Since Rift’s launch in February last year, Trion’s popular and very warmly-received MMO has received almost constant updates, the development team releasing major content patches every two months. While any two of those updates combined would be more than a match for any other game expansion, Trion are now about to introduce Storm Legion, their own idea of what constitutes an expansion, and it’s big. This weekend, a beta event will give players a chance to explore the Eastern Holdings, the City Core and Seratos, as well as try out the Dimensions and Hunt Rifts, and we’ve got 500 beta keys to give away. Yes, 500! For a chance to claim yours, and to find out more about Storm Legion, read on.

First of all, if you want to get your hands on one of those keys then all you need to do is head over to our Facebook page

and give us a Like. Once you’ve done that, send us a private message

asking for a Rift beta key and we’ll send one your way. Be as quick as

you can, because it’s first come, first served, and there’ll be a lot of

people keen to claim theirs. This looks like it’s going to be one heck

of a big beta.

You

see, to stand out from all those content patches, Rift’s first

dedicated expansion has to offer something pretty special. Trion aren’t

messing around and, since Rift is full and could do with loosening its

belt, Trion are tripling the size of the world. That’s just for

starters.

In

that context, that ambition seems spectacularly mad. Not only are the

team adding two new continents, Brevane and Dusken, but each of these

continents are larger in terms of raw landmass than the single continent

that Rift released with, and that’s a continent which, over the past

year and a half, has been steadily filled with everything the team at

Trion could think to put in it. Brevane and Dusken will continue the

story of the two remaining dragon gods in Telara’s world, Regulos and

Crucia.



The

very first area in Dusken is a twisted warzone of a beach, evoking

Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha landings, only warped through the lens of

MMO fantasy games. This is an area for pure killing, with players

attempting to cutting a swathe through the eponymous Storm Legion, and

the story quests splinter off into Carnage missions, kill quests

triggered when you dispatch a certain type of enemy.

But

Storm Rift also rewards different styles of play, giving players a

wider choice of what they can do and when. Brevane is much more

welcoming, with the lush greenery of Cape Jule offering much more than

just combat. Rift’s artifact system, where you’re tasked with scouring

the surface of Telara for glowing points before putting them together in

sets, comes back in full force here.

You

only have to look at what Rift has become in the last twenty months to

see how much emphasis Trion putting on that choice, with the

introduction of systems like Instant Adventure, which pits players

together in a quickly generated arc of quests across any of the games

zones, or Conquest, the new three-way faction PvP. Scott Hartman, the

Executive Producer on Rift and the Chief Creative Officer of the whole

company, explained to me exactly how the company’s thinking has adapted

over time.



“Early

on, when we were playing with prototypes a year ago, we realised that

having fewer story quests, but having them be more meaningful, really

changes the way people play the game,” he said. They’re used instead as a

spine through the zone, something to guide you but never lock you into a

constant rinse and repeat of monster slaying and quest completion.

He

also showed me two new dungeons, one for each of the continents.

Instead of merely rushing you through a static dungeon where each boss

waits patiently for you to come and slaughter them, Trion are attempting

to make these places feel alive and busy. One was an indoctrination

factory for the Storm Legion, and as you travel through its bowels,

jumping from air vent to air vent, you gradually witness the ordeals

that each new recruit goes through before they emerge a fresh faced,

brainwashed servant of Crucia.

The

additions aren’t limited to geography, either. Each of Rift’s four

classes is getting a new Soul, a subclass that offers up a whole slew of

tactical options for players, and all but the Cleric’s were on show.

Warriors

get the Tempest, an appropriately lightning-themed ranged subclass that

hurls out electricity both in bolts and bombs. The intention is to give

the Warrior something to do from range, before closing the gap and

letting rip with the rest of their abilities, and it works well as a

straight DPS nuke.



The

Mage, however, gets the opposite, being newly augmented with the

Harbinger Soul which brings magical melee weapons into their hands. Each

of these combines with a different kind of Mage attunement, so that a

giant spectral axe will enhance your healing spells, while a huge

ethereal scythe might boost your necromancy. The most impressive thing

about the Harbinger is how it adapts the rest of your abilities to work

in a melee context. It lets you charge nukes that would have previously

been suicide to try.

The

Tactician is the Rogue’s new Soul and, appropriately, it’s the most

tactically interesting. Instead of focusing on the Rogue’s pure damage

potential as the majority of its current Souls do, it offers some

lateral utility, with a series of area-of-effect buffs, ranged

abilities, and, most exciting of all, a handful of different flavours of

flamethrowers that spew burning liquid, healing or necromantic magic.

More

impressive is the overhaul that all the previous Souls are going to be

receiving. During a hands-on session with the game, one of the

developers informed me that the change list to the classes alone was

dozens of pages long, and a good chunk of the current Souls feel like

they’re brand new. Trion are hitting reset on a huge section of the

game, pulling it in line with everything that they want out of their

MMO.



The

developers are clearly passionate about their game and this is

evidenced in all the planning they’ve been doing. Trion have ensured all

the tools are in place for them to iterate, and iterate fast, and

that’s what they’ve been doing since Rift’s launch, all culminating in

Storm Legion. It’s not only a new playground for players to enjoy, but

also for Trion themselves. Now they’ve got some space to fill, to add

new dynamic events to, to pack with more dungeons, to populate with

everything they’ve been developing since February last year.

If

Trion can pull off everything they’ve shown for Storm Legion, it will

not only be the biggest update that Rift has ever seen, it’ll also be in

the running for the largest expansion any

MMO has ever seen. That’s not even mentioning Dimensions, Rift’s take

on player housing, which we’ll be previewing shortly. The sheer scale of

all this is beyond impressive, and testament to how robustly Trion have

built their game, so that creating new content and new systems is as

easy as they can make it, and as fast as their players could ever want.