Trion Worlds CCO and Rift Executive Producer Scott Hartsman gives us details on the third Rift closed beta event, large scale events and more!

Now that the third Rift closed beta event is planned and the beta NDA has lifted, we were curious to find out Trion Worlds' thoughts on the entire process. We decided to go straight to Trion Worlds CCO and Rift Executive Producer Scott Hartsman to discuss what the team has learned from the feedback that was submitted from the two previous beta events.

While Hartsman did touch on the subjects in his recent letter to the community, we were able to get him to elaborate a bit more on the third closed beta event, large scale events and more. Keep reading after the jump for the full interview!

ZAM: So Scott, are we going to have any quests to deliver lion meat to anywhere snowy?

Scott Hartsman: [laughs] I think that is the secret master key to all of the quests. If you happen to have lion meat on you, I think you can just turn it in to any NPC in the game.

ZAM: Awesome! I read your beta wrap-up post and I was wondering if there's anything else that your team has taken away from both Beta 1 and 2 that you'd like to share?

Hartsman: It's really amazing to me that we get time to focus on the gameplay right now instead of sitting around panicking that we may be having server problems and that we can't advance gameplay or react to the feedback that we need to. We're able to use this time the way it should be used, which is to listen to how people are reacting and then dive into the backside server data to find out who is advancing how fast, how does the server economy look, and actually pay attention to gameplay stuff instead of scalability fires. Since we are in a situation like that, we are able to deal with all kinds of stuff.

The stuff that I called out in the post is just some of the fixes we have planned. Because we don't have to put out fires, we actually had designers sitting on beta servers watching chat from people and implementing fixes for the bugs that players were finding as they brought them up. So it's really about seeing what other annoyances can we get rid of, what blockers are there and what rough edges can we polish off.

ZAM: Will we be seeing any more events soon like the mass beta invasion?

Hartsman: Absolutely! We haven't really been talking about the huge, mass-gigantor events. It's mostly because we didn't want to go bragging that we'd have all of this until it actually worked. I think it's because the MMO audience as a whole is used to being promised all kinds of things and whether or not anyone delivers on them is anyone's guess. We were intentionally going for the opposite of that. Show people first then say, "By the way, we also have this." It is a major theme for us and something that continues throughout the rest of the game. As we open up more zones, people can expect to see more of them. It was the best non-friction way to get people to be more social instead of having them sit around and shout for a group. It's more like, "Your zone just exploded. Look!"

ZAM: Can you tell us a bit about the upcoming third beta event?

Hartsman: One of the most asked for feedback suggestions we got was, "Please run something between Christmas and new year."  It takes about 60 people to make sure these events run, so we have a bunch of people dedicated to make sure this event runs smoothly over the holiday break. One of the themes we have really been hitting hard is when people make sane requests and good observations - we are actually paying attention and putting our money where our mouth is. If that means a beta event over the holiday break, then so be it.

ZAM: I've been keeping an eye on the Trion boards and ZAM's forums through the events. Believe me, your community appreciates it!

Hartsman: Awesome! Beta 3 will be a combination of Beta 1 and 2 with more event content and more advancement in the soul system to let people play with more class combinations. Even if you did play in the previous betas, you're going to see stuff that didn’t exist and there will be entirely new soul combos to make. You can take your existing character and play it 10 different ways if you want now. We really think that's going to be good for the game itself as well as make for a pretty damn good beta event.

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