Why did Rift fail?

spronk_sl said:

reading some of the employee comments on whether its a good place to work or not is pretty interesting
Trion Worlds Reviews | Glassdoor

I do wonder how they are doing financially, feels like the kind of studio that is always a step away from being shut down

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Great reading there. I quote from some disgruntled review: "Previous CEO was a disconnected salesman with big promises, Current CEO is stuck in the last decade, displays classic Napoleon complex behavior with an intense distrust of anyone outside his inner circle. Fired over 150 employees and shutdown the San Diego office the day after his surprise CEO appointment. Had his underlings do it because he's afraid.

All executives were fired or promptly resigned."

Yikes!

I feel like Glassdoor is far more appealing to the disgruntled employee than it is to happy workers who probably don't care enough to right a glowing review of their company. That's not to dismiss all complaints and Trion looks to be on the low side, but if you've got three stars you're looking pretty good at Glassdoor.

Rift just had shit talent making the game from the beginning. Not saying they are all horrible but that game was just bland from front to back. They had a couple of really good ideas in theory which for me was the rifts and the other was classes but they did not have the talent to develop either of them. They "borrowed" all these little bits and bobs from other games and failed to improve on them or in a fair amount of cases made them worse. The people who were in charge of the creative direction of the game should be exiled from ever working on a game again for the sake of all of us.

I frankly do not rate Hartsman as high as some do either. He seems adequate at best with no real vision or creativity. He is the milk-toast guy you bring in to try to make the games un-suck just enough to make it tread water. The gaming industry really needs a thorough douching from top to bottom instead of these retreads we have now. The issue is most of if not all of these people do not care about MMO's or the genre and would be shocked if even a small fraction of them even actually play their own game or any MMO for that matter.

There are certain key words that makes me shiver with disgust and one of them is "dynamic events" (as in rifts) when this gimmick was announced to be the selling point for "Rift" I knew I wasn't interested. Don't get me wrong; I am sure plenty of others would love this kind of Game Show Mechanics (reminds me of those events we had when we were kids when the music starts and we were set loose to collect stuff).

Rift was boring, for me, from the very beginning.
Just like SWTOR was boring since the very first time Bioware CEO announced the "4th pillar" he wanted to add to MMORPGs, the Story Element.

I think, and I could be wrong, that most lead designers responsible in creating MMORPGs in the last 6 years have no fucking clue on how this dying genre work and what actually keeps players interested in the world they are creating.

bocephus_sl said:

I frankly do not rate Hartsman as high as some do either. He seems adequate at best with no real vision or creativity. He is the milk-toast guy you bring in to try to make the games un-suck just enough to make it tread water. The gaming industry really needs a thorough douching from top to bottom instead of these retreads we have now. The issue is most of if not all of these people do not care about MMO's or the genre and would be shocked if even a small fraction of them even actually play their own game or any MMO for that matter.

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I think Scott can do a good job with what he has at disposal and maybe he could do even better if he was allowed to form a team from scratch, step by step. He's one of the few working with a clear goal in mind, something that apparently many other people in the game industry tend to forget: it's a job, it's still a fucking job and a "relaxed" work environment doesn't mean you can fuck around all day and then complain you have to crunch hours for 6 months. Even if you do, so what? I worked 12 hours a day for 11 years, still doing 10 on a regular basis, often 6 days/week. If you want a more relaxed work environment... open a brothel or something.

I never understood why in the gaming industry the vibe I get from the various info is "yeah, bro, it's cool, we'll get it done... after we waste time for a little bit longer". Maybe it's just the impression, don't know.

Miele_sl said:

I think Scott can do a good job with what he has at disposal and maybe he could do even better if he was allowed to form a team from scratch, step by step. He's one of the few working with a clear goal in mind, something that apparently many other people in the game industry tend to forget: it's a job, it's still a fucking job and a "relaxed" work environment doesn't mean you can fuck around all day and then complain you have to crunch hours for 6 months. Even if you do, so what? I worked 12 hours a day for 11 years, still doing 10 on a regular basis, often 6 days/week. If you want a more relaxed work environment... open a brothel or something.

I never understood why in the gaming industry the vibe I get from the various info is "yeah, bro, it's cool, we'll get it done... after we waste time for a little bit longer". Maybe it's just the impression, don't know.

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I work 40 hours a week and I'd rather switch jobs than pile on OT just because management fucks up. I don't get the complete indifference some of you guys show when you slave away years of your life at your job so someone else can get rich. Is home really such a terrible place for you that you'd rather sit in an office more than 50% of your time?

Quineloe_sl said:

I work 40 hours a week and I'd rather switch jobs than pile on OT just because management fucks up. I don't get the complete indifference some of you guys show when you slave away years of your life at your job so someone else can get rich. Is home really such a terrible place for you that you'd rather sit in an office more than 50% of your time?

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I get money for myself, I don't slave for others, duh
Besides I'm 40, did what I had to and now I'm sitting back: from 2014 just regular hours, haha!

Rift's marketing campaign slogan of "You're not in Azeroth anymore" tells you everything you need to know about why they failed.

I wrote this back in April 2013 in the rift thread on why I thought it was bad, before it went F2P. Looking back on it I can see they increased the grinding required a lot in order to prepare it for F2P. It also makes sense that the talent is there but the management is self destructive.

Eggplant_sl said:

As a person who's got a lot of time into this game, I wouldn't. With the expansion, they managed to turn a good game into a shitty grind fest. It's just not fun. There's not as much to do at max level as there was previous to the expansion, which is stupid.

It's like they took everything good they did with rift original, and threw it away and went with grinds foreverything. Reputation grinds, double rep grinds in some cases, and other grinds. They nerfed gear badges and pvp gain significantly via different methods to make those grinds even worse too.

There was even a way to do old dungeons at lvl 60, where you could get maybe 1 PA point every 3-4 runs via old dungeon badges. They decided this was way too OP and nerfed the shit out of old dungeon badges, now the old dungeons are ghost towns, just a stupid decision all around. Repeat this kind of decision making all over the place.

They added a new feature like a invasion/defense thing forgot what it's called, they had mobs spawning at an insane rate out of these invasion/defend events at release which was awesome and a lot of fun. They significantly decreased the spawn rate to horribly boring because some people, god forbid, were using it to level up.

Even their content updates have been mediocre and infrequent since the expansion release, definitely not worth $15 a month. If you've been subscribed since November and paid for the expansion, that's $130 you've spent for the expansion plus a couple shitty patches.

They had some great ideas that made it a unique game that was better than WoW in many aspects, but they threw all those unique good things away and decided rep grinds and harder treadmills were the best thing to implement.This kind of decision making fits with their company strategy though, leveraging their rift original success on 3 new unproven mmos and failing horribly.

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My biggest issue with Rift is that it had an identity crisis. The world could be challenging and interesting with Rifts and reasons to explore; undermined by endless quest-hubs leading you around by the balls. Dungeons could be engaging and fun; undermined by the fact it was so much easier to solo grind few people bothered with dungeons or never learned finer points of their class. The class/soul system had tons of potential to create unique classes; undermined by every fucking soul and class being able to do everything with extreme skill-bloat. Open world pvp had a good bit of potential, undermined by everything ever. Hell, even the warfronts (that what they were called) had a lot of potential as a fuck-around mini game, until they were made to be all grindy and shit.

I want a game that has the balls to say 'this is what we are' and that's that. I can at least respect that. But trying to just throw every feature and design into a game just makes none of them very appealing. I had enough fun trying out underplayed soul combos I would have played either the 'hardcore' or 'casual' versions of rift, but not both, as it got to be a cluster fuck of confused design decisions. I still think they could make a mini game that's just a character/class/soul tweaker where you build characters and pit them against challenges, maybe even multi-player challenges or pvp matches ala Guild Wars. But, alas, they'd probably try to attach a shitty 'world' to that and fuck it up too.

My only fond memories of Rift involved playing a Riftstalker. Dungeons were fun if you weren't falling through the world and had a group of people who could get over a rogue tanking. And in pvp it was fun and had a lot of tools despite not being a DurrPS choice, especially the fang match where I could single-handedly turn the tide in favor of my team just by causing so much confusion and misdirection and by feeling like an actual tank in pvp, which was kinda cool. Buuut, by the time I soloed two classes to max and had two more in the mid 30's and realized dungeons and "pvp" were getting harder to find, I called it quits with most of the people I knew who also soloed to max and realized they'd killed their own fun. And I didn't even give myself the chance to be disappointed by the raiding because the progression-by-numbers I was told to follow smelled of dailies and lame.

Did it fail? Or did it just fail to be what gamers wanted it to be?

I enjoyed it for a few months after release, then gave it away. Came back for the expansion, played for a few weeks, gave it away for good. That expansion was the grindiest thing I think I have ever seen

Why did Wildstar fail?

Xianthe_sl said:

My company is on here, 5 stars and is 13 years old. And yes, we've had layoffs in the past. Glassdoor isn't always a 3 star system.

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Mine isn't too bad either, right at four out of five. My post was mostly anecdotal on a few searches I've done but maybe the bigger take away is that the gaming industry is full of companies that are run like shit and treat their employees poorly (which lines up to must stories about the industry).

If people get treated like disposable plug in modules , you are not getting their best work in any industry. If the incentive to getting it done means unemployment austerity . There is no incentive to not drag out the process of creation at all.
There are few things comedy gold , like watching a company that treated you like crap. Go right down the swirly bowl .

The game was on rails, in questing, crafting, equipment, leveling etc. Very restricted options/alternatives to the core paths. I actually liked the Rifts, openworld randomness that you can just join in at anytime, but the reward system was again just uninspired, gear upgrades were bland and I never really got the point of the soul system tbh, good concept, odd in practice.