RIFT's first closed beta produces "a hell of a sight"

This past weekend, RIFT played host to thousands of brand-new testers with its first closed beta event. The three-day event featured the first 20 levels of the Defiant experience and wrapped up early Monday. According to a forum post by Trion World's Executive Producer Scott Hartsman, the team couldn't be more pleased with the way things panned out.

RIFT's team received over 20,000 pieces of feedback from the event and learned quite a few things, including, as Hartsman put it, "answers to some critical questions." These answers included how the servers would hold up with so many people in so few zones, if they could deliver quick patches, and how rifts would happen with the crowd density. In fact, there were so many people that the team had to double the amount of servers almost immediately, although fortunately the servers held up under the strain.

Hartsman identified a number of problem areas that would be addressed, such as mob respawn rate. Because of the massive population, RIFT's titular feature had a difficult time being a challenge until the team made some adjustments: "Where we had hoped and expected to see invasions rampaging across the countryside, instead the population density had become far too high, such that invasions weren't even getting off the ground. We updated the game with even more insanely active tuning on Saturday night to give the invaders a chance to come out and play too, and the response in chat and submitted feedbacks was overwhelmingly positive once that started. By the time it worked, it was a hell of a sight -- Huge invasions finally freed up, setting up footholds, wiping out the local populace, and eventually being repelled by defenders."

Trion is working on a number of improvements as it prepares for its second closed beta event, which is prepped to start December 17th. Stay tuned to Massively for a special upcoming post-beta interview!