MMO Reporter Network’s Chris chats with RIFT Executive Producer Bill “Daglar” Fisher and Senior Design Director Simon “Dead Simon” Ffinch. They show off a tour of Nightmare Tide and touch on a whole bunch of features in 3.0. A must watch!
Direct Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM7ICZAqWNQ
Briefly:
- Nightmare Tide – Can go straight there or do a story leading up to it.
- Plane of Water is the manifestation of dreams of a being called Draum. His dreams are being disturbed.
- No breathing/drowning bar in the Plane of Water.
- The video shows off the ‘water volumes’ and how the draining water of Goboro Reef isn’t being drained like a ‘bath’ draining but it gets taken in chunks so there’s vertical columns of water that separate underwater content and ‘dry’ content.
- The video shows off some new mobs in-game. Shows a lot of different areas never seen before like underwater tunnels, vertical water volumes and even above-ground locations like the base of Gyel Fortress in-game.
- Showed off the new Soul Tree window with Masteries on the right.
- Seems to be 3 choices per level above 60.
- You can switch your Masteries whilst out of combat.
- They are saved to your role/spec, but you can change them on-the-fly outside of combat per spec (so you don’t have to go to your Class Trainer to change Masteries within a spec).
- Video showed off Goboro Reef’s puzzle. They are repeatable. There’s mini-puzzles within this puzzle to obtain keys to get to new locations in this cube-maze-like puzzle.
- Showed off Tarken Glacier – Izbithu and Mount Sharax in-game. Confirmed Izbithu’s maw is an entrance to one of the dungeons in Nightmare Tide (probably Glacial Maw).
- 6 dungeons launching with launch. 4 new, 2 revamps (one being Iron Tomb).
- Showed off a Nightmare Rift.
- Unlimited no. of stages – goal is to get as far as you can. Stages will get more complex, more challenging and stage timers will keep dropping.
- 120 bosses already created for the Nightmare Rifts.
- Nightmare Rifts have powerups which you have to decide when to use (use now, or at a later stage?) and also bonus exp (saw 3x bonus exp and 2x bonus exp chat announcement).
- After launch they are looking to add an instance version so those who want to go a little more hardcore or really push the stages without worrying about random players joining in and making the fights unnecessarily harder (more hp, picking up powerups when not needed/etc) can do so.
- From the looks of it, the mobs seem to have quite a variety of different mechanics.
- Talked about Mentoring Up. Abilities scaled up (but no additional abilities than your real level).
- Showed off Minions UI.
RIFT 3.0 Rogue Mastery Preview. Src: MMO Report Network Video
RIFT 3.0 Izbithu + Mt Sharax Preview. Src: MMO Report Network Video
RIFT 3.0 Minions UI Window Preview. Src: MMO Report Network Video
A lot of new information provided and some very nice images to boot. Check out the full video here.
RiftGrate 
Just watched the video … my god I’m so impatient ! This expansion will be awesome !
I can’t wait to mount into a water volume, ride up to the highest point and then exit to the dry land portion and see how far I can end up. Maybe I’ll manage to go from water volume -> dry land -> next water volume in a single leap!
I’m hoping there’s some hard-to-get artifacts or special NPC that requires such maneuvers.
Haha I’ll definitely try to do that too ! I just noticed that there’s the “participation bar” (don’t know the name in english) in the Nightmare Rift, like during the first months of Rift chocolate.
Yea, that is rather interesting. I don’t actually think it measure participation though because the dev wasn’t doing anything except the occasional bard motif. I think it measures each ‘mini-stage’ before the main Stage number increases.
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=20jkb5e&s=8
You see this tornado thing at the back?
Maybe we can use it and access another layer at the zone?
Yep, noticed that – it’s that thing that was datamined a while ago as what is likely known as “The Spout” (probably the twisted area in the bottom-left-ish region of Goboro Reef underneath Luminous Passage on the map. I’m not quite sure it would be transport since that looks to be what the Ghar Stations (one in each zone) seems to be about. To me it almost looks like what you would see if you pulled the plug from a full bath – basically that sucking motion, perhaps one of the things that is causing the zone to lose all its water.
oh yeah. it makes sense as u say it
Is it sure that there will be access to different layers at the zones or we just assume it from the datamining?
The layers are more lore info than actual layers. Basically each zone (according to info from Trion posts) has some verticality to it so it’s actually a lot bigger than it looks. In terms of ‘different layers’; it has more to do with lore – Each zone is supposed to be a different layer of the Plane of Water and each layer has its own moon. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that each zone has multiple ‘layers’.
Not sure what to think about Masteries. They seem more boring that I thought at first.
Maybe I’ll change my mind once I get to see and use them.