The next major Rift content patch, Conquest, is going to land in the patcher next week, bringing with it a slew of new features, enhancing, PvP, end game content, and letting you mince about with your lower level friends, showing off your fancy armour without ruining their game thanks to the new mentoring mode. There’s also a few more minor additions, detailed below the jump.
The most immediately exciting is that there’s now a barbershop in the game, which lets you tweak your appearance, meaning that the afro you thought would be just hilarious in the character creator but have secretly resented ever since can now be done away with, or you can just mix things up with a ponytail
There’s also a new world event in Summerfest, presenting you with a scavenger hunt to slueth your way through, and a new raid Sliver in the Primeval Feast, where you’ll face up against Fae Lord Twyl.
It’s the new three-way PvP that’s the most interesting though, giving players a series of control points to fight over and control, a whole new battleground scenario that should make things in Rift’s PvP a whole lot more interesting. It’s clearly the focus of 1.9, and any PvP with three sides is good PvP, as Planetside, Dark Age of Camelot and Guild Wars 2 have proven.
But it’s the mentoring system that I’m really excited about, because levels can so easily become a barrier for entry to so many players, even if they do have friends already in the game. Being so many levels away means they have a sheer cliff of grind in front of them that they have to scale before being able to play with the people they want to play with, and with a mentoring system they can at least have some company while they do it, even if they’re not given access immediately to the content their friends are playing. It strips away some of the barriers of entry, and makes starting up the game much more palatable.
The patch should hit sometime next week, and, with Rift’s fancy new streaming patcher content, you should be able to play it near immediately.