Trion recently updated their official site with some of the coolest highlights of patch 1.9. We couldn’t help but share! Keep reading for the list, along with links to the coverage we’ve provided on some of the upcoming features.

RIFT 1.9: Conquest

Maelforge and Laethys are dead, and with the Blood Storm on the run, the Ascended have splintered over philosophical differences. Three groups have risen among these mighty immortals, and their inter-dimensional war has come to a head in a battle that rages across realities.

Conquest introduces factions that transcend the differences between Guardian and Defiant. Join the Oathsworn, the Dominion, or the Nightfall, and experience pulse-pounding player-on-player bloodshed in a whole new way. Earn PvP ranks and armor sets as you fight your way across this incredible conflict.

Trion’s latest Dev Blog video showcases the latest content system: Instant Adventures. The videos tells us much of what we know already; people can join and immediately start killing and fighting and playing the game.

Later today, Patch 1.6.1 will be deployed to the servers with Instant Adventures for everyone to see for themselves.

rion Worlds today introduces “Instant Adventure,” a new feature that allows Rift™ players to immediately team up with fellow Ascended, complete group quests, and get awesome rewards with the click of a button. The new “Instant Adventure” button teleports players to Stillmoor or Shimmersand where challenges scaled to party size await. One minute you could be purging a nest of cultists with a small group … the next you’re fighting alongside dozens of players in a massive raid against the Blood Storm’s mightiest forces.

A few cool things we can see in the video is a ship firing canons on to the shore! That’s certainly new. Pirates ahoy!

ZAM has published their latest dev blog and this time it’s with Will Cook, a Design Director for Trion.

You would be surprised how difficult it is to build something that everybody really wants. Dynamic content is something that everyone knows when they see it — we’ve all experienced it from time to time, during an unexpected world event or an uncontrollable PvP tug of war. We’ve felt it in our single player sandboxes and procedural generated dungeons. We all know dynamic content when we see it. But we don’t always know what makes it. Sometimes it means that new monsters have replaced old ones. Other times it means that we got caught up in something fun the game didn’t intend for us to do. It can even mean that we’ve joined hundreds of other players in a surprising world event.

ZAM has released their latest Dev Blog and this time it’s Russ Brown, Vice President of Development.

I come into work, grab my second cup of coffee and look over what’s going on in Rift. I look at the game logs and the forums, then I see my team’s reaction from them. My entire team has seen the posts and I am almost sure of finding a discussion or debate going on. For example, this morning I see conversations on our death system and corpse runs, starting soul selection and our XP leveling curve. Designers, artists, QA and engineers all chime in with opinions on what is working and what is not. This is what makes MMOs special and unlike any other game.

The latest Dev Journal at MMORPG.com has been released and this time they are talking about Asha Catari, second in command of the Dragonslayer Covenant and one of the founders of the Defiants.

Artifacts exist of a flourishing city-state known as Catari, dating back to the Eth Empire. Though the empire fell, the family line of the state’s sorcerer lords endured, continuing to produce some of the finest mages of Telara. The sisters Aurum and Asha Catari proved no exception to this tradition. The pair distinguished themselves among the pupils of Quicksilver College, though in very different ways. Aurum was the shining star of the academy, always performing to task and beyond standards of excellence. Asha, the younger sister, was just as gifted, but chafed under stringent curriculum of the college, questioning the effectiveness of century old methodologies. She was expelled in her third year for pursuing the arts of the warlock, a subject forbidden at the school. The scandal caused her father, Theo Catari, the representative of the southern races and High Mage in the court of Mathos, to disown her.

Read more at MMORPG.com.