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: I like to give the people I interview the opportunity to answer this next question at some point. I find there’s a lot of pent-up rage in the gaming industry, like, “You bastards in the media never ask me that! And now that you have I’m going to talk about it for 90 minutes straight!”

So, is there anything that you, personally would like to talk about? The sort of things that people such as myself might not generally ask you?

Cindy Bowens: The only thing I can think of is what I said before we started the tape. And that is how excited I am to be in a position where I really feel that community is understood, and that the community is valued. That just means everything to me as a community manager.

Russ, among many of the other staff members, have come to me and said, “What do you need? What can we do to support the community? I want to be a part of it.”

After we go back to the office next week we’re going to start having people come on to the forums, we’re going to start podcasts, we’re going to start live IRC chats with community members… anything to let them interface with the devs and get an idea of who wants what, and how they want to see the game go.

It’s a little tricky area with that, because you can’t do everything, you can’t please everybody, but that’s one of the things I think I’ve learned over the years, how to funnel that information and find out what’s important, what’s across the board as opposed to just a small group of people complaining.

I just couldn’t be happier to have landed here. I think it’s going to be a great community, where a lot of good things happen.

You asked me before we started if we were going to have… What did you call it? “Riftguard?”

The MMO Gamer: [laughing] Yes, the Rift version of Fanguard or Fan Faire from EQ…

Cindy Bowens: We’re definitely talking about that. I miss doing the old event, and my boss and I have talked a lot about that. If the interest is there, if people want to have live events, that’s definitely a direction we’ll go.

Russ Brown: I also think it’s important, as I rant against other companies sometimes, I never understand why companies change things that are popular.

The customer is king. If they like it, encourage it. If your game has something else, oh well, they like it!

So many times I see companies say, “Oh my god! Millions of people are exploiting this! Or doing this in the game!” And yes, they like it, they’re enjoying it, encourage it. They’re the customer. You are a service, that’s what an MMO is.

The MMO Gamer: That’s very similar to the position of Craig Morrison, the game director of Age of Conan.

We had a very long conversation last year, revolving around the question of “Why can’t MMOs just be fun?”

His position was that designers generally spend the bulk of their time trying to keep people playing the way they want them to, as opposed to just letting players find their own fun—even if some might consider it to be “not as designed.”

Can I assume based on that answer that you’re more of the let the players play the game the way they wan—

Russ Brown: Damn straight.

The way I’d like to see it work, the way I want it to work, is that as long as players aren’t griefing, or totally making it terrible for other players, let the players play the way they want to play, as long as they enjoy themselves.

As long as they make it a fun place to be, and a fun place to play.

It’s like when I used to run a paper game, I used to say, “Hey, if you want this game to advance, make it fun for the guy sitting next to you.”

That’s how you make a good game. Not going in there and making it so some other guy can’t do what he wants to do. That’s my one thing.

The MMO Gamer: You’ve said that the customer is king, and if people are enjoying things, you shouldn’t change them.

And I didn’t want to say anything while I was receiving the demo out of an abundance of tact, but since you brought the subject up…

Russ Brown: Shoot.

The MMO Gamer: I’m sure you’re going to get a lot of heat because your UI and gameplay are… let’s say they’d be very familiar to a WoW player.

Anyone who has ever played WoW could just come right in to Rift, and pick it up no problem. You don’t need to explain anything, they know how the hotbar works, they know how the backpack works, the skill systems are very similar…

Russ Brown: Right.

The MMO Gamer: There are going to be people out there who will eviscerate you for that, who are going to want to know, “Why didn’t they innovate more?”

Russ Brown: Well, there’s things you innovate on, and there’s things you don’t. The hotbar has been in RPGs for what? 25 years?

Before 3D, there was a hotbar. It works really well with that thing called a mouse, and for the type of game we’re doing.

I don’t think innovations in things like the hotbar, or the UI really drive a game to greatness. I can make the greatest bag system in the world, and no one’s going to buy my game.

I need to innovate on things like gameplay, on me, my character, not on UI.

Our UI will be familiar, people will understand it, it will be easy to use.

The MMO Gamer: Having said that, can you give a concrete example of an innovative system in Rift?

Russ Brown: Our class system. The fact that I can dabble in different souls. A choice I make when I’m first starting the game doesn’t totally bone me 200 days later.

I can play this game for a year, and I can constantly get new souls, new class systems…

It also gives us one very important thing: It allows us to make a very specific type of soul, a very specific role, that does a very specific thing. Because you can swap it out, that’s okay.

If I couldn’t swap out my souls, if I couldn’t swap out my skills, you couldn’t make something that’s really specific. I couldn’t make a class that’s just a really good buffer.

Because if I did that, people would say “Why would you do that? It’s no fun when I try to do this other thing.” But now, I can say “You’re right, it is no fun when you try to do that other thing. It’s made to do this thing. If you want to do that other thing, there’s a soul for that, too.”

You can do a lot of interesting things with it. You’ll see over the course of the life of the game.

The MMO Gamer: I asked Russ my standard “Why do you make games?” interview closer last year, so for this year I’ll use a slightly modified version:

Cindy, what made you decide to get into community management? What compels you to wake up every morning and herd cats all day long?

Cindy Bowens: Well, at first I played The Realm, that’s where I got into MMOs. Started into EverQuest, and just loved it. I was a huge EverQuest fan.

I started a fansite called The Women of EverQuest that really took off, and had quite a few people on it. And that was where the idea came from for these fan events, someone on there said, “Hey, we should all get together and meet!”

I had a background in event planning, so I did my research, and put together the EverQuest Gathering in St. Louis. I think that was in 1999, right after the launch.

SOE, who was Verant at the time, found out about it, sent some people to it, and it was huge. We were supposed to have 100 people, and 250 people showed up.

That went so well they said “Let’s do another one in Vegas.” And all this time I’m still just a player.

So we had another one in Vegas, that was supposed to have 250 people, and we had 500 show up.

At that point Brad McQuaid said, “Why don’t you come work for Sony and start doing these events on a regular basis?”

So along with doing the events, I was working with fansites, with the community at large, and I was doing a FanFaire every three months in a different city across the country.

During that time I got to meet every fansite that was out there, and thousands of EverQuest players who also got to meet each other and meet the team… they were just awesome events.

But they were a little tough on me. After two years of that kind of schedule I kind of got burned out. And that’s about the game that Brad left SOE and started Sigil.

They had just started, they hadn’t even announced a game, and they decided that they wanted to try building a community first, before building the game.

So they hired me when there was nothing. We didn’t even have a forum or anything. So I got to be there and build that community all the way up.

And it was great, we had 200,000 people in our community before the game even launched.

It really showed that if you give people with the interest a place to come, and let them be a part of building your game, it really pays off.

So, that’s about it! I’ve been in community management since 1999, worked with just about everybody in the fansite field, and I guess you could say I’m an expert on MMO players, because I’ve met so many and talked to so many.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, well thank you both very much for joining us, we appreciate it, and we hope we can do it again some time.

Russ Brown: Always enjoy talking to you.

Cindy Bowens: Definitely.