Trion today announced that their MMO Rift Online would be joining the great migration from subscription-based gaming to a free-to-play model, walking in the footsteps of Lord of the Rings: Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and DC Universe Online.
Though one key difference between Rift and all those other MMOs... we’ll let the list of restricted features speak for itself.
Trion are to scrap the requirement to pay a subscription fee to play Rift, their well regarded MMO. From June 12th, players will be able to create and play through the content from the base game, and the recent Storm Legion expansion pack without charge.
Open world MMO shooter Defiance has gathered over a million registered accounts since its launch last month. Developer Trion has celebrated by revealing the most popular activities in the game, and launching a contest for players to be featured on the accompanying TV show.
While Defiance may look like a brown/grey shooter inspired by all brown/grey shooters, the latest trailer shows off a selection of weapons that are far from generic. There are lightning guns, tick-firing guns, big weird metal globule guns.
Check them out for yourself.
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Starting on Thursday, Rift's land of Telara has been taken over by the Carnival of the Ascended, bringing with it pets for your pets, carnival games and class changes.
The full list of changes is copied in below but the biggest alterations which 2.2 brings is the new Planar Attunement Tier 3, Planar Attunement of War Tier 2, and the Planar Attunement level cap lift, increasing it to 1079.
Check out the rest of the changes below.
Over the course of two days with Trion Worlds in and around Crytek’s nanoshiny Frankfurt HQ, earlier this month, a strange thing happened. The name stopped being funny. Slowly but surely, this apparently accidental bottling of FPS creative bankruptcy in two short syllables was washed clean, to reveal the image of the game itself - a reimagining of the multiplayer FPS as ongoing service. Think Call of Duty reimagined by Riot Games - not harvested annually until the land turns barren, but nurtured, through updates big and small, over the next half-decade. That’s Warface. Or at least, what it might become.
Previously just the domain of upcoming sci-fi films, this year's SCI-FI-LONDON film festival will be overrun with Trion World's Defiance. As lead sponsor of the event Trion will be able to show off the game and tease details of the television programme that is being launched in conjunction with the game.
More below.
Rift's Carnival of the Ascended won't just be hitting the Tempest Bay this year but will spread across all of Telara, bringing with it hats that can be worn at a jaunty angle and colourful mounts of all shapes and sizes (that's a lie, we don't know what shape or size they'll be, they could be exceedingly similar shapes and sizes).
Trion Worlds’ MMO shooter will launch itself into shops virtual and physical around the world on April 2nd. That’s not a tentative, rainbow-pot date either, but a great, wide steel wall of transmedia obligation. Because Defiance has to be out before April 15th, when the first episode of its Syfy TV sibling plays to the public.
Rift developers Trion have signed a deal with XL Games to publish ArcheAge, the MMO follow-up to Lineage currently in beta in South Korea. ArcheAge will be released in North America, Europe, Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand.
Despite already having more than five million subscribers in Russia, Crytek have been wary about launching their free-to-play shooter outside of the vast snowy wastelands. That all changed last week, though, when the closed beta launched for Europe and North America.
It’s a Tuesday and it’s nearly 10am, which means it’s ludicrous ambition o’clock. In a clear punt to upstage both Dust 514’s CCP and Planetside 2’s SOE, Trion Worlds are developing this thing which is MMO and third-person shooter and sci-fi TV drama, all at once. That last part isn’t creative license on my part, either - an actual, thirteen-part SyFy series will accompany the game’s release this summer (that soon?).
About 40 members of Trion Worlds’ in-house development team were laid off yesterday, an affected employee has told Gamasutra. The job losses reportedly leave the Rift team at around two-thirds strength.
Following the news that Petroglyph are to let go 30 staff, it looks like their publisher, Trion Worlds is taking the game they were working on, the MMO RTS End of Nations, in-house. 
Let’s talk game mechanics for a second. I’m going to echo MMO-blogger Syncaine in saying that MMO game mechanics are poor. Would you play a single game that played like a typical MMO for hours on end? Fights that - at least in the solo-parts of the game - tend to look exactly the same? Quests that send you out to do more or less the same thing, but with a different wrapping, over and over again? 
If you’re a Rift fan, Storm Legion is the biggest of deals. Two ginormous new continents, an island stronghold city for both Guardians and Defiant, ten more levels and an expanded Ascended class system. All today.
Crytek are showing off some tactical co-op shooting in their latest trailer. Warface published by Trion Worlds is going to be free to play later this year.
Since launching last year, Trion Worlds have been regularly updating RIFT with content patches filled with dynamic changes every couple of months. Now RIFT's first proper expansion, Storm Legion, is ready. And it's huge. The latest update 1.11: Tempest Rising has already set the ball rolling in the lead up to Storm Legion's launch, unleashing a four-staged World Event and some pretty extreme class changes. But what's included in RIFT: Storm Legion? And why should you play it? Here's everything we know.
Rift: Storm Legion's release is closing in and we've learned of the Minecraft-like home building and its two vast new continents, now details of its four new souls (read: classes) have reached our ears. Though, rather than bullet point listing all the details of the game, Trion have written short stories of each new soul. Given it that old oral history, campfire tale approach.
Storm Legion, Rift’s first expansion, is going to come with player housing. Only it’s not just player housing, but an entire sandbox of tools to build and create the perfect living space: something that’s entirely unique to you. Trion just couldn’t stand to do what everyone else was doing, so they decided to do one better.
