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

ZAM: Do you see players leaning more towards Defiant or Guardians?

Hartsman: Thankfully it has been almost perfectly even and I could not be happier. We don't have a ton of content in the game that requires perfect side balance and we did that on purpose.

ZAM: On the PvP servers, are you going to have an enforced faction balance much like what Aion did?

Hartsman: No. We intentionally designed around not needing that. There can be a population imbalance and the game will still be fun.

ZAM: With the closed beta NDA lift, what would you love to see your community talking about the most?

Hartsman: The mass scale events are well above and beyond anything else. I mean, you've been playing the same games as I have for the last 10 years. [laughs] If you can pull those types of things off at a mass scale where you've got 600-700 people in a zone doing the same gigantic event where there are raids running around in parallel, there's an objective to defend, lots of things to attack and cool things to do without waiting for GM interaction to do it - I think that's really unique. Also, having servers that are able to take that load amount and not light themselves on fire is another thing that no one has been able to do. Those are the things where we are drawing the line in the sand and saying, "if you haven't seen one of those, you really haven't seen Rift yet."

ZAM: One last question. What is with all the squirrels?

Hartsman: Oh, the squirrels? [laughs] We have quite a few squirrel critters in-game on the Defiant side. There’s actually a quest where the squirrels found a way to get themselves planes-touched by the plane of fire because well – when the planes interact with Telara sometimes weird things happen. Oddly enough, I can’t tell you how many times in the last beta on the Guardian side, people were shouting, “omg, where are the fire squirrels?” It’s just something one of our design leads, Gavin Irby, put into Freemarch one day and everyone on the team laughed so much we decided that it had to stay. I guess we’re Trion and we like our squirrels!

ZAM: My vote is for death squirrels!  Definitely death squirrels. Any parting comments?

Hartsman: The big shift for us was playing with the soul system to offer more souls early on and giving more points to spend in the trees. When we spoke with the designers on both the systems and content side, they agreed that despite it being a whole lot more work, it’s the right thing to do and it’s going to make the game a whole lot more fun. I think that anyone who may have tried the game in Beta 1 and 2 and wanted a crack at a better soul system, coming back for beta 3 should definitely be really cool for them.