Trion’s livestreams from the PAX convention floor every day over the holiday weekend presented a deluge of information for viewers and attendees, and amongst the many things shown was a first look at Endless Eclipse, one of the new raids in Storm Legion. The final boss of this gigantic new zone? “One of the two dragons that are left,” said Russ Brown, VP of Development for RIFT, while giving the internet a tour of the raid for Trion’s TwitchTV page.
A dragon, eh? Well if Crucia is on the Storm Legion cover that probably leaves… yep, that’s right, it’s time to face down Regulos, previously known as the big baddie from vanilla RIFT. In fact, at one point near the end of the tour a zone name popped up on the screen: “Regulos Raid Death Chamber”. Let’s just hope it’s his death and not ours, right?
As would suit a dragon god from the Plane of Death, Endless Eclipse is styled to be dark and unnerving. The walls seem to move as though breathing, and surfaces glisten with unidentified slimy substances. Brown himself quite cheerfully describes the zone’s design as “nasty looking” and “mucussy”, and one gets the sense that the design team really enjoyed making Regulos’s death lair. At one point we’re shown an epic balcony high in a building, gated off by giant skeletal hands. “This would make a great place for a dimension,” Brown says in the video, although whether it’s honest musing or a hint about the future is unclear. (Either way, he’s right, the area would make an amazing guild hall.)
Later Brown leads the tour outside to a beautiful alien landscape with floating islands and walks over to a large hole dead in the center of a flat platform. “I wonder who comes out there?” he teased. Sadly no creatures were spawned during the tour although Community Manager Elrar was spotted at the PAX booth telling folks that Regulos has been given a makeover and the results are “awesome”.
Endless Eclipse is described a “mid-range” raid, likely meaning that it’s the Tier 2 equivalent of Storm Legion. Killing off Regulos this early in the story was pretty unexpected, and rumors that the third raid to ship with Storm Legion will star Crucia means that it’s entirely possible that there is a worse, yet unseen enemy that we’ll have to face before Storm Legion is done.
RIFT has thus far filled a niche in the increasingly fractured MMO marketplace in large part due to its raiding content. Folks who are bored of raiding in previous games or playing other MMOs that don’t have structured end-game PvE are often drawn to RIFT’s many concurrent raid tiers and the high difficulty of cutting edge content. Raiding is an important element of Storm Legion’s success, and it’s nice to see that Trion has been hard at work giving raid environments, at least, their share of the expansion magic.
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