The RIFT portion of yesterday’s Trion Friday live stream extravaganza was, unsurprisingly, focused on RIFT’s big move to a free-to-play system beginning on June 12th. Daglar joined Simon and Elrar and explained how some of the systems will work in greater detail as well as updated the RIFT community on some promising changes to the current Patron reward system. The team has been listening to all of our feedback and has made a few changes that, overall, make being a RIFT veteran a little more appealing.

Elrar also showed off the in-game shop in its current state and let Daglar talk a little bit about the different categories of items, the Loyalty tiers, and a whole lot more. To catch a replay of the live stream, you can see it here. Alternatively, keep reading to see our detailed highlights roundup.

Daglar continued addressing a solid portion of player feedback on the forums yesterday. Among his posts, a few were especially interesting. He commented on what we’ll be seeing as far as race and faction change items in the cash shop as well as the future of server transfers and expansion content.

This first quote was regarding the possibility of additional character slots in the item store:

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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Character slots is on the wish list, but we cannot say for certain if it will make the launch date.

Server transfers will remain free for your normal free weekly transfer. We could potentially in the distant future charge for multiple moves per week, but I don’t really like that idea and I’d rather get us to a better place with cross shard / single shard technology.

Faction and race changes are not linked. If you change yourself to a Bahmi as a guardian, you are still a Guardian. If you are a Kelari and change faction, you are still a Kelari.

Bahmi Guardian? Now that’s an interesting change.

Since this week’s huge bombshell announcement regarding RIFT going free-to-play beginning June 12th, Daglar and the entire Trion RIFT team have been quite diligent in making sure they keep the lines of communication open with the playerbase. Daglar has set a record with the amount of posts he’s made in this official forum thread (hence “Daglar Tracker”) which has been an overall solid source for player feedback.

Keep reading to see a couple of choice quotes that Daglar made yesterday regarding the possibility of additional servers for the F2P transition and thoughts on in-game shop gear, previous raid tiers, and some possible changes we may see to tier mark systems in the future.

In lieu of hearing a simple announcement regarding an arrival date for Patch 2.3, we received some other big news yesterday along with that patch date announcement. Yep, RIFT’s going free-to-play on June 12th, which is also when 2.3 will be opening its doors (and Dendrome). Most of us saw the hints of this move coming months ago in between the layoffs at Trion, the addition of the in-game shop, and Scott Hartsman’s departure. Yesterday’s news still came as a surprise to many of us, however, especially given the timing of the news.

Bill “Daglar” Fisher mentioned yesterday that the team had been planning this move for more than a year, but despite the fact that the team pushed one-year subscription plans during the launch of Storm Legion, veteran players were only given one month to absorb the F2P news. Many one-year subscribers are understandably feeling a little let down by this move, especially considering the fact that some are paid up with over 300 days remaining on their accounts.

While we still don’t know exactly when RIFT 2.3 is coming out, Daglar did toss out a hint about one thing we’ll see in RIFT 2.4– a new 20-man raid. He also gave us one bit of reassuring news on the length of time that will go between these next two updates:

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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Next question is when is 2.4? Currently scheduled for a shorter amount of time than 2.2 to 2.3.

Daglar wasn’t quite as generous with hints when it came to the PvP front of the game. In this forum thread, he mentioned the following:

“There is no current ETA for another Warfront. There is no need for conspiracy theories that no one plays PvP in RIFT – quite a few folks do. The content of PvP is typically, the PvP itself. New maps are great, and we’d love to provide more when the time is right – but I cannot give you a date and or time when a new Warfront will be delivered.”

One of the features players most commonly request is the ability to alter the appearance of our weapons through RIFT‘s Wardrobe system. Many players had hoped we’d gain the ability to change the appearance of our weapons in Storm Legion. It didn’t happen, unfortunately, but Daglar did have some excellent news yesterday for players who have been faithfully reminding Trion’s RIFT team that this feature is still very much needed:

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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Wardrobe will not be available for weapons. However we have another solution coming down the pipe for 2.3 to customize weapon appearances.

Later in the same thread, Pithos added an extra detail and told us that yes, this new system will also affect the appearance of shields and other off-hand items. Hooray!

There are some interesting changes and additions coming in 2.3 including a new chronicle. When will we see new souls though? Hints and more hints.

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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More chronicles are in the works. You should expect one with 2.3.

~Daglar

In response to this question: Even if these new souls are not to be expected within the next weeks, I’m looking forward to that!
Anyway… the one new soul in SL was no reason for Trion to give us another role slot… will the second new soul now finally be reason enough for a few more???
THAT would be nice!

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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2.3

Daglar shared a bit of good news for Warrior players who enjoy using Combat Veteran Warlord specs that also include abilities found in the Paladin soul. The Paladin soul still has a few clunky “flavor” ability requirements that require the use of a shield. This won’t be the case for much longer!

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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The flavor is nice on the Paladin, but at the end of the day the game play and synergy suffers for it. I’ve asked Aillion to remove the shield requirement on a number of Paladin abilities – and to rename the ones that would be silly without it.

Hm, that means a change in name for Shield Charge. ‘Shiny Wings O’ Light Charge’, anyone? Nah, probably not.

…Well, kind of, anyway. Since this week’s Daglar-styled forum hint about our two class devs being hard at work designing brand new souls, the RIFT community’s been abuzz with all sorts of speculation and opinions on what we’ll see as far as new souls go and when exactly we’ll see them added to the game. Daglar tossed out a couple of additional hints yesterday and briefly mentioned the fact that Trion seriously considered adding in another calling for Storm Legion, but decided to go with new souls instead.

This reply was in regards to a question on whether we’ll see specific souls this time around or a completely new calling:

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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New soul yes. New calling no.

We played around with a variety of ideas for a new calling for Storm Legion but felt that the game and our players were actually best served by expanding the class system we have.

Later on in the thread, Dalgar answered a forum poster who asked if we’d see the new souls in a few months time with, “Nope, not a few months. Longer than a few.” He posted one more time to remind players that creating new souls and continually balancing them can be an extremely involved task and tends to take longer than most players realize. “Quite a few tasks that people think are “super fast” are actually the result of multiple months worth of work,” he said. “WTB magic wand that makes things go faster.”

Sadly, we’re lacking that magic wand to help Daglar and his team out. We are left with a larger hint about what type of time frame we’re looking at, however. It definitely sounds like these new souls are nowhere ready to meet the public eye just yet. That just means we have more to look forward to!

You could always guess that new souls were always coming to RIFT, but in the first two years of life they were only hinted at by going into an expansion. With the shake-up with senior management that hit recently, are we going to be getting more souls sooner than the next expansion?

Will we finally see some of the original Telara design where souls are treated as rewards or loot drops? Interesting times ahead.

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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There is a difference between being unaware and having to many other tasks on him to address it. His full time job is not to read and respond to the forums and address every issue – though he does an absolutely amazing job of making additional time to do so. I on the other hand can go ask him to re-adjust his priority for the day and modify something.

I hate talking about things that are not close to being ready, but Kervik and Aillion are pretty busy working on brand new souls and other class related features for the future right now.

Daglar
Creative Director: RIFT

Free month of subscription time if someone can guess what those souls are.