Rift 3.0 Ripples

Rumours have been rippling through the planes of water about rift 3.0, the second expansion! However not everyone that I have spoken to seems thrilled about it, some worry that the game is not going in the right direction or may end up like Warcraft where by the newer content could not match up to the older... but I say neigh to these neigh Sayers! Trion have their heads screwed on about this one, and will avoid mistakes where possible! Here's a little of what we know so far.

(Please note: everything that you are about the read is subject to change; Some information is educated speculation, it is however the most I know)

Where?

Rift 3.0 is set to be Rift: The plane of Water and from what we have seen in the underwater zone near Ember isle we can pretty much guess we will be fighting the ancient race: the Akvan, currently they sleep but a quest chain has hinted at them awakening! We will hopefully see some Creepy creatures powered by water ad dark magic. It has been speculated that the majority of content will be set under water, however the underwater zone near Ember isle has not been overly successful, which we hope Trion notice, and in turn rethink the zones a little.

 What else?

Well there an numerous things dotted around the web, I tend to take these things with a pinch of salt, but alas, this cannot be ignored. The picture to the right was released by Trion, it was a brainstorm of ideas for 3.0, a lot of it seems to be based around dreams and water. I wont go into detail with all of it but if you enlarge the photo you can see the numerous awesome ideas. Another thing to note is the picture stuck onto the whiteboard, this we believe is a concept for the new continent/island/zone that will be the main place for 3.0 content, as you can see it has multiple layers! Like a cake, and everybody loves cake. This would be an interesting spin on underwater content, as it would allow players to walk rather than swim, which makes controlling your character much less of an annoyance.

When?

This is the part where everything falls down, there are much greater details than those which feature in this article available on the web but this is the part I wanted to talk about. With 2.7 on the Horizon and the release of 4 new souls along with it, it would seem there is now no rush to release a new expansion. The souls were scheduled to be released with 3.0 however Trion officials have hinted at a possible patch 2.8 and possibly implementing tier 3 raids in storm legion. With all this information and us being promised "More" than what we already know about, it seems unlikely that the speculations of 3.0 being released this summer are true, if these rumours become truth though, there shouldn't be too much grumbling from the players, with a new tier of raids and 4 news souls to play around with. Another benefit of releasing "expansion worthy" features in regular content patches is that it allows Trion to iron out any bugs more efficiently, thus making the whole game more enjoyable at a quicker pace.

New Features

Here of some of the new feature ideas floating around

• New abilities
• Water mounts which will allow you to travel quickly across or through water.
• Fishing Rifts!
• Nightmare Rifts - Potentially 15 stage large scale rifts
• Single player and Puzzle Chronicles
• 4 new zones
• New dungeons and Raids

A lot of these features of course, are expected to be added with a new expansion to any MMO game, but it is the features we haven't heard about yet that excite me. Whether or not these new features are set to drop with 3.0 or prior to it, I for one, welcome them.

/Dakra