We took a break from the Game Developers Conference to head to Trion Worlds' studio and talk with the producer about Rift's launch and beyond.

ZAM: Compared to other MMOs, Rift had a fairly smooth launch. Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

Gershowitz: Oh, there are always things you want to do differently. I think in terms of stability and service and the quality of the game, I don't think we could have done anything differently. Obviously we'd have changed the way we approached things, but we did a pretty good job, in my opinion, of having one of the most successful MMO launches, at least that I've worked on. Servers are up and stable and the game is fun. The game can handle a thousand people in Freemarch, for example. I kid you not, there was well over 1,000 people in one zone with no problems. Things were going on and people were having fun and the server wasn't coming to its knees, which is kind of a huge accomplishment on our end. I think we made a lot of the right choices. I think the things that we want to do differently are the things we're doing now the make the game better, and they're more smaller things to add in versus the key important things of having a fun game, a stable game, and a service that is up and constantly improving itself from day one, which was probably the most important thing for us.

ZAM: From your perspective, how many players would you say have already hit the level cap? Is it what you expected?

Gershowitz: A small percentage of our total player base has hit 50 at this point and it's what we expected. The players that hit max level did so within the times we kind of expected. A lot of people say, “hey, Rift is a short game.” The answer is Rift's a short game if you want to power through it. But for players who are just playing it, there are tons of things to do, and they spend a heck of a lot more time just adventuring around in the world than sitting in the same dungeon instance and grinding the same mobs over and over again without sleeping for three days. We have a high-level population. People are in our expert dungeons right now.

Overall, I don't think people are exceeding our expectations. They will always exceed what you expect them to do, but I don't think they're exceeding our worst-case scenarios. It's not like everybody in the game is at 50. Actually, a lot of people are pretty low or middle range, which is right where we'd expect them right now.

ZAM: As you said, the launch of an MMO is just the beginning. What are you working on for future content?

Gershowitz: Most of us are stuck in the frenzy of Update 1, which is coming down the line. We have some pretty decent-sized things planned for the first couple months of updates. New content for players to play through, new things for them to experience and further expanding the world. We're really serious about expanding the game after launch. We want to do a lot of things in a lot of places. We have that list of things we didn't get to do, and we're drawn to that list. We're also learning from our initial players the kinds of things they like, and we're changing our plans accordingly.

ZAM: Sounds like players have a lot to look forward to in the coming months. Let's switch to the topic of dynamic content. Did anything happen in-game during launch that you didn't expect?

Gershowitz: Oh, there were lots of things that happened with the dynamic content that we didn't expect. It's dynamic, right? It worked well in ways that we didn't expect it to work well and worked poorly in ways we didn't expect it to work poorly. When you put that type of dynamic system in with the randomness of players, it changes.

A really good example of it is a lot of people in our forums were complaining that the exp out of rifts and rift events was a little low at launch. It was because we found an exploit. We didn't really expect a thousand people to be sitting there killing hundreds of invasions at a time. Because we didn't think it was going to be that successful, people were leveling really fast as a result. It was tuned for a large group, but not nearly as large as that group. We tuned it down for a little bit and spent a week or so getting things in place, and will be putting it back up again with our next patch. We've put the things in place to make sure that the higher populations don't necessarily exploit the generosity that we want to give players who come across a rift and venture in with a smaller group of friends.

ZAM: So exp from rifts will be going back up?

Gershowitz: Oh yeah! There was an expectation in beta and alpha that rifts gave out really good experience, which they did. The big difference is that even in our later beta phases, people had spread out a little bit more. We didn't necessarily take into account the super large mass of players moving through the rifts. Unfortunately, we had to do an emergency deal with that and lower the exp, but it was one of our highest priorities to get that back up. In the next patch, especially smaller groups and raids, will see a dramatic increase in experience.

And then there are the obvious things from there. We're constantly making new dynamic events, tweaking the ones we have, playing around with the spawn rates and everything else to make sure that people aren't necessarily flooded by dynamic events all the time or can't find one anywhere in the world. It's all a very delicate kind of dance between too little and too much. It's something we're really serious about and it's something we watch every day.

ZAM: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Gershowitz: The community has been fantastic for this game. I don't think I've worked on a game before that has had a community that has been behind us this much as developers, and it really energizes us in wanting to make the game better and make changes, so I think it's a really positive feedback cycle right now. It really excited me if we can keep that going in the next couple months, because it means we're going to be able to do some really fun things and I think the community's really going to like it.

Darryl Gangloff, Editor-in-Chief