TRION have been very upfront about how they were going to approach addons but there has been some confusion as to whether anything would be possible by the time the game was released. This evening they have clarified their position with reagrds to modifications.

There have been a lot of questions about Rift and the use of Add-ons. We’d like to clear up where we stand on this issue.

There is a lot of confusion surrounding our position on Addons and other types of UI modifications, so it is not at all surprising that a reasonable person would think that we are universally against them.

It’s true that RIFT at launch does not have any API support for addons. The reason that we have chosen to go this route is the same as we publicly described when we unveiled the game in early 2010.

Whenever we consider adding a new feature to RIFT, we first and foremost want to make sure that we ship and support it at high quality. That’s the primary yardstick we use. If we can’t, we will tend to hold off until we can.

Supporting Addons, Skinning, and other UI Modifications in a way that is of sufficiently high quality, stability, and in a way that does not allow for the creation of automated play (e.g. bots, which are inherently a negative to the overall experience) was not a task that we could afford to take lightly. Instead, we chose to provide a robust, attractive UI that players could customize in many ways.

As we work toward the future of RIFT, we will be looking to provide new ways for users to customize their experience, through more customizations and possibly all the way through addons and skinning — To us, the issue is primarily one of providing all features at the proper quality that RIFT players deserve.

This latest update will please some players and disappoint others. Addons can both be useful at times but can also be destructive as far as the gameplay is concerned. If you followed World of Warcraft, which has a very open addon API, then you’ll know that over the years many addons were released that could effectively be considered cheats. The one that springs to mind was the waypoint addon where your character could automatically move between set points. This didn’t last long and the functionality was removed and the addon development halted.

Monitoring addons can a time consuming process for a development team and I think TRION has taken the right stance with regards to addons. RIFT players want a solid stable game and I would rather development time was spent on that than watching every single addon that’s created that could potentially damage the game. TRION has done an excellent job with the interface offering everything you need to play the game, coupled with useful tooltips and quest guide markers in-game, the game doesn’t really require any additions right now. In the future maybe, but I would rather TRION out them in the game themselves.