We sat down with Executive Producer Scott Hartsman to find out more about Rift's first worldwide dynamic event, which will add a new raid zone to the game.

Rift's first worldwide, fully dynamic event is scheduled to kick off tomorrow, March 30 (update: at 8 a.m. PDT), which is less than one month after the game's March 1 launch. This ambitious event will last for about a week and contain something for everyone; players of all levels will be able to fight invasions of the undead army in every zone to ultimately unlock a permanent level 50 20-player raid zone and bring the fight directly to Alsbeth the Discordant, the right hand of Regulos the Destroyer.

As part of Update 1.1, this event kicks off a brand new scale for Rift's dynamic content. Editor-in-Chief Darryl "Togikagi" Gangloff had the chance to sit down with Trion Worlds CCO and Rift Executive Producer Scott Hartsman to discuss the event and what it means for the future of the game.

Keep reading after the jump for the full interview and to watch the River of Souls event trailer! Also, check out some new screenshots in our gallery.

River of Souls lore and event trailer

Before diving into the Q&A, here's a brief summary of the lore behind the event. Alsbeth, the leader of the Endless Court, has been yanking souls from the Soulstream and reanimating them as an army of undead to serve Regulos. It's up the Ascended to wade through these minions and enter the River of Souls to make Alsbeth pay for her crimes.

The trailer provides a good preview for the event:

ZAM: Can you start off by giving us your thoughts on the world event and what it entails?

Scott Hartsman: Yeah, absolutely. One of the big things that people have called out repeatedly throughout our betas is that they have really loved the events. They love that our world is unpredictable, that new and interesting things are happening all the time, and that the world wasn't exactly in the same state it was yesterday. That's been a theme that we've been pushing really hard, even internally on the dev team; the cool, crazy things we can do with our event system using our architecture that we can use to advance the story.

Naturally, a live update cycle fits into that idea really well because this time we're developing an event on a brand new scale. These things are happening worldwide all at the same time now, which lets us do a couple of cool things. We get to introduce an entirely new scale of event, and we get to make sure that everybody gets to participate. A lot of times when it comes to advancing a story in an MMO, it's just for the highest of the high end. This lets us do cool things that everybody can participate in so everybody is really a part of what's going on in the world and taking the story to its next chapter. That's really been the big recurring theme for us.

In the presentation of the events themselves, we're also unveiling our world event UI so it's a constant reminder of where you are in the current stage of things and where the world is and where it's been, and what you're going to be working toward next. It's a great way for us to be able to do cool things on update cycles to make sure people understand there is always going to be something cool to come back to in the game.

ZAM: Can you talk a little bit more about that world event UI you just mentioned?

Hartsman: It's mostly a list of all the things that are going on during the event. The idea is that it shows the stages the event will have, but you won't be able to see the details of the future ones until you're on that stage. You can see the details of the past and the present, but as for future stages of advancement the idea is to give people a context of the scope of the totality of the event.

If I've played in a given stage for a certain amount of time, that's cool. I can now see there's another stage coming up, and maybe I'll come back tomorrow and take part in that, or come back in a couple days and take part in another stage, and so on. It's kind of like making sure people are in charge of their own play time, if that makes sense. We want to make sure people have the ability to participate in a stage, and then say “I'm going to let the rest of my server pick up the slack and I'll come back tomorrow.” Players will have a context of the multiple new things going on in the game.

ZAM: This whole thing should last for about a week, right?

Hartsman: Yup! And then it culminates in a brand new raid zone. It's all themed around the same story.

ZAM: So players on a server will need to complete the stages of the event to unlock the raid?

Hartsman: Exactly. Think of the stages themselves as pages of a chapter where the entire unveil is the chapter itself. They are all progressing the story to the point that you've now broken into Alsbeth's realm and you're able to take part in the assault. In terms of the lore, with her being Regulos' right hand, she's the guardian of the Soulstream. You will advance to the point where you've broken through and now it's time to take the fight to her.

The raid is level 50 content, but the nice thing about doing that is it becomes aspirational content for everyone else. I think that's another large theme of our update cycle; there's always going to be more there, and even if you're not there yet, at some point it's going to be something cool for you to do as well. We kind of get a little of the best of both worlds with something immediately relevant to everybody, but then later on there's the other half of it.

ZAM: Will the event be going on constantly 24/7, or will it be more like invasions where we see a message flash on our screens and we run to the nearest battle?

Hartsman: There's actually a little bit of both. There are parts of it that run longer term than others, how does that sound? Every stage is its own distinct set of objectives. There are definitely some where there's a persistent thing, but there are others where it's more start and stop, because what we didn't want to do with these events was make it that the rest of the game was unplayable either, so there's a bit of a balancing act between those two.

ZAM: So a player could avoid the entire event if they wanted to focus on other content?

Hartsman: Yeah, exactly. It's not something we're forcing the entire world to do. We try to work player agency into this as best as we can, which is to say, “if I just want to be questing, let me be questing.” But what we're finding more and more is that people want more events. This is largely us saying, “you got it!”

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