RIFT Prime
Several years ago, I made a two-part post on this site regarding my experience with various MMOs. ( You can read them using the following links: Rise of MMOs part 1 & Rise of the MMOs part 2 ). In these articles I elaborated a bit on some of the multiplayer online games I’ve tinkered with over the years. One of the games I touched on in that post was RIFT. RIFT was a game that I got to experience from day one. I played it well into its second expansion. RIFT was released during the time between the original version of Final Fantasy XIV and A Realm Reborn. During this lull, I found myself in search of a new MMO, RIFT was the obvious choice.
At release, RIFT borrowed very heavily from World of Warcraft in terms of design and playstyle. But it presented a world all it’s own. One of the more unique features of RIFT are…. rifts. Rifts are essentially random portal/events that pop up in the open world. Some rifts are more frequent than others and the appearance of a rare one would often result in players stopping what they were doing to come participate.
I have fond memories of very first point release for the game. There was a server-wide special event that occurred as the evil goddess descended to do battle against players. It was exciting, yet very flawed. The servers had a hard time keeping up with the load and as result, many players found themselves unable to participate in the event. This resulted in many people missing out on one-of-a-kind achievements and titles. The community was livid. The mismanagement of the event saw the first mass exodus of RIFT players.
One of my fondest memories of the game was participating in the first ever Extra Life event. This was a special marathon session where gamers would accept pledges for charity and play RIFT for twenty four hours straight. We played alongside with the game developers and even earned special titles and rewards. Good times.
The early days of RIFT were lots of fun. As time went by, things started to settle down and as happens with most new MMOs, players began to migrate elsewhere. Trion Worlds, the developers of RIFT, tried to keep things interesting by releasing free content and new paid expansions. But after a while, RIFT’s population took a major hit. Eventually, the game moved to a Free-to-Play model. It was during that time that I finally said my farewell.
These days, RIFT thrives as a F2P game, but it is barely recognizable to old players like me. Even if I wanted to try to get back into it, I’d be completely lost. That’s why the rumors that Trion was going to introduce a classic version of the game caught my attention. It wasn’t long before I realized that the rumors were actually true, RIFT Prime was happening!
This version of RIFT launched on 3/7/2018. Like the original, it will only be available by subscription and will start out with the vanilla version of the game (but, with many of the modern quality of life enhancements). It’s going to be handled in a progression format, but at an accelerated rate. You’ll be able to relive all of the content patches from day one, up to the modern version of the game. Eventually, the RIFT Prime experiment will end, and you’ll be able to import your character to the regular version of the game.
I find this entire concept very appealing and I’ve decided to participate. It has been many years since I last set foot in the world of Telara. Tonight, I’ll be taking my first step back in. As a result, I’ll be posting my progress on this site.
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