Faelor
07-12-2010, 05:49 AM
Class and Callings Q&A with Scott Hartsman (http://www.tentonhammer.com/rift/interviews/class-callings-scott-hartsman)
Ten Ton Hammer: The response to the E3 2010 class system seems split between those that think that Rift is simply co-opting talent trees with the soul tree system, and those that are a little overwhelmed with the possibilities. What would you say to the former crowd? Would you say it's your own take on talent trees?
Scott Hartsman: I actually kind of wouldn't. For those that say that it's just talent trees, the only thing I have to say is that once you play it, you will totally understand. Just to give you an example from the character I most recently rolled, I chose a warrior. I still had choices with just the one soul up through the first fifteen levels, and it's cool and it's fun. It gets drastically different is when you're faced with the choice of what's your second soul going to be - it's reinforced through the fiction and you're this awesome ascended being, therefore you have the ability to control multiple souls. You're making an active choice as to what the next path is that you're going to choose.
It's so different than staring at the same three panes that don't really involve a whole lot of choice at all. With our system, you can customize it down to which individual abilities out of these classes you're going to take. We error on the side of being a little bit too generous, intentionally, in giving you choices also. For example, say my first soul has a melee finisher that's okay, but my second soul has a melee finisher that's actually quite an upgrade, so when I get that second soul I can use one of my attack point builders from my first soul, add a finisher from my second soul, and it really drastically changes the results. By being smart, you can determine which abilities work together to give you the best damage. It's choices at the micro level like that, as well as at the macro level - which 2 or 3 of these choices do I want to have at any given time.
Letting people get a hands-on with it is about the best thing that we can do. All through E3, it was really cool to watch people's eyes light up as they play when they realized, 'Whoa, I was a healer up until five seconds ago, then I slotted this other thing and now my cleric also has this mage-like DPS ability too? This is actually fun! I totally get it now.' We're just looking forward to more people being able to try it out.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/86648 (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/86648)
Ten Ton Hammer: So for the 'just talent tree' crowd, the core message is that these abilities and enhancements interact with each other across souls? And that applies to all souls?
Scott Hartsman: Absolutely, lots of different interactions at different levels.
Ten Ton Hammer: I was going to ask if players can 'double up' on souls, but from your illustration it doesn't sound like that would make much sense.
Scott Hartsman: Doubling up in the literal sense - absolutely not. But what you can definitely do is effectively double up by just investing in one soul all the way to the end. That's a perfectly valid way to play also.
Ten Ton Hammer: So if players envision a very limited role for their character but want to be very good at what they do, they don't have to explore the myriad possibilities you're offering them?
Scott Hartsman: Yea. If I have a tank soul, I can go all in. I mean, I can go all in on that sucker the entire way. That's going to give me root abilities that are only available to people who do just that.
Ten Ton Hammer: So with all of these choices at hand, let's talk a little bit about the inevitable - revising your choices with a respec. Could you describe the respec options you're planning to make available to players?
Scott Hartsman: What we're going for is, I think, pretty ambitious for a launch feature set, but this is one area that there was no way in hell that we were going to skimp on. What we are doing from the outset is, yes, you absolutely can from the outset go to a trainer and pay (with in-game currency) to reset your souls. You can then re-invest those points any way you choose.
Characters will also have multiple attunements - multiple specs - from the get-go, so you do have the ability to buy multiple specs immediately in the game. All of those have hotbars saved with all of your loadouts, and once you have those multiple loadouts, you can switch between them in the field.
For example, my current character has a high-end DPSing plate-wearer. He's got his 'I am übertank' spec, which is mostly invested in a single tank soul. He also has a hybrid soul where he's 50-50 with a DPS soul to really plow through soloing, questing, that kind of stuff. I can switch back and forth between those two anytime I want, and later on I'll go buy a third spec. And maybe later on when I find a different role for myself - PvP perhaps - I'll buy a fourth spec. The idea is to give players the ability to come up with loadouts that they like and be able to switch them at will.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/85697 (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/85697)
Ten Ton Hammer: And you can pick up multiple attunements at any level?
Scott Hartsman: This is an open question for us - should we tie multiple specs to different level ranges - i.e. I can buy a second one at 15, a third one at 30, and so on. But the more I play the more I think we don't want to do that - just open them up all at once instead of trickling them out over time.
Ten Ton Hammer: How are players' ability points divided between these multiple attunements? Are you picking and choosing between abilities you've already bought, or is there a separate point pool for each of your attunements?
Scott Hartsman: You have one pool of points for your character. At level one you have 1 point, at level 2 you have two, and so on. It's which places you choose to invest those points is where it goes.
Ten Ton Hammer: In many MMOGs, players typically have their level-up build and their group build, but then at level cap, their chosen build becomes narrowly defined so as to capitalize on their class's core strengths. Is this how you envision things playing out with attunements in Rift?
Scott Hartsman: I think high-end is when you want to give people the most flexibility. For example, wouldn't it be neat if you could take your plate-wearing dude and have him be a cool soloer in one set, a great PvPer in another set, and an awesome raid tank in another set. I think it's really important to give players more things to do in the high-end rather than pidgeon-holed into a single role. I think that's kind of boring.
Ten Ton Hammer: But players tend to pidgeon-hole themselves, seeking that one über build, right?
Scott Hartsman: Sure, and I think it's on us to make sure we have a game where that's not the end-all-be-all game experience. You're talking about raiding, and the classic case of the tank that's built up and geared up to be a raid tank, and that is it, period, end of sentence. I think it's on us to make games that have more to do even when you're that guy.
Ten Ton Hammer: So from a class design perspective, are you designing with all that in mind? Will there be multiple paths to perfection in any given role?
Scott Hartsman: I don't know how close we'll get to this; I'm a very honest person if nothing else. But the goal is this: no matter what choice you make at character select on day one, the idea is that, yes, you should be able to go be the best at endgame-something, but that you should be able to successfully fulfill multiple roles in group, in raid, and in PvP. We don't want anybody to ever be at the point where they've put hundreds of hours of time into this character, and now that they've hit the end-all-be-all, they're a one trick pony. That's really not fun.
Ten Ton Hammer: So the idea is that there will be no bad class development choices, essentially?
Scott Hartsman: Don't get me wrong, we're giving players the tools to make all kinds of bad choices. But, none of them are irreversible, and sometimes the difference between good and bad is just moving a few points around. We expect there to be a lot of theorycrafting too.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/85694 (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/85694)
Ten Ton Hammer: On the classes and callings page (http://www.riftgame.com/en/classes/index.php) , we see nine of the 16 souls revealed. Are you pretty set in concept for what those classes will be?
Scott Hartsman: Absolutely, on all but one. And the other thing is: there's more than 16. That's all I can say on that right now. The thing that you should take away when you look at that website is that that ain't the full complement. There's more.
Ten Ton Hammer: Since not everyone has the time or desire to delve deep into theorycrafting to make the kind of character they want. Is it clearly laid out, or will we have to sit down and puzzle about our character out-of-game using detailed charts and graphs?
Scott Hartsman: I wouldn't worry about that too much, because we expect a couple of things to happen. First, when you have a system like this, and it's customizable, there will be many conversations, threads, etc. of what's your favorite build, what works well for this, etc. In any game, there's going to be some cookie cutters that everyone is going to like. That's fine.
For those that are just in Rift for the social experience and don't want to play the class system at all, that's fine. Just keep investing in the one class you picked. Chances are, you will come out ok. Alternately, built right into the game is the invest and preview ability. It's not a system where every time you click a button, it's confirmed forever. If you go to respec all of your points, yea, you can respend them nine or ten different ways and experiment with them in real time before you finally hit ok and accept all the changes. We're building that in from the beginning; I think you have to with a system like this.
Ten Ton Hammer: So respec'ing won't break the bank? It's not an escalating amount of money you have to pay?
Scott Hartsman: It's not obscenely escalating, we'll put it that way. We're expecting people to want to do this. Actually, we're expecting people to need to do this. We're tuning it more to be a token cost and less of a 'holy crap, I need to save up tons of money so I can do x tonight.'
Ten Ton Hammer: Some folks think class balance will be an impossible task with the system you've described. I'm not sure how anyone can talk balance prior to beta, but how are you addressing balancing concerns from the get-go?
Scott Hartsman: Sure. Here's the thing: I love when people say, 'Oh, this is going to be hard or impossible to balance' because, to me, that means they're adept at finding ways to cheat the system, which means they're going to have fun with it. That said, there are some people that think of imbalance as a universal problem. Imbalance is only a problem if it traps users into a corner where they have no way to make their situation better. This system gives you so many tools to help you help yourself. And if something is incredibly out of whack, of course we'll deal with it.
Ten Ton Hammer: It often seems to matter more that players have the perception that classes are out of balance, whether they actually are or not. Are there things you can do at this stage to address the perception of imbalance? Sort of work on your trusting relationship with players?
Scott Hartsman: The perception of imbalance I think is always going to exist. I'm actually more afraid of systems where there is no such perception because if you have achieved perfect numeric balance, congratulations, you've just made the more boringly overbalanced game in existence. That's actually far more deadly to the success of a game than making something that had the potential to be too interesting. A lot of it will always come down to how good an individual player is behind the keyboard.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/86647 (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/86647)
Ten Ton Hammer: Have you toyed with the idea of class build presets? Sort of the old KOTOR-ish auto-level idea?
Scott Hartsman: It's something we've talked about, but that's the kind of thing where I'd want to see what happens in beta first to determine if we really need that. In our testing so far, we have our own fair share of newbies (on a dev team this size, we have lots of people that aren't involved with the class system at all, and we haven't seen the need for it yet). If we need it, we can go that way.
Ten Ton Hammer: That kind of leads into my last question. The soul tree is a purely level-based development system; you're getting points per level to spend on classes and callings. Will there be a skill-based component to character development as well?
Scott Hartsman: Not to developing primary skills like that, no. Our tradeskill system, however, does use learned skills over time. But for combat, it's all about the leveling. You allude to something that we've had lots of conversations about, continuing to add new dimensions to the system. But we realized we were already going to have our hands full with just the system as spec'ed - we'll try that first and then see if we need new complications. So far, I think we're good. We started out on the assumption that we'd need one full time class designer to handle all the souls, and very rapidly that expanded to 3 and 4. Most games that I've worked on in the past have generally had one person or two. It's rapidly turned into something that we wanted to double down on to ensure we come up with something great. We're trying to put our money where our mouth is on that one.
Ten Ton Hammer: The response to the E3 2010 class system seems split between those that think that Rift is simply co-opting talent trees with the soul tree system, and those that are a little overwhelmed with the possibilities. What would you say to the former crowd? Would you say it's your own take on talent trees?
Scott Hartsman: I actually kind of wouldn't. For those that say that it's just talent trees, the only thing I have to say is that once you play it, you will totally understand. Just to give you an example from the character I most recently rolled, I chose a warrior. I still had choices with just the one soul up through the first fifteen levels, and it's cool and it's fun. It gets drastically different is when you're faced with the choice of what's your second soul going to be - it's reinforced through the fiction and you're this awesome ascended being, therefore you have the ability to control multiple souls. You're making an active choice as to what the next path is that you're going to choose.
It's so different than staring at the same three panes that don't really involve a whole lot of choice at all. With our system, you can customize it down to which individual abilities out of these classes you're going to take. We error on the side of being a little bit too generous, intentionally, in giving you choices also. For example, say my first soul has a melee finisher that's okay, but my second soul has a melee finisher that's actually quite an upgrade, so when I get that second soul I can use one of my attack point builders from my first soul, add a finisher from my second soul, and it really drastically changes the results. By being smart, you can determine which abilities work together to give you the best damage. It's choices at the micro level like that, as well as at the macro level - which 2 or 3 of these choices do I want to have at any given time.
Letting people get a hands-on with it is about the best thing that we can do. All through E3, it was really cool to watch people's eyes light up as they play when they realized, 'Whoa, I was a healer up until five seconds ago, then I slotted this other thing and now my cleric also has this mage-like DPS ability too? This is actually fun! I totally get it now.' We're just looking forward to more people being able to try it out.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/86648 (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/86648)
Ten Ton Hammer: So for the 'just talent tree' crowd, the core message is that these abilities and enhancements interact with each other across souls? And that applies to all souls?
Scott Hartsman: Absolutely, lots of different interactions at different levels.
Ten Ton Hammer: I was going to ask if players can 'double up' on souls, but from your illustration it doesn't sound like that would make much sense.
Scott Hartsman: Doubling up in the literal sense - absolutely not. But what you can definitely do is effectively double up by just investing in one soul all the way to the end. That's a perfectly valid way to play also.
Ten Ton Hammer: So if players envision a very limited role for their character but want to be very good at what they do, they don't have to explore the myriad possibilities you're offering them?
Scott Hartsman: Yea. If I have a tank soul, I can go all in. I mean, I can go all in on that sucker the entire way. That's going to give me root abilities that are only available to people who do just that.
Ten Ton Hammer: So with all of these choices at hand, let's talk a little bit about the inevitable - revising your choices with a respec. Could you describe the respec options you're planning to make available to players?
Scott Hartsman: What we're going for is, I think, pretty ambitious for a launch feature set, but this is one area that there was no way in hell that we were going to skimp on. What we are doing from the outset is, yes, you absolutely can from the outset go to a trainer and pay (with in-game currency) to reset your souls. You can then re-invest those points any way you choose.
Characters will also have multiple attunements - multiple specs - from the get-go, so you do have the ability to buy multiple specs immediately in the game. All of those have hotbars saved with all of your loadouts, and once you have those multiple loadouts, you can switch between them in the field.
For example, my current character has a high-end DPSing plate-wearer. He's got his 'I am übertank' spec, which is mostly invested in a single tank soul. He also has a hybrid soul where he's 50-50 with a DPS soul to really plow through soloing, questing, that kind of stuff. I can switch back and forth between those two anytime I want, and later on I'll go buy a third spec. And maybe later on when I find a different role for myself - PvP perhaps - I'll buy a fourth spec. The idea is to give players the ability to come up with loadouts that they like and be able to switch them at will.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/85697 (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/85697)
Ten Ton Hammer: And you can pick up multiple attunements at any level?
Scott Hartsman: This is an open question for us - should we tie multiple specs to different level ranges - i.e. I can buy a second one at 15, a third one at 30, and so on. But the more I play the more I think we don't want to do that - just open them up all at once instead of trickling them out over time.
Ten Ton Hammer: How are players' ability points divided between these multiple attunements? Are you picking and choosing between abilities you've already bought, or is there a separate point pool for each of your attunements?
Scott Hartsman: You have one pool of points for your character. At level one you have 1 point, at level 2 you have two, and so on. It's which places you choose to invest those points is where it goes.
Ten Ton Hammer: In many MMOGs, players typically have their level-up build and their group build, but then at level cap, their chosen build becomes narrowly defined so as to capitalize on their class's core strengths. Is this how you envision things playing out with attunements in Rift?
Scott Hartsman: I think high-end is when you want to give people the most flexibility. For example, wouldn't it be neat if you could take your plate-wearing dude and have him be a cool soloer in one set, a great PvPer in another set, and an awesome raid tank in another set. I think it's really important to give players more things to do in the high-end rather than pidgeon-holed into a single role. I think that's kind of boring.
Ten Ton Hammer: But players tend to pidgeon-hole themselves, seeking that one über build, right?
Scott Hartsman: Sure, and I think it's on us to make sure we have a game where that's not the end-all-be-all game experience. You're talking about raiding, and the classic case of the tank that's built up and geared up to be a raid tank, and that is it, period, end of sentence. I think it's on us to make games that have more to do even when you're that guy.
Ten Ton Hammer: So from a class design perspective, are you designing with all that in mind? Will there be multiple paths to perfection in any given role?
Scott Hartsman: I don't know how close we'll get to this; I'm a very honest person if nothing else. But the goal is this: no matter what choice you make at character select on day one, the idea is that, yes, you should be able to go be the best at endgame-something, but that you should be able to successfully fulfill multiple roles in group, in raid, and in PvP. We don't want anybody to ever be at the point where they've put hundreds of hours of time into this character, and now that they've hit the end-all-be-all, they're a one trick pony. That's really not fun.
Ten Ton Hammer: So the idea is that there will be no bad class development choices, essentially?
Scott Hartsman: Don't get me wrong, we're giving players the tools to make all kinds of bad choices. But, none of them are irreversible, and sometimes the difference between good and bad is just moving a few points around. We expect there to be a lot of theorycrafting too.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/85694 (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/85694)
Ten Ton Hammer: On the classes and callings page (http://www.riftgame.com/en/classes/index.php) , we see nine of the 16 souls revealed. Are you pretty set in concept for what those classes will be?
Scott Hartsman: Absolutely, on all but one. And the other thing is: there's more than 16. That's all I can say on that right now. The thing that you should take away when you look at that website is that that ain't the full complement. There's more.
Ten Ton Hammer: Since not everyone has the time or desire to delve deep into theorycrafting to make the kind of character they want. Is it clearly laid out, or will we have to sit down and puzzle about our character out-of-game using detailed charts and graphs?
Scott Hartsman: I wouldn't worry about that too much, because we expect a couple of things to happen. First, when you have a system like this, and it's customizable, there will be many conversations, threads, etc. of what's your favorite build, what works well for this, etc. In any game, there's going to be some cookie cutters that everyone is going to like. That's fine.
For those that are just in Rift for the social experience and don't want to play the class system at all, that's fine. Just keep investing in the one class you picked. Chances are, you will come out ok. Alternately, built right into the game is the invest and preview ability. It's not a system where every time you click a button, it's confirmed forever. If you go to respec all of your points, yea, you can respend them nine or ten different ways and experiment with them in real time before you finally hit ok and accept all the changes. We're building that in from the beginning; I think you have to with a system like this.
Ten Ton Hammer: So respec'ing won't break the bank? It's not an escalating amount of money you have to pay?
Scott Hartsman: It's not obscenely escalating, we'll put it that way. We're expecting people to want to do this. Actually, we're expecting people to need to do this. We're tuning it more to be a token cost and less of a 'holy crap, I need to save up tons of money so I can do x tonight.'
Ten Ton Hammer: Some folks think class balance will be an impossible task with the system you've described. I'm not sure how anyone can talk balance prior to beta, but how are you addressing balancing concerns from the get-go?
Scott Hartsman: Sure. Here's the thing: I love when people say, 'Oh, this is going to be hard or impossible to balance' because, to me, that means they're adept at finding ways to cheat the system, which means they're going to have fun with it. That said, there are some people that think of imbalance as a universal problem. Imbalance is only a problem if it traps users into a corner where they have no way to make their situation better. This system gives you so many tools to help you help yourself. And if something is incredibly out of whack, of course we'll deal with it.
Ten Ton Hammer: It often seems to matter more that players have the perception that classes are out of balance, whether they actually are or not. Are there things you can do at this stage to address the perception of imbalance? Sort of work on your trusting relationship with players?
Scott Hartsman: The perception of imbalance I think is always going to exist. I'm actually more afraid of systems where there is no such perception because if you have achieved perfect numeric balance, congratulations, you've just made the more boringly overbalanced game in existence. That's actually far more deadly to the success of a game than making something that had the potential to be too interesting. A lot of it will always come down to how good an individual player is behind the keyboard.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/86647 (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/86647)
Ten Ton Hammer: Have you toyed with the idea of class build presets? Sort of the old KOTOR-ish auto-level idea?
Scott Hartsman: It's something we've talked about, but that's the kind of thing where I'd want to see what happens in beta first to determine if we really need that. In our testing so far, we have our own fair share of newbies (on a dev team this size, we have lots of people that aren't involved with the class system at all, and we haven't seen the need for it yet). If we need it, we can go that way.
Ten Ton Hammer: That kind of leads into my last question. The soul tree is a purely level-based development system; you're getting points per level to spend on classes and callings. Will there be a skill-based component to character development as well?
Scott Hartsman: Not to developing primary skills like that, no. Our tradeskill system, however, does use learned skills over time. But for combat, it's all about the leveling. You allude to something that we've had lots of conversations about, continuing to add new dimensions to the system. But we realized we were already going to have our hands full with just the system as spec'ed - we'll try that first and then see if we need new complications. So far, I think we're good. We started out on the assumption that we'd need one full time class designer to handle all the souls, and very rapidly that expanded to 3 and 4. Most games that I've worked on in the past have generally had one person or two. It's rapidly turned into something that we wanted to double down on to ensure we come up with something great. We're trying to put our money where our mouth is on that one.