, do you feel may have trouble selling larger expansions down the line?

SH:  I really don't think so.  I think that expansions kind of scratch an itch that update content doesn't.  The trick with expansions is to not do them too frequently because you really want to make people feel like they're getting their money's worth when they buy a box.  So we're not aiming to rush out an expansion right now. 

From the CEO on down, the directive is ‘work on the live game, make the live game the best, absolute most awesome game we can’. So we're going to keep doing that, and there will continue to be new places to go.  New things to fight, new things to discover, new things to make.  And then later on we will very likely get into the larger content, like an entire new area to explore.  In our particular game there are all different kinds of things we can do, all different kinds of shapes that can take.  We've still been kind of playing with the specifics in the background, but right now we're just all focused on live.

IG:  Great deal of MMO development tends to be 'promise that world and then give a peanut’. Is there anything in Rift that got away from you?

SH:  There were a lot of features that we decided intentionally to hold off until after launch to do more controlled rollouts.  We didn't have a whole lot of emergencies or surprises.  We actually got in more content than we figured we would've. 

We know for example, we've got theses storyline quests for you follow.  Starting at level 15, they take you all the way through the main story.  We knew like hell we wanted those in, but we didn't think we stood the chance.  But as everything was coming together as well as it did, we got those in.  We got brand new types of dynamic content in. 

One of them that fairly PVP-focused, which we were prototyping and found it was kind of fun just as a prototype.  And we decided 'what the hell, let's let the players play with it in beta’.  And they enjoyed it enough.  The worst I could say we did was pull back features for live.

IG:  So you're pretty early in your launch, but have you thought about expanding the story to other media?  Guild Wars, Elder Scrolls, and Dead Space are just a few brands that have novels and animation released, for instance. Are there any plans for expanded content?

SH:  So our expanded content.  We've already got the comic series, which has been following the story for a while.  Fleshing out some of the origin stories.  Most of the extensions that we're working on right now are actually more interactive extensions instead of doing books, movies, TV, that kind of stuff.  Which of course we're open to, but for the moment we're focused more on interactive things.

For instance, we have all of these data feeds from the game where players can build their own websites with some of our discovered game data.  So including things like which players that discover certain items on which servers and when they discovered them.  So we're got that information for items, souls, NPCs, tradeskills, artifact collections, and on, and on.  And we fully expect that every time we release a new piece of data, somebody figures out a way to do something cool with it. 

We released our soul tree, our class system data and people stated building soul calculators on websites and on iOS and Android devices.  And we expect to see people continue to build things like that.  So we're really focused on more interactive extensions.

IG:  Going up against the big dog in the house, World of Warcraft.  They've expanded to include services like the Remote Auction House and the Armory.  You've started that, but is it hard getting all that up and running?

SH:  It's incredibly challenging.  It's getting one more part of an architecture that needs to come online alongside the rest of the company.  If you're trying to compare us to every game that's gone before, I think we compare very favorably, but if you compare bullet-for-bullet with a product that's had 200 people working on it for seven years, you're going to get a slightly different comparison. 

But if I had to pick a couple of things that make us special, it’s the speed at which we've proven that we're able to adapt and innovate.  We're able to develop new cool stuff and interact with our players.  The way we steer what we're doing based on what's going to resonate best with them.  I think that's one of our new-kid-on-the-block advantages. 

IG:  Late in the game, you switched to the different marketing strategy, with the tagline “We're not in Azeroth anymore.”   That may have invited some of these comparisons to World of Warcraft.  Do you think the strategy was a positive or negative?

SH:  Interesting.  I think it's a little of both.  For starters, I loved the campaign.  When I first saw the campaign pitch I laughed my ass off.  Very bluntly.  We saw it and went, “Wow there's no way we can do that. That means we have to do that.”  For any company that starting out, trying to get attention in a very crowded marketplace, you have to do something to get attention and I think that campaign really helped us stand out. I think the polite way to phrase it is it inspired many conversations around the internet.  And that's really what we needed.  So in that regard, I think it's did its job phenomenally.  It did its job better than we expected.

On the flipside of that, if people take it too literally and don’t take it as the well-intended humor it really is, it does invite people to go, 'Oh well, if they’re going to say that, then I'm going to make a checklist, and I'm going to go ding ding ding ding’.  That kind of thing doesn't really worry me because as far as I’m concerned it did its job.  Got lots of people to keep coming to the game.

IG:  Soapbox question.  Going forward what trends are you really looking forward and what trends have disappointed you?

SH:  So, I’ve been just kind of watching everything that's been going on over the last few years in both premium, triple A, core gamer MMOs, as well as ultracasual browser MMOs or social games.  I'm very happy that the social games have come up the way they have.  Primarily because they've created so many new types of gamers without particularly cannibalizing from what we'd call core gamers. 

So I think that's expanded everything nicely and there are more people who would think of themselves as a person who plays computer games.  And I think that's really good for everybody when that happens. 

I think the – if you wanted to ask about the biggest disappointment, it would be that we as a core games industry haven't quite yet gathered up enough institutional knowledge as a whole to be able to launch really good game a little more efficiently and a little more reliably.  I think Rift did great, but I think that the bar is ridiculously high for the amount of technology that has to go into one of these things. 

And you can't go into them on the cheap.  You can't go trying to make a core gamer MMO on a low budget. Because I think that enough attempts over the last few years have proven that your game will tend to not succeed or just kind of limp along.  So I think that's a place that I've been kind of disappointed, when I see that, “Hey, we can't make these things for $10 million yet. We're still up in the $50 million range and they still take 5 years.” 

IG:  Cliff Bleszinski recently talked about the fact that there's no middle ground in game development anymore.

SH:  And yeah, there really isn’t.  Let me put it this way: There is a bit of a middle ground, but the problem is if you aim for the middle ground, you end up considered on the cheap side anyway.  I would totally agree with that.

Coming up in Part Two of our talk with Trion, IndustryGamers speaks to David Reid, Senior Vice President of Publishing for the company. 

M.H. Williams has been writing in some form or another for ten years and has been a hardcore gamer since the NES first graced American shores.  You can catch him on Twitter as @AutomaticZen, Google+ as himself, or on his personal Facebook page.