The subscription MMO market is a hard one to break into these days, with World of Warcraft sitting upon its throne with 12 million users. Still, Trion Worlds sees its opportunity, even to the point of launching an ad campaign saying, “You’re not in Azeroth anymore.” We asked SVP of Publishing David Reid, about throwing down the gauntlet and what would help Rift compete with World of Warcraft.
Where did the idea for the “You’re not in Azeroth anymore” campaign come from?
During the process of coming up with a marketing campaign, you create a lot of ideas. Between the product team and marketing team, there were a lot of ideas that felt like, “Been there done that.” There’s a way that [MMORPGs] have very consistently been taken to market. We’re a challenger and we’re not a big company yet, so we had to think about how to get above the noise. We need to break through and be true to what you’re selling — you don’t want something that doesn’t show the product.
The idea of a rift opening up and monsters coming about and changing the world is something that hasn’t really been done in the scale we’re talking. The notion of playing through an MMO and doing all of the same quests is getting old. The idea of the Rifts is a ‘You’re not in Kansas anymore’ and that’s the spiritual inspiration for the campaign; that’s part of the reason we shifted our name from Planes of Telara. If you’re an MMO gamer, Azeroth might as well be Kansas. When you see a rift open in our game, you know things are different.
We can see why you would choose to change your name to just Rift — it’s simple, and it conveys the central idea of the game?
We listen to our community on this, but there’s another facet though. It’s amazing how many MMOs refer to online or a place in the world. There was a time when all online companies had to have ‘e’ in the title. We believe games are going online and all games, or some part of games, will be online soon.
Whom are you hoping to target with your marketing efforts for Rift Will it be a more hardcore MMO crowd?
It is an MMO crowd, that’s who were targeting. We’re at a point in the industry where we don’t think Rift will be anyone’s first MMO; that is our audience. Anytime you make a campaign, you want to appeal to your core audience, but if you’re not annoying or confusing someone you don’t have a very good campaign! If someone doesn’t know what Azeroth is, you’re not our target market.
In what ways do you see Rift standing out compared to World of Warcraft?
It’s fundamentally about the essence of a world that is changing. For all of the potential that MMOs have, to be connected and updated all the time, there really hasn’t been anything to give the player . . . well, EVE Online is very different from what we’re doing, but by and large, the world isn’t changing in most MMOs. We think that that is the difference with Rift. When you see a rift open and an invasion begin, you can see dozens of people take down the boss. It is a completely different experience from your other MMOs; it is about rifts, invasions, choices and the impact of those choices. Whether an NPC has to hide out in a cave for a while or you help save his village impacts how you play. It’s also about the ascended soul class system; what MMO players wanted was to do more with their character. It’s asking a lot for players to hope they like their default class from the beginning until the end, but now they can tweak their classes every step of the way and at every level.
All fantasy MMOs can kind of look alike after a while, so being distinct can be important.
I would say we’re pleased with how it looks and runs better that just about anything on an ATi card from 2003. There’s a couple answers there, though. First, fantasy is a big genre, it’s not something we’re trying to reinvent and bring our own twist to. We have some liberty in saying what a dwarf is and what an elf looks like and the monsters are different and have an outer-planes look to them. So we’re not shying away from core fantasy. But to your point, it’s about art direction and subtlety. I remember it being said not that long ago ‘MMOs don’t have to have great graphics’ . . . if you say that, your graphics probably suck. Graphics are one of the most important things for video games – people either see graphics and like it or they don’t. There’s work of art direction and craft, and once you get beyond that it’s a fantasy game and what’s different is the gameplay.
David Reid
How has the game changed from the feedback you’ve gotten from players during development?
It’s been great. The first thing I’d say is that Beta really is launch! Don’t go in if you’re not confident in your product – I saw those mistakes at NCsoft. Don’t mortgage the future of the game! Alpha is a little different, gamers accept the role of something in progress, but in Beta you’re basically at launch. This was the first beta for Trion; we’ve done it separately for other companies but not together before. It’s about making sure your ping times, scalability, and other things are working; then you go into beta 2 and it’s time to start showing what’s new and the world opens up, and the reaction to that was positive. The thing we learned was to time when to make the cool content come in earlier, show what is the “riftness” of Rift. Hearing it from the community has changed the balance of things too – for instance, they wanted more flexibility with the class system. Before you got one point in your soul tree per level, and people wanted more, so we started with 51 max soul points and we turned it up to 70. It’s about fine tuning of knobs at this point in the game, and that’s important.
One of the things we may have taken for granted early on is what people are familiar with in fantasy. We need to spend time introducing them to the fashion, the world, and the “proper noun” speak. We’re baking it in, making that a higher level of polish and completeness and articulating the lore, the story and the high level of discourse. Another game based on a big IP could maybe assume that sort of knowledge, but we couldn’t.
If you look across MMOs, many games had established IPs, but Lineage was new and Guild Wars was new, just during my time at NCsoft. What makes our games different is what the shared audience will have on the canon; it’s hard when the story is already told to feel like you’re making a difference. I’m a big fan of Bethesda RPGs and the freedom they offer, but MMOs don’t offer a lot of that. Why shouldn’t you be able to see your name in lights? With remarkable few exceptions, you’ll probably not hit a home run in the World Series, but you could stand out in Rift. I mean, we have plenty of PVE content that’s cut from the same cloth of most MMO content; we feel you need to have that, but what we feel is different is that there’s going to be a guild and a player that makes a difference and MMOs haven’t done a great job of enabling that; we aim to change that.
It can be hard with a game like, say, Star Wars Galaxies that is in the middle of a fixed storyline.
In a lot of the single player Star Wars games, they give you a slice of lore you haven’t seen before and that works really well; there’s no bigger IP for gamers. But as soon as you start getting into the bigger universe, you get to the question of how many players save the world Does it start to seem a little shallow if anyone can do it There’s a water cooler moment that people can ask “Yeah man, what did you do during this moment ” but persistant worlds should be about stand out accomplishments. It needs to be about communities where people can shine.
What potential do you see for subscription MMOs in the market now?
We fundamentally are big believers in it. In my mind, you see a lot of big publishers that have retreated from the subscription model and have gone away from the AAA business and approached the genre like a free-to-play casual, but they aren’t the business that harnesses the gamer with a capital G. If you have the content, players are happy to play to it. You want to make people realize the level of polish your product has. We think the subscription model is only growing; it just comes with a level of leverage F2P doesn’t have.
So, we’re very confident in the subscription business.
It’s a tough business to get into. You need to be firing on all cylinders right from the beginning.
Even the biggest companies have a hard time launching MMOs. Getting the community lined up is a tough thing, and fundamentally it’s best to have veteran people behind it. MMO gamers have seen a lot of games with a lot of potential that haven’t delivered. You can’t not live up to those promises, but we intend to live up to ours. That’s what the marketing campaign is about: there’s a new MMO in town and we’re an MMO games company founded by MMO gamers.
Finally, what’s been important for you to highlight in the game trailers and features you’ve sent out for Rift?
Clearly, there’s one obvious thing: you can’t really talk about your graphics, you have to show them. If people see the graphical upgrade and see the horizon and a texture that doesn’t just look like plastered on 2D art [they’ll be excited]. Everything has to reflect AAA quality. In features and lore, the focus is the rifts themselves, that the world is under siege from the outer planes. It’s not like ‘this is a monster’ – it’s an enemy with its own agenda. We don’t know what will happen when a fire rift and a dark rift open up next to each other near a target — they might attack the town or each other. That’s the signature feature, the effect on the world. The flaming footprints left by fire elementals, the fact that a life rift is aggressive as well; getting all that across is point number one.
The second most important point is factions, the Guardians vs. the Defiant is faith versus reason, not good versus evil. That gave a really interesting counterpoint and letting people know there was a different layer to our game too. We’re releasing a trailer now for the warrior calling, and you’ve got 8 different souls to work with, and depending on how you allocate it you can be completely different. You can save many different builds, so it’s a high level of variety for the gameplay. So there you have it: the rifts, the factions and the class system are key.
David, thanks.
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