Trion Community Day Video with New Info on 3.0

Trion held a “Trion Worlds Community Day 2014” last week where they invited a group of players from their various titles as well as Game Sites/Mags over to the  Trion Worlds office in Redwood Shores, California.

Seatin, Techie Will and Baramos (Noobzilla) have uploaded a video about the visit you can find here.

Enter Trion

There were multiple players invited from all Trion titles as well as IGN, MMORPG.com, Polygon and PC Gamer. On the RIFT side, Seatin, Techie Will, Baramos, Bctrainers and Ilex were invited over.

• The group met up on Monday with dinner. Baramos attempted to impersonate Scott Hartsmen to fool the other players whilst Hartsmen was still in-transit.
• Got signed copies of original RIFT Collector’s Edition Box with 20+ RIFT Staff signatures.
• Lots of enthusiasm from the Trion team.
• They visited the Trion Worlds office on Tuesday and ended up staying there or conversing with Trion staff from 8am till near-midnight.
• There was a whole bunch of concept art on the walls, including inspiration from different animals to create Maelforge.
• They played approx. 2 1/2 hrs of RIFT and 2hrs of each of the other games whilst at the office and got a tour of the place. The group ran through the upcoming Nightmare Coast Dungeon.
• All players who were invited to the Trion Worlds Community Day 2014 got access to 3.0 alpha testing.
• At the end of Tuesday night they spent 3hrs+ chatting with Daglar, bouncing suggestions, feedback and ideas.

Daglar asked: What would you do if you were the Producer for one day?

• Seatin: Make Conquest have Black Garden weekend mechanic (orbs). Daglar rejected the idea.
• Techie Will: Better Inventory Management.
• Baramos: Turn Ember Isle into a persistent open-world PvP place as a lot of players skip it for Storm Legion zones.

3.0 Information

ETA: 2014. Techie Will managed to squeeze out of Daglar that it will ‘probably’ not be December.

Nightmare Rifts

• Group was shown a graphic about nightmare rifts.
• Nightmare Rifts are very thematic and look highly disturbing with a massive eyeball in the center of the Rift and hands/body parts all over the place.

Mentoring System – Mentor Up

• Bring in new Mentoring Up for 3.0.
• This will allow players to participate in zone events in higher-level zones and in higher-level dungeons. (potentially even raids). This will not be via the Looking-For-Group (‘LFG’) window though (for dungeons) so it will be manual join. Don’t worry about Level 10 players mentoring up and joining your random dungeons.
• Limitations:
  • Can’t equip gear of a higher level than your ‘real’ level.
  • Can’t pick up quests that require a higher level than your real level.
  • You will get all passives in your soul trees up to the mentored level, but you won’t get any higher-level abilities.
  • Need to be at least Level 10.
• Loot: Unknown what loot you will get but it is assumed that you will get level-appropriate gear for your real, un-mentored level (like you do when mentoring down).

Raid Zone Instant Adventures

• Coming shortly after 3.0, Trion is looking to turn a few existing raid zones including Hammerknell Fortress (Level 50 Tier 2 20-man Raid) and ‘maybe’ Infernal Dawn (Level 50 Tier 3 20-man Raid) into an Instant Adventure Zone. (Seatin suggests that this could perhaps mirror a Looking-For-Raid (‘LFR’) system).
• No clue on details and there was no indication of whether you could actually fight any of the bosses.
• They mentioned that one enthusiastic Trion team member has been pushing these types of IAs for a while now. (Dev Tacitus revealed on the PTS today that it was him; he has also been asking for mentoring up for 2yrs+ now).

3.0 Zones

There will be 3 zones for 3.0, although there will be plenty of stuff to do for each zone, and there will be multiple layers per zone. [We’ve seen before an idea of how big these zones are, and they look a lot bigger than your typical Storm Legion zone].

Minions System

• Anything you kill in RIFT will get you a chance at a Minion card. There’s also ones you can obtain from performing certain tasks or completing certain quests.
• Every Minion has a fixed set of stats, although there are levels. You use Minions to complete tasks in the Minions UI/Interface.
• Seatin gives an example: “Kill Lord Greenscale and get him as one of your minion trading cards then you can send him off to the Plane of Life to harvest some crafting materials”.
• Minions are Account Bound. [r]

How Missions (Adventure Cards) Work:

• You choose a Mission. Then you choose a Minion to send on a Mission.
• Missions include kill, harvest craft materials and collect artifacts.
• You can gain Experience, Platinum, Crafting Materials and Artifacts.
• You can send your Minions off to do Missions wherever you are, such as when you are raiding. Simply use the Minions UI/Interface. [There may be restrictions, like being out of combat.]
• Missions last a varying amount of time. Mock-up concept art they saw had “10min Duration” and another as “12hr Duration” as examples.
• Different Minions will be suited for different types of Missions that go to different locations. You will want a diverse ‘card deck’ of Minions. You can still take any Minion to do any Mission, but the better-suited Minions will bring back better rewards.

The Minions System is still highly Work-in-Progress, with no working version for testers to try out yet. All the info above is based on concepts on paper that Trion showed on the day.

PvP Improvements

• The group put out various suggestions to Daglar, especially to bring back open world PvP.
• Daglar was “pretty responsive” to the idea of making Daily PvP Quests only completable on PvP Shards. However, no confirmation on whether this will actually be implemented.
• PvP Gear Changes: Trion is looking to fix the gear gap – they want to provide progression (so no normalization), but they don’t want the gear gap to be as large as it is now.
• PvP Gear changes will be universal – so they’ll apply to open world and perhaps even warfronts to reduce barriers across the board.
• Reverse Bolstering System included (no details).
• The change will also include an improvement for PvP players to make it easier to do PvE content in 3.0.

PvE Gear Changes

• There’s lots of changes coming for PvE gear.
• Tank Gear will still exist in 3.0. However, TOUGHNESS is being removed. Tanks will simply require HIT instead. Other tank stats such as BLOCK and DEFLECT are still going to remain.
• A new Tank Stat: GUARD is being introduced.
  • GUARD will affect party members and allows players standing within x meters of the tank to benefit from a kind of positive effect.
  • No information was given on what this ability will actually do.
  • It’s an aura.
  • If two tanks have GUARD stats on their gear, the one with the higher stat gets applied.

[This could potentially add a new raid mechanic where tanks may need to position themselves to – say – protect Ranged players in a fight.]

Other Info

• Trion passed around a piece of Concept Art that looks like some kind of monster – perhaps an open-world boss. Daglar said they weren’t meant to see it (an “oops!” moment). Unless the group decides to reveal their Paint skills though, we don’t know what it is.
• Further Concept Art Tease: “Something you’ll see in the Forest Moon of Endor” – Baramos. [Treehouses? Ewoks?]
• A couple of the old dungeons will be making their way back for 3.0.
• Account-wide Storage: Can’t make it for 2.8 or 3.0 release, but Trion are looking at unique ideas for account-wide storage.
• Performance – multiple people working on it – currently working on Shadow Optimization.
• Daglar is looking at stats and stat caps. No info or anything solid.
• Can’t go Factionless (so no factionless open-world PvP, for instance) due to how the questing system works. The Questing System requires a Faction.

Quite a few new pieces of information for 3.0 revealed with this year’s Trion Worlds Community Day.

Check out the video for full information and banter by Seatin, Techie Will and Baramos here.
You can also check out more 3.0-related information here.