Dev Chatter – 4.2 Instant Adventure edition (Spoilers)
The following conversations were taken from my direct and private interaction with some devs. The following questions were asked and responded to on July 5, 2017.
As usual, this has been anonymized (as appropriate), and edited for topic flow and some minor grammar tweaks. I specifically asked questions regarding the upcoming IAs. More to come on this Friday’s live stream.
The purpose of these dev chatter posts is to summarize the general thoughts of Rift’s dev team, and gain some insight into the whys and hows of the game’s design..
All details are subject to change!
Q: [To clarify] are we getting just 1 new Instant Adventure line in 4.2, or 2 new lines?
A: That answer is not straight forward. With 4.2 launch, planar assault adventures will be replaced by featured Celestial Adventures. That will be Gedlo Badlands interspersed with plane of fire and life runs. A few weeks after 4.2 releases, VP [Vostigar Peaks, the new level 70 open world zone coming in 4.2] adventures will be added to that queue. That way, people will have a chance to just play through VP story before seeing it via IA.
So Gedlo in 2 weeks followed by VP 2-3 weeks after. We decided to hold VP IA back a small bit just in the last couple of weeks.
Q: what made the team choose Gedlo?
Tacitus: Me. The original schedule called for Ashenfell and VP. I dislike working in Ashenfell aesthetically (the blackened volcanic terrain just drives me away, same as the center of ember isle – purely a matter of personal taste). So I chose to do Gedlo instead.
Q: Do you know if we be seeing the other [elemental planes] for the Planar Assault IAs? or is this concept being ultimately abandoned for the more traditional IA format?
A: [We are] not sure when/if the other planes might be added. [in short, it is not on the schedule to do so]
Q: Will there be more to do in the Life and Fire fragment IAs?
A: There are not ay plans at the moment to add more activities to the fire/life ones, but [we are] looking at those two zones over the next couple of days to see if [we] can clean up some of the life plane issues, and adding new scripting to force the game to switch zones after any planar assault boss fight (to reduce repetitiveness). [This] zone transfer forcing is also getting added to HK/MoM so that it should stop running HK non-stop.
Q: now I shall wish for a Gedlo IA where you have to jump in the paraffin to hallucinate long enough to fight off something =P
A: You do fight some hallucinations!
