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.
Rift has been the great (read: only) new subscription MMO success story of the decade, launching in 2011 to applause and a flood of direct debit details. But by mid-2012 subscriber numbers had begun to wane. In October Trion Worlds launched a new initiative with gaming social network Raptr to draw in fresh meat. In essence, the initiative saw players bribed with in-game items to keep playing. The result? The planes of Telara ran red with metaphorical new blood, and players began to play for longer too.
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.
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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).
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.
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.
