A handful of fans from the official Rift: Planes of Telara forums were recently invited to tour the Trion Worlds office and get their hands on the game. They also had their questions answered by the Trion team.

Q: Will you be supporting a fullscreen windowed mode?

Hartsman: Yes, it's in there right now. We always knew we were shipping with fullscreen windowed mode. One of our engineers even requested it.

Q: What are your thoughts of adding novelty souls to the game?

Brown: I love the soul system. Right now we have no novelty souls. In a short period of time, we are going to introduce to the alpha team some very interesting new types of souls.

Hartsman: I don't know if it's been explained clearly, but the ability for us to add speciality souls is there. As long as you have a starter soul, and as long as we're sure that the starter souls can all group, raid, PvP and solo, then we can start adding crazy souls from there. They can be more fun because we know you have that base. We can do a 10-point specialty soul that you suddenly find in the world.

Q: Will you be able to use special characters in the naming system?

Hartsman: Right now we are alphabetical only.

Q: Will surnames ever be added?

Hartsman: There could be at some point, but right now we're trying to see how we do with just first names and titles. We'll have titles at launch. Surnames are on our list of things we'd like to add to the game.

Q: Will Rift have flags like PvP and roleplaying?

Hartsman: Right now we have AFK in-game. We don't have LFG implemented yet. Again, there's the list of stuff we'd like to add, and we're just going down the list.

Q: Will there be a dynamic weather system?

Brown: We don't generally make it too dynamic since it's irritating, honestly. We give it more for the feel of the zones. For example, you'll have areas with a lot of snow. We don't have things like dynamic rain. It's a conscious choice.

Q: Will there be guild alliances? Is there a guild member cap?

Hartsman: Right now we don't have a cap. We'll end up figuring what cap we should set later on. It will definitely be in the hundreds of characters range. There are no in-game alliances yet, but we do have custom chat channels.

Q: What is the planned update frequency for the game?

Hartsman: I've lived through nine years of live MMO work. It's different for every game and every audience. In the games that I've worked on in the past, we found five to six weeks was perfect for smaller updates, and then larger content updates like every three months. As for our specific plan, we just want to launch the game. We don't want to put the cart before the horse and promise anything.

Q: What is your ideal server size?

Hartsman: The cool thing about our architecture is that we can add more capacity just by adding more processes. Our initial guess is that the world is going to be fun with 2,000 to 2,250 players leveling up. We'll have cross-server Warfronts right off the bat, so those really don't count as people in the world.

Q: Will there be server rule sets like PvE and PvP? Will roleplaying be enforced?

Hartsman: Roleplaying is not something you can really enforce with rules. We have two tags: RP and PvP. Servers can have no tags, which is a standard PvE server, or they can be RP, PvP, or PvPRP.

Q: Would you ever consider special edition servers, like permadeath or last man standing?

Hartsman: We've kicked around a few ideas like that, and I think that kind of thing would be awesome a couple years down the line.

Darryl Gangloff, Editor-in-Chief