Rift Dev Staff History?

[Fencers]

Elrar was really cool. Seemed like a genuine bro.

[Edge-]

Elrar was really cool. Seemed like a genuine bro.

Yeah, I'm still bitter they got rid of him. Dude was totally awesome and easily their best public facing employee. Super cool cat.

[taliey]

Rift is still up and running?

Color me surprised.

[Edge-]

Rift is still up and running?

Color me surprised.

It's pretty rare for major MMO's to die, brah. They usually stick around for quite a while.

[gonterf]

I got the 'hundreds' of employees from something they said on the official forums a while back. Admittedly I don't have a source, but keep in mind that many of those would be in the IT/Sysadmin/DBA area, in localization, or in QA. For all its flaws, Trion does have a large customer support staff as well, although I doubt any of it is dedicated to Rift alone. Same goes for marketing and HR. Compare this to the recent video from Blizzard on the front page of this site in which they comment that at one point they had more than a thousand employees working on WoW.

As for Taliey - don't feed the trolls. Anyone worth replying to should be able to ascertain Rift's current population levels on their own without making a comment, and certainly without making a comment in a totally unrelated thread.

[Muspelheim]

Have they ever explained the logic behind limiting the races? Most I heard is why they did it in Vanilla, but no reason in SL or NT

Making new races is expensive. Like, really, really expensive. First off, making a new model with a full range of animations is incredibly time-consuming. You couldn't just take a Skelf and make it a player race, for instance, because players have a shit-ton of animations that the Skelf model doesn't.

But even more significantly, if you make a new race, you need to redesign every single armor model in the game so that it fits that new race. And the further that the race deviates from the basic humanoid shape, the more work it is. Consider that there are thousands of armor graphics in the game, and you can get a sense of the scale of that undertaking. And it also means that for every new piece of armor that you ever make, it takes even longer to create because you need to generate two more models for it (one for males, one for females), meaning that for each new race, the cost of developing new armor is permanently increased.

So, for designing a new race to be worthwhile, it would need to generate more revenue than those costs, in terms of attracting players or driving purchases. And generally speaking, I highly doubt that a new race would actually be able to pull that off.

I think it would be great if we got new races, but the costs involved are far from insignificant. The reasons for not creating a new race are very significant and very real, and I wouldn't be surprised if we never see any more playable races, because it just doesn't make economic sense.

[Khelendros]

Making new races is expensive. Like, really, really expensive. First off, making a new model with a full range of animations is incredibly time-consuming. You couldn't just take a Skelf and make it a player race, for instance, because players have a shit-ton of animations that the Skelf model doesn't.

But even more significantly, if you make a new race, you need to redesign every single armor model in the game so that it fits that new race. And the further that the race deviates from the basic humanoid shape, the more work it is. Consider that there are thousands of armor graphics in the game, and you can get a sense of the scale of that undertaking. And it also means that for every new piece of armor that you ever make, it takes even longer to create because you need to generate two more models for it (one for males, one for females), meaning that for each new race, the cost of developing new armor is permanently increased.

So, for designing a new race to be worthwhile, it would need to generate more revenue than those costs, in terms of attracting players or driving purchases. And generally speaking, I highly doubt that a new race would actually be able to pull that off.

I think it would be great if we got new races, but the costs involved are far from insignificant. The reasons for not creating a new race are very significant and very real, and I wouldn't be surprised if we never see any more playable races, because it just doesn't make economic sense.

And to add to what Muspel said, if we do get another race it would probably be one race and it would very likely be at the cost of other things people may want more like new souls. But again as Muspel pointed out the problems are totally seperate from that facing the team doing a soul or class design. Its mainly the combat animations, which are tough in any circumstances.

That being said, I definitely wouldn't mind having Skelf as a race for example. I grew quite attached to Finric over the course of her story.

[Deleted]

I got the pleasure of being invited to San Francisco a few months back to get a tour of the Trion offices and meet most of the team in person. I was actually quite surprised at how many people actually work on the game. I had the idea that it was about 20-40 people, but in reality it's at least 90+ (Not including any CS).

A lot of the developers prefer to hide behind the mask of anonymity than publicly show their faces, which is pretty understandable for the state of the RIFT forums. I met quite a few people that knew who I was, but alas I had absolutely no idea who they were as they never post on the forums!

A lot of people that originally worked on RIFT have moved to other projects (Such as Trove and Archeage) and new people have been brought in to take over their responsibilities.

Everyone seemed pretty happy and it seemed like a really cool place to work.

My only gripe is that I believe they need to expand their CM/PR/Marketing time. Dev to player communication is nowhere near what it used to be and that upsets me, this is especially apparent in Archeage.

[Edge-]

A lot of people that originally worked on RIFT have moved to other projects (Such as Trove and Archeage) and new people have been brought in to take over their responsibilities.

Wait, ArcheAge has folks working on it who have worked on MMO's before? Because the way it's been handled, I thought they just rounded up a bunch of unpaid interns fresh out of college and told them to launch the game : P

My only gripe is that I believe they need to expand their CM/PR/Marketing time. Dev to player communication is nowhere near what it used to be and that upsets me, this is especially apparent in Archeage.

Agreed (though that's mainly the CM field, PR/marketing do far less consumer focused communication). While I've never lurked the forums too heavily, it really feels like they don't communicate anywhere near as much as they used to when Elrar was around. Yes, I'm still bitter they fired him -_-

[willowe]

All that matters is Elrar is gone. That's it.

It was like half of my respect walked out the door with him. Still respect Hartsman and a few others, but it just felt like a different team post-Elrar and that was 50% of the reason I ended up leaving. Pre-F2P Trion, specifically pre-Storm Legion, was the best MMO Developer I've ever seen. Their game had issues, sure, but they were people. Unlike other companies...

I remember a time, long passed, when Elrar used to come here and talk to us.....