Russ Brown and Cindy Bowens Talk Trion’s Upcoming Fantasy MMO, Rift: Planes of Telara

By Steven Crews | July 15, 2010 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews

The MMO Gamer: As Russ said when we were talking before the interview, building the community in an MMO is building the game. If you have no community, you have no players.

Cindy Bowens: Right.

The MMO Gamer: But, at the same time, while you’re building the community, how much of your job is also managing expectations?

There’s always the danger of becoming “the next big thing,” to the point that you’re never going to be able to satisfy the demands that players have built for themselves, hyping up the game for months or years before ever it comes out.

Cindy Bowens: We have to be very careful about what we promise. Unless something is written in stone I won’t confirm it, none of us will.

We try to listen a lot. We try to hear the feedback, we plan on doing a lot of polls, a lot of threads where we can really get their opinions, and respond to them.

But you’re right, managing those expectations is a big part of it. We haven’t made any grandiose promises that I know of…

Russ Brown: Right.

Cindy Bowens: We’re just saying “Hey, this is what we’re doing, and we hope you’ll come play with us.”

Russ Brown: Exactly. And that’s really the key point: “This is what we’re doing.”

A lot of times when you hear people giving feedback, they’ll say, “Is this more action-oriented? Are you going to have action-based combat?”

We are what I like to call an “avatar-based” MMO. The skill is in the avatar. It’s not an action, twitchy game. So we tell them what we are, and then leave it to them to decide what they want to do.

The MMO Gamer: So to build off of those last two answers, have you gone back and changed anything major based solely on community feedback?

Cindy Bowens: I don’t think so, yet. But, I totally see that happening. We have plans to do a lot of polls, get their feedback on things…

Russ Brown: Just last night, somebody had an idea about going back into the Shadowlands later in their career when I was having a chat with them, and I thought, “That’s a really good idea…” [laughing]

Cindy Bowens: That’s a big part of it, too; having the devs chat with fans, bringing members of the community in, meet the team, see the game, get their reactions face to face.

The MMO Gamer: See, that was a freebie right there, if you said “yes,” your forums would have exploded with every crackpot Monday morning game designer on the planet… You’d have had a community of thousands up and running in five minutes.

Everyone: [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: I’d like to think that based on my job I tend to be ahead of the curve on most things MMO, but prior to last year’s E3 Trion wasn’t really that big on my radar—or the radar of most people I know.

So I guess the question is: where did you guys come from? It seems like the company just sprang out of the ground from nothing a few years ago, and now you’re rolling in cash and have got multiple AAA titles in development at once.

Russ Brown: What happened is some of our founders, Lars, JVC, a few other people, got together and they wanted to make a AAA MMO.

We had a great team of people come in, and they had a vision of making a platform that could handle dynamic content, which was successful.

A lot of it was driven by this idea that you can make a game where everyone can gather together in one spot, you use distributed architecture, and then you can deliver dynamic content to it.

From that grew a game that uses that architecture.

You saw my presentation last year, it was much more of a technical demo than a game. We didn’t talk about lore too much, we didn’t talk about the game side.

So now it’s all about delivering the game, not so much the back-end technology.

The MMO Gamer: After spending all of that time and effort on tech, what made you guys take a look at the fantasy MMO market, which is arguably extremely saturated and already dominated by a 900lb gorilla in the room, and say “Me, too!”

Russ Brown: It’s the biggest market out there. It’s the biggest market, and goddamnit, when you make an MMO, your first game has got to be fantasy. It’s got to be. Because fantasy has swords.

Cindy Bowens: [laughs]

Russ Brown: Classic fantasy is what people love, it’s what I read, it’s what I play. It just had to be fantasy.

The MMO Gamer: As a follow-up to that, because fantasy is the biggest market, and obviously a very popular genre inside and outside of the gaming industry, how do you begin to set yourself apart from the thousands of other swords and sorcery fantasy worlds already out there?

How do you differentiate your elves from everybody else’s elves?

Russ Brown: The very first thing is look. Make your look distinctive, create distinctive creatures, distinctive player races.

Secondly is lore, give the player a good story. We’re doing this whole thing of the lore of an invasion… we have a world that is being invaded by other Planes, it just sounds fun. Give the players something that’s fun, right?

But you do want some familiarity. I’ve made those games that were fantasy with all different races, and people hated them—well, for other reasons, too… [laughing]

But people would say, “Hey, where’s my dwarves? Where’s my elves?” You just have to give people dwarves and elves, it’s a part of fantasy.

The MMO Gamer: Cindy, we were having a chat before the interview, and you said that when Trion hired you they basically said, “Build us a community. Do whatever you need to do.”

What did you tell them you need to do?

Cindy Bowens: I think the most important part of building a community is finding your leaders, and empowering them to help you. One person can’t stay on the forums 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

It’s really important to spread out your community, and find people that are really supporting you, and really strongly—if not necessarily always positively. Some of my best community leaders have not been fanboys.

It takes people who have the respect of the community to keep things going in a good direction.

That’s basically what I’ve been working on, now: Getting to know my community, getting help to my leaders, getting them what they need. Helping fansites… I love working with fansites! We’ve already got one really good fansite called Telara Central that’s been up and running for about a year.

I’ve been in contact with a number of other people who are interested in starting other types of fansites, we have a Wikipedia already…

So I’ll be spending a lot of time these next few months working with them, and helping them get going.

I don’t necessarily believe that everyone has to live on our site constantly, because they’re not going to. People start their own communities at different sites. So I want to network, and be a part of that.

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