Dev Interview With Amary
I recently was given the opportunity to ask the Rift team several questions after the Rift Prime announcement. Amary has graciously taken time from her schedule of scheduling and planning all the things to answer some questions that I have regarding both Rift Live and Prime.
Huge thanks to Amary and Brasse over at Trion Worlds for making this happen!
Let’s delve in!
Thank you for the time to interview! I imagine you and the team must be busy working on Rift Prime, the next Valentine’s day promotions, and the 7th anniversary event.
Q: Can you tell me a bit about yourself, what you worked on for Rift during the launch years, and what you are focused on today?
Hi, Clowd! I’m familiar with your name and site from around the office chats even before I came back over to the Rift team, and I love how you keep up with the latest on the game. Hopefully I can give you some details you haven’t already seen!
I’m Ama, and I’m lucky to have managed to work in MMOs for almost… thirteen years now. MMOs have been my major source of fun and relaxation since Ultima Online and my first industry job was working as QA on EverQuest II. From there I took some twists and turns through different roles (all of which turned out to give really useful knowledge!) until I landed at Trion in 2010, just prior to the internal alpha and beta stages of Rift.
I’m most remembered by early Rift players for being the name they saw bringing the patchnotes and giving status updates on maintenance downtimes. That was the public-facing portion of my role back then, which also included a bunch of additional behind-the-scenes work: collecting details on all changes or additions being worked on by development, following them through test builds to ensure the change was actually making it to live, and then documenting it all up as final player-facing patch notes (and their translation into French and German from our localization team). Basically, I got to learn all of the steps a single game change takes from a designer, or an engineer, or an artist making the change on their personal machine all the way through that content appearing on live servers for players. At any given time there are dozens or even hundreds of those changes or additions moving through the process.
For the last several years I’ve been working on the ArcheAge team at Trion as a Producer, which has its own set of processes as a game where the development team is actually an outside company (in Korea, no less!). Some aspects of the job were the same, while others were wildly different, but on the whole I’ve learned a ton about live game operations from working on that project as well.
I came back to the Rift team at the start of January this year, where they have a lot of big goals and ideas and needed additional producer help to keep things organized. “What are we working on RIGHT NOW, what are we working on now that won’t be done until later, what will we work on next so when person X is done with their current set of tasks they can move right into that, what’s extremely urgent from live that we can slot in to get fixed or changed ASAP without derailing other work…” It’s a lot of project management type assistance so the dev team can maximize their time MAKING COOL THINGS while someone else chases down issues that might be slowing them down or preventing an update.
You might have heard Brasse saying “Ama always has a list”. She’s wrong, I always have *several* lists, a calendar, about five meetings, seven excel documents, three JIRA dashboards, innumerable email filters, and an internal wiki.
PvE
Q: The Rift On post mentioned Intrepid: Greenscale’s Blight as the next raid. Will we be seeing this in 4.4, or later?
Q: Every expansion has released at least one expert dungeon later in it’s life cycle, do you think we can expect one for the 4.x series?
Q: There was discussion of a revamp or changes to Planar Fragments last summer that did not come to pass. So far we have received a 50% reduction in upgrade costs. Can we expect more changes in 2018?
I grouped these questions together as they all point toward a similar ask – when’s the next raid, when’s the next dungeon, when’s the next balance/endgame pass. I can say these won’t be answered with 4.4, which has a full set of other work planned for its release. The team as a whole is considering what’s next beyond that update. Planar Fragments is definitely on the radar, which was kind of expected after we started adjustments on the Eternal item quests. Dungeons and Raids are always a core part of RIFT but we’re also considering other types of individual and large scale content beyond simply “add another tier of numbers with boss fights and replacement gear”.
Q: There was talk some time ago about adding a version of Bastion of Steel to LFR. I understand this was debated some. Is this something that the team plans to revisit in the future?
Q: Do you think we will see older raids added to LFR?
Q: Supposedly, LFR has the ability to provide rewards for queueing, but this is currently unused. Do you think we could see rewards added to LFR for queueing?
LFR questions! We’re not done with LFR yet. In terms of rewards specifically for using it, systemically I think the team would rather see reasons for doing the specific content accessed in LFR instead of rewards tied to simply using the system itself.
Q: What was your favorite PvE moment in Rift? Any amusing stories or awesome victories?
My favorite Rift memories are very “back in MY day” from the first year. Holding the line at Marsh House against neverending invasions. The “world is ending” feel of the River of Souls unlock event (and trying to get zoned in right when it opened… THE STRUGGLE WAS REAL). My first Extra Life marathon in Rift where I convinced the team to give me a sheep polymorphing ability and poly’d the crowd of players outside of Sanctum into sheeps, intending to do a low level naked run across the map – only then they organized themselves into a sheep team lining themselves up to spell out “Hi!” with their fluffy sheep forms.
Rift Prime
Q: Will Rift Prime’s dungeon loot system (where you get loot based upon your non-mentored level) be brought over to live?
That depends on a couple of things – how well the final implementation works, how well it’s received, and the decision of the design team after seeing how Prime is affected by it. It’s not out of the question.
Q: Will we have LFG and LFR on Prime at launch? Or will LFR wait for the Prophecy of Ahnket chapter to unlock?
LFG will be available, but of course not all of the content the system can access on live will be unlocked at first. LFR on day one is still up in the air as it requires some additional work to hook up to the older raids.
Q: Will warfronts be active? If so, will they unlock as chapters unlock?
Warfronts will be available, some of them on day one and additional WFs unlocked over time.
Q: Will Conquest make a return in Rift Prime?
Sadly, not for this release.
Q: I am personally concerned about Level 50 balance in Rift Prime, especially since the game has been balanced around 61-points max in a soul since the release of Storm Legion. Will there be class changes to ensure the content at level 50 is still challenging?
Q: A lot of the older raids in Rift launched in a challenging state. Will Rift Prime bring back a similar level of challenge for these older raids?
We’re looking at balance from a broader angle of available soul tree points and character versus NPC damage output/hp to try to avoid making ability changes that would have to go to the live servers as well – especially as Prime won’t always remain level 50 capped! We do know the overall power of a level 50 live character now is stronger than an original launch 50 and are in the process of tuning Prime server for that expectation.
Q: Hammerknell keep was retooled from a level 50 raid to a level 65 raid during the Nightmare Tide expansion. From my understanding, the level 50 version no longer exists. Are there plans to restore it for Prime?
We did unearth an ancient map of Hammerknell 50 but there are some overlapping data issues with trying to restore it that make this not such a simple task. Right now there are skilled data ninjas looking at making this happen.
Q: If you could magically bring any one thing (feature, piece of content, event, etc.) back from the 1.x days of Rift, what would it be and why?
Purely my personal opinion: Long-duration world events that combined both story and new, time-based content – the raid opening world events are a great example of these.
PvP
Q: The upcoming warfront – Tenebrean Prison – has been stated to be a “Deathmatch” warfront in the [January 26th] live stream. Will this be a free for all, or team based deathmatch? Any additional details you are willing to share at this time?
We actually have a livestream coming up that’s specifically dedicated to Tenebrean Prison so I don’t want to spoil their reveal.
Q: What was your favorite PvP moment in Rift? Any amusing stories or awesome victories?
I carried the fang in Black Garden for a long time once and was super proud of myself… Also I somehow managed to pick up a Fluffy on my original main!
Closing
Q: What are you looking forward to the most in 2018 for Rift?
From my own perspective, being on an in-house development team is super exciting just due to the variety and speed of discussions that happen on a daily basis. My timing is also pretty great to roll up a main on Prime – we’ve been playing on an internal testing shard and I keep wishing it was my live character! Prime will be a pretty good catchup for all of those zones and raids I missed during my time away from the team.
