Rift: And now an expansion

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(c) Trion Worlds

Just a quick note on Rift: it seems like yesterday that I posted an article talking about how Rift was blowing the doors off content expectations, producing more new content than anyone else had in just one short year. Well, they continue to set the bar high for patches, but have raised it for the upcoming expansion. The expansion, which is now known to be called Storm Legion, is set to come out this fall. This is a smart move. Trion is counting on some people being a bit disappointed by the other offerings like Mists of Pandaria and Guild Wars 2, and they want to be the one to scoop the refugees as they did with Star Wars.


The content in Storm Legion is crazy. So far, we know they plan to triple the size of the outdoor world! There are new raids, of course, and new dungeons, of course. There's also going to be new souls for the existing classes, but no new classes or races. The no new races thing surprises me, but the classes don't. Adding a class in Rift would be like adding 3 or 4 in most other games, because of the way the soul system works, and balancing that out would be crazy. Plus, because each class needs to have an extremely flexible suite of roles they can fill, it's not clear that there's enough room in the lore for another class. In the four classes we have now, we get all of the major fantasy tropes from fire-slinging mages to dark necromancers to holy healers to armor-plated tanks to plague-wielding meleeists and so on. Pretty much everything you've ever played in an MMO with one exception is in this. That exception is the monk, and a generic monk could easily be added as a soul to cleric or rogue.

Anyway, there's a lot coming, and I can't wait. I'm taking some time off Rift to get recharged and excited about what's coming. I'll probably come back to it in a couple weeks after having gotten some housework done ;-) Then I'll charge right into finishing off the content that I have so I can get my butt over to Storm Legion!