Port Scion – A Past Look

Port Scion is the region locked in-between Silverwood and Freemarch, once the capital of both Guardians and Defiants before Alsbeth’s betrayal resulting in the city and port being overrun by Regulos’ forces.

Dev Tacitus has revealed what Port Scion looked like back in 2009 during RIFT’s development.

Port Scion circa 2009

[Source: MikeD]

The image above was used to compare Port Scion to the other cities that were available at the time. Port Scion was actually built – these are actual top-down images and not just brainstorming doodles:

Nope, that was built. I mean, there were some holes in geometry still, plenty of work to be done, those top down views are from in-game. It was HUGE.

[Source: Tacitus]

Unfortunately all of the assets are gone since the area is not accessible. What remains is just emptiness.

The Districts

As you can see, Port Scion originally had 4 districts in the city as well as a port.

• The left district and the port itself have similar-looking areas to Meridian.
• The right district is where the Battle for Port Scion warfront is held with houses, a bridge, canal and church.
• The bottom district looks to be made up of assets used for Sanctum with the quite notable Sanctum central building at the bottom.

This is no coincidence – the Port Scion assets were later removed and used to help create Sanctum and Meridian.

The Port

Compare the above image to the 2009 image.

From the looks of it, the port at Port Scion was supposed to be where the broken bridge (that used to connect Silverwood and Freemarch) now lies. Either the port was completely removed for the release of RIFT or it was ‘pushed back’ to where the right district resides in the 2009 map.

Tunnels

Dev Tacitus also revealed that there was originally supposed to be “MASSIVE cave networks” dotted all over the place that would link up the various zones near Port Scion. There were whole bunches of caves and twisting and winding tunnels.

They were removed in the end because they had nothing in them and took too long to traverse through (15min by foot from Gloamwood to Iron Pine Peak). [r]

3.0 Drowned Port Scion

The future of Port Scion is unclear at this point, although there is a drowned version of the Battle for Port Scion (right district) in the Public Test Shard’s datafiles, as datamined by TehFrank.

It is unknown at this stage what the map is going to be used for – perhaps a sliver, quest instance, ‘nightmare’ or even an area in-game.

Port Scion – Outside Walls

Another point of interest is in what the outside of Port Scion looks like on Live compared to some of the mini-maps found in the 3.0 datamined files.

Notice something? The left image is what the outside of Port Scion looks like on the main map. The right is an image datamined by TehFrank in a previous PTS update.

From the above image, either Trion are simply re-using assets for a different map in 3.0 or this could potentially be some weird, ‘inverted’ Port Scion. There’s 4 ‘gates’ similar to Port Scion’s gate/wharf that surround something sinister located in the middle area.

This could be the perfect excuse to re-visit all 4 districts of the original Port Scion and refurbish them – one for each ‘gate’ in the map on the right. There’s already ‘flooded’ maps for the right district, why not flooded maps for refurbished versions of the top, bottom and left districts as well?

We’ll just have to wait and see if we actually get the full Port Scion city in 3.0.

Some interesting information revealed to us by Dev Tacitus about the development history of Port Scion as well as some speculation for 3.0. You can find out some more ‘could-have-been’ information here. Or why not check out some 3.0 datamined maps for the 3.0 zones?