It’s been a long time coming, but we finally received Daglar’s State of the Game address yesterday. In it, Daglar touched on a lot of information we already knew along with a fair dose of PR-speak, but he did reassure the community that Trion is listening to its playerbase and is always working to bring us improvements in every part of the game from graphical optimization and cross-shard functionality to PvP matchmaking improvements, dimension enhancements, and more.
He also reminded the community that Trion is trying something a little different with RIFT 2.5: Song of Dreams by rolling out new content every week. The goal with this experiment of sorts is to see how players react to the stream of steady, new content to explore since that’s exactly how Trion wants to release the content for RIFT 3.0, which is our second expansion that will take place in the Plane of Water.
Instead of having a steady stream of new content releasing in the weeks after 3.0, however, Trion is aiming to release content intended for 3.0 before 3.0 actually launches. From the sounds of Daglar’s phrasing in his State of the Game address, it appears we’re specifically looking at getting the new crafting profession, the new souls, and some additional story content before 3.0 launches. Here’s the hint pointing to that:
“Why wait for an expansion pack to release a new crafting profession? Why wait to introduce new souls for each of the callings? Why wait to start introducing the story of 3.0?”
We’ve already began to see the story of 3.0 emerge in Song of Dreams, but getting the new souls (Arbiter – Mage Tank, Physician – Rogue Healer, Liberator – Warrior Healer, and Crusader – Cleric Support) ahead of time as well as the new profession that was teased during a recent live stream would be pretty sweet. These would presumably be added during one of the patches leading up to 3.0 in order to give Trion more time to complete the actual expansion’s content (as well as give us plenty of time to learn the news souls!).
Daglar also posted some important news for folks on our European shards yesterday:
Originally posted by Daglar (Source)
As many of you know, RIFT has had a massive influx of players in the last several weeks. When we did the cluster combinations we had a good understanding of what our capacity would be in the future. There was room to grow in our plans – enough room to fit up to 40% new users comfortably. Our success and your interest has far exceeded this and unfortunately has led to laggy shards in the EU, long queues, and overall a game play experience that isn’t up to our standards.We have additional enhancements being made to our clusters, but those enhancements will take time to implement. Because of this, we will once again be temporarily separating the EU shards into two clusters. An English cluster and a mixed French/German/International cluster. When we have additional enhancements made to our cluster technology, we will once again combine EU to be a single whole cluster.
I’m extremely sorry for what you’ve had to experience over the last several weeks.
It’s good to see an apology issued after all of the transfer/lag problems many EU players have experienced in these past few weeks. It’s also good to see a solution, even if it’s only temporary. Daglar made a second post later on reminding players that new shards will not be opening and that Argent, unfortunately, will not be making a return.
