OnRPG recently had a chance to interview Simon Ffinch, Senior Design Director of RIFT. During the interview, the OnRPG team tried to garner some information about what the next year will hold for RIFT. There weren’t too many new tidbits of info discovered in the interview, sadly, but there were a couple of interesting details. Here are two of the questions that were asked, along with their answers:

Can you tell us a bit about what you have planned for this year?

Well I don’t want to give away too much right now so I will keep this a little vague. We do have updates planned out for RIFT well into next year with some really exciting and much requested things for the players to experience. We will be expanding on all the features we have in the game right now and exploring a host of new ones. With the death of the dragons things will be changing around Telara. Players will discover that the denizens of the plane of life are not so bad after all with the corruption of Greenscale removed, although they can be a little mischievous. I will just say that nature abhors a vacuum and the Dragons have left a very large vacuum and of course the true meaning and power of the infinity gate is still to be revealed.

What can we look forward to in Dendrome when it comes out with 2.3?

In the immediate future players can look forward to the world event that will lead to the opening of The Dendrome. Small cracks in the barrier between Ashora and the Dendrome can be widened by players, the better they do the easier the access to the Dendrome will become. As well as a large amount of area to explore this zone will add a really radical new type of dynamic content called Strongholds, plus a whole lot more that will be revealed over the coming weeks. The players will also get to learn a lot more about the Architects and their history and place in Telara.

While this isn’t quite as promising as an official state-of-the-game address listing more specifics on Trion’s yearly plans, at least this bit is something. The plans for opening Dendrome sound pretty interesting. It will be nice to see another world event that’s tied to the current story in a major way. Make sure to check out the full interview over at OnRPG.

RIFT Patch 1.9 is hitting live servers this week, and Rift Junkies got a chance to participate in a press conference call with Hal Hanlin and Scott Hartsman, who chatted a bit about why the team at Trion is so excited to unleash all the cool features of Conquest– and how that excitement will carry on into the future. One of the underlying themes of Patch 1.9 seems to have a lot to with accessibility– bringing players closer together, and creating content that all types of players can dive right into, enjoying it for months to come.

What feature are the staff at Trion most excited about? That question’s pretty easy to answer, at least when it comes to Hal Hanlin and Scott Hartsman. Conquest, of course! It isn’t the patch’s namesake for no reason. The team’s excited about Conquest for many reasons, the most notable reason, however, is because it has the capability of bridging players together. PvPers who enjoy going up against other players have a place in Conquest, as well as anyone who likes multiple objectives, teamwork, or crafting. Everyone can take part. And as a bonus, the rewards have a place on everyone’s wish list.

Another small bit of possible expansion speculation was found yesterday on the official forums, when one curious RIFT player took a look at Trion’s recent trademark entries. Trademark purchases are easily accessible, thanks to the existence of public records, and yep, turns out Trion did recently purchase a trademark: Storm Legion.

The entries For Storm Legion can be found here, here, and here. This trademark could mean a few things, of course, but it’s probably safe to say that Trion intends something pretty major here– something that will see more of the public eye than other RIFT patches. An expansion named ‘RIFT: Storm Legion’? Quite possibly.

Editor’s Note: In the tradition of many other MMORPGs, expansion names are often discovered by trademark registration. However, there are some instances where the trademark leads to the names of books or boardgames.

Whether the trademark has to do with an official expansion or not remains to be seen, but either way, it’s also probably safe to say that the content will have to do with the arrival of Crucia, the addition of the next major raid instance, perhaps a major city, and whatever else Trion has in store for us.

One thing’s for sure– there’s certainly a lot of buzz going around the community regarding these speculative bits. In the community thread where this information was discovered, some RIFT players questioned whether or not Trion would leave the thread open. I think this response pretty much summarizes Trion’s take on all of the speculation:

“Posting this just creates more anticipation hype and buzz. I don’t think they have a problem with that.”

Pretty much. All of the speculation, ideas, and rumors add to the hype we’re seeing. The little hints on the PTS, the PCGamer article, the hints in lore we’ve seen– it all adds to the hype, and makes the experience of waiting just a little more exciting. All we can hope for is that the news, whenever it is finally revealed, actually lives up to the hype. Knowing Trion, it will.

With all of the speculation about a possible RIFT expansion happening sometime this year, one of the most hotly-debated topics within the community is the idea of Trion raising the current level cap. Will they give us another 10 levels of content to plow through, or will they keep lining up content packages for the current endgame? There are definitely key arguments on either side of the fence. Here are a few opinions, straight from this thread, where a large portion of the speculation is currently happening:

“New zones are fun, but seeing all that gear you strove so hard for become useless overnight and superseded by level 51 greens will probably be too much to bear. Went through this a couple of times in other MMOs; as much as I love Rift, I don’t think I can do that again.

They’ll also have to find a way to keep the old content from becoming totally irrelevant. The mentoring feature will keep downlevel zones (somewhat) relevant in case of a level-cap increase. However, no such feature yet exists that would keep the current dungeons and raids from becoming obsolete before a majority of the playerbase ever experiences them.”

This is a very solid reason to be against a level increase cap. Increases often make gear, entire maps, entire cities (Shattrath, anyone?), and entire raids and instance zones obsolete, except when it comes to nostalgia and achievements. Many MMO players like the fact that expansions force an in-game wipe of sorts that knock entire raids out of the ballpark, others don’t. Mentoring may solve this issue somewhat in RIFT, but possibly not, since the reward factors may not line up unless Trion adjusts how rewards scale from older content.

This is a bit of video datamining that actually came out a couple months ago, but since we’ve been hearing about possible RIFT expansion content and all sorts of other speculation goodies lately, we thought we’d highlight it again. In March, G4 took a studio tour over at Trion Worlds, releasing a video that displayed a whiteboard with a barely-visible list of RIFT’s future patch releases and a list of some of the designs they’re currently aiming toward.

Click “continue reading” to find out more!

The folks at PCGamer received an interesting package in the mail yesterday. In it were a strange assortment of items that seemed to hint at some details about a RIFT expansion of sorts. Now, we’ve heard a few times now from Trion staff members that we probably won’t need to purchase a separate expansion, but that we will definitely see content warranting an expansion. Free expansion with awesome content? I’m in.

So, what was in the box? I’m just going to leave the link to the article here. Click “continue reading” to see a summary. It’s um, kinda cryptic.

RIFT’s Public Test Shard is useful for all kinds of things: testing out new features like Conquest, playing with new builds, and keeping tabs on world events. Oh, and datamining! Since the PTS client is closer to the client Trion’s development team works on, every now and then PTS players are able to glimpse into the world of Telara as imagined in the future, and find out about the cool things headed our way that haven’t been announced publicly. Most of the information datamined is pure speculation at this point, but that’s half the fun!

This past week, a couple PTS players noticed some very interesting additions to the achievements tab. One of which is pictured above, and was located under the “Zones” section. Yep, that’s right. Six new zones. Six. Dusken Spires, Eternal City, Pelladane, Seratos, Morban, and Steppes of Infinity. Interestingly enough, there are six planes. Could these possibly be the new zones in the next huge content addition?

Trion, in the past, has talked about the addition of expansion-type content that will eventually allow players to move through the planes, and take part in battles in a world we are unfamiliar with. It’s possible that these zones are connected to that content, since the numbers match. It’s also possible that these zones are connected to content located in Planetouched Wilds, which is an area discovered on the PTS last year, or a new continent entirely.

A couple of weeks ago in an interview with some of Trion’s staff members, we found out about some of the design philosophies the company has discovered, developed, and maintained over the past year that RIFT has been our MMO home. Trion has learned a lot about what their fanbase wants when it comes to raid design, dynamic content, endgame activities, and everything else in between.

It seems that their philosophies and lessons learned as far as raid design have worked out well– Infernal Dawn seems to, so far, be a huge success. Patch 1.8 in general seems to have been a success. It had a little something for everyone. But as most MMO gamers know, a successful patch begs one question in particular: What’s coming up next?

For many of us, it was around this time one year ago that we first heard about RIFT, eagerly dived into beta, then started our adventures across Telara. For others, their adventures would begin later, but would be no less exciting than ours. We’ve all had some pretty crazy adventures by now, and it’s hard to believe that RIFT has been out an entire year. But yet, here we are, celebrating alongside the folks at Trion– who, might I add, have some reasons to celebrate.

RIFT started off the show with a smooth launch and a flood of players who hungered for that MMO experience with more to offer. Do you remember the first few days spent leveling in Silverwood and Freemarch? The roar of an epic zone event taking place, the rush of people as they made their way across the map to slay a huge beast, and the cheers sounding out across every chat channel as it was defeated? I think most of us do, and it’s safe to say that for many of us, that memory will always be among our favorite MMO moments.

The MMO market is larger than it’s ever been. There are quite a few quality games available now for MMO fans, and more are scheduled for release this coming year. With this kind of competition, many MMO developers are taking steps to attract new players and keep the attention of veteran players. The first step? Creating a quality game. Trion has succeeded there. The second step? Making that game accessible.

Some MMO companies are converting their games to a free-to-play model in order to make their game more accessible to their player base and still bring in a profit. Other companies, like Trion, are taking a different route– the trial version route. RIFT is now free, up to level 20, for new players and returning players. This announcement was made a few days ago. The details about this free version, also known as RIFT Lite, can be found on Trion’s official site.