Rift News Tidbits – Latest from the Forums

Things are starting to ramp back up for the new year as the Rift team comes off of a long holiday break.  To start us off, Gingers has posted a response to some questions on the forums, providing an update of near-term goals and what has been going on internally.  While most of this has been known to those of us who closely follow the devs, this is one of the first times it has all been collected in one space.  I have copied her response from the forums below for posterity. (Accessed 3:30pm EST January 4th, 2017)

Other pieces to note:

• Dimensions on PTS have been offline since before break.  They should be coming back up in the near-term however.
• Brasse is following a Planar Fragments feedback thread.  Please contribute meaningfully to this discussion, as a number of us have been providing some ideas and recommendations about what we would like to see from the system, and ways to improve.  This thread HAS caught the dev’s attention, and I am confident that a few of them have read over it both before and after the holidays.
• DPS Class balance changes are in the works on PTS.  This thread is generally for bugs and feedback on class feel.  The last one devolved into people yelling at each other for no productive reason at all.  If you can, get on PTS, test out the changes noted in this thread, and provide feedback.  It does get reviewed, and major/broken imbalances have already been caught and fixed thanks to this feedback, such as the old PTS version of the Tempest Soul’s Legendary Skyfall.

Ginger’s response:

I know you all haven’t had much information from us, so I’ll try to give some clarity where I can.

• How is the raid coming along? Testing soon? Yes we are planning on testing soon. A lot of fantastic concept art has been created for the raid. The map itself is “white boxed” meaning the designers can work within the space while the artists make it pretty. The raid armor is in the process of being modeled and rigged. The boss models are being rigged and animated. The boss mechanics, abilities, and scripts are being created with temp VFX in place. Actual VFX is starting soon, audio will come in after that.
• How is the game being viewed by the company in terms of expansion success? Personally I’m incredibly proud of what our team has achieved, increasing the level cap is a HUGE amount of work along with the most beautiful land mast we’ve ever launched with. That’s my personal viewpoint.
• How is class balance being viewed in terms of importance compared to the rest of the game development? Class balance is as important as all other aspects of the game. Class balance/systems has it’s own team, just like content has a team, and environment art has a team. We have a huge game to maintain and EVERY major update has include class balance. It is constantly being worked on, it is a never ending work.
• Are healer changes inc or did that get postponed and healing balance will happen soon? A healing pass is planned but when it will release is still being ironed out, it really depends on how that change fits in with the other content being worked on.
• What is the game trying to do to get the old playerbase to return to its game? We often do marketing campaigns that give special bonuses to players that return. We regularly give freebies, discounts, and free Patron time to returning players. As often as we create high end content, we also create content for new/returning players to make the game easier to understand such as the Starter Guild system, the upcoming LFR system, level boosts, dungeon veteran incentives, added the special artifacts to Stonefield and Gloamwood, we added new player lockboxes that give free goodies every few levels.
• How about that Primalist? Going over 2 years with only 1 mediocre soul released, no support still and no AoE healer. I don’t know what the souls will be but they are in our future plans. I can’t give any more specifics than that.
• Does the company recognize that the easy mode game which SFP was not 100% desired by the playerbase, and are there plans to increase difficulty or create “master mode” dungeons? We have a lot of plans for dungeons in the future but that also I can’t get into specifics.

Also I should mention that the last 6+ months were a bit of a crunch and the devs are very dedicated to their work, very few took time off during that period. So now that the expansion has launched some are still out on vacation spending time with their families.