In the latest installment of our exclusive dev blog series, Senior Game Designer Berenger Fish outlines the design process behind Alsbeth's new raid instance.

Once Phase 3 of The River of Souls world event is complete, a new level 50 20-player raid instance will be unlocked that brings the fight directly to Alsbeth the Discordant. If you're interested in the design process behind The River of Souls instance, then we have a special treat for you. For our latest exclusive Rift dev blog entry, Senior Game Designer Berenger Fish has outlined how the raid went from an idea to reality in a matter of months. Get all the details after the jump!

Phase 2 of the world event begins tomorrow, April 16, at noon server time, followed by the start of Phase 3. For more details, check out our event guide. Also, new players can try out Rift for free this weekend simply by heading over the the Allies of the Ascended page, grabbing a key and following the instructions. See you in Telara!

The River of Souls

By Senior Game Designer Berenger Fish

When designing any video game, a particular feature or piece of content may go through many cycles of iteration. This is especially true when spending many years developing a first class MMO. It is not uncommon for the pre-production of a large piece of content such as a zone or dungeon to begin a year or more before it’s ready to go live.

Typically for a dungeon to come to life, the design, planning, scheduling and implementation of many different departments must be carefully choreographed. The art department delivers the concept art, environment, props, creature models, animation, VFX, icons, maps and more. The audio department delivers music, environmental SFX, ability SFX and many lines of recorded dialog. From the design department we have stories to develop, encounters to design, quests to write, achievements to author, loot tables to itemize, and a myriad of many little tasks as we try to put it all together. The engineers, of course, support us all as they add features to the game and our toolsets.

During this entire time the content will evolve to reflect any changes to the game or story, as well as be improved upon as the tools become more advanced and we become more proficient in using them. It’s even possible for the finished product to be very different than the original design.

This is what makes the development of Rift’s second instanced raid, The River of Souls, a testament to our technology and our development team’s ability to be nimble and adapt as our needs change. What would normally take a year of planning and development was compressed into only a few months. River of Souls was born from several needs.

The biggest reason we developed The River of Souls was that we had a story that needed telling. Alsbeth the Discordant is one of Telara’s major villains. She is Regulos’ most powerful sorceress and leader of the Endless Court, making appearances all over the world as well as several dungeons. Through most of our Alpha tests her storyline concluded in Stillmoor, but nobody was particularly happy about it. She deserved more.

Secondly, from a progression and itemization standpoint we wanted to expand our lowest tier of 20-player raiding. We ideally want to provide a certain number of boss encounters at a given tier so that there is a nice balance between difficulty and loot sources. If you have too few encounters then the capabilities of the raid don’t improve very quickly (not to mention players tiring of the same encounters every week). If there are too many encounters at the same difficulty level then it’s possible that the power of the raid can increase so rapidly that the content will become obsolete too soon.

We had expanded our first raid, Greenscale’s Blight, to include more bosses than originally designed, but not enough to provide a complete tier of content. The next raid was now too big to combine them into a single tier. We had a few different options as to what we could do to solve the problem, but nothing ideal. What we really needed was more content!

“We should give Alsbeth her own raid.”

That simple statement quickly evolved into, “What can we do to make this happen?” Schedules are tight. We’re trying to ship a triple-A MMO in a matter of only months! Perhaps if we just keep it nice and simple and keep the custom assets to a minimum it might be possible. A plan is made. We are a go.

Only we don’t keep it simple.

Immediately the work begins. The artists quickly produce a base environment and the designers dive into implementing encounters. Everybody dreams bigger. River of Souls has to be as good as the rest of Rift! The artists start cranking out new models, new animations, new VFX. The design team adds more and more gameplay, special vignettes, and a worldwide opening event.

The final result is something that we are very proud of, not because “we did the best we could given the circumstances,” but because River of Souls stands on its own as being a kick-ass raid. We hope you enjoy it.