Live Datamining: New Mounts

RIFT was updated with 3.4 Hotfix #8 on the 11th November 2015 with ~68mb download. A few new mounts have popped up.

Patch version is STABLE-303-24-A-1056174.

Summary:

• New Mounts. Gold Arclight Rider; Red/White/Grey Greathound; horse_storm_wings.
• Other Info. MoM rigs/config files + tiger swim.
  

As always, everything below is subject to change prior to hitting Live and some things included below may never make it to Live release.

New Mounts

This week’s hotfix included a few new mount skins and rig files.

Gold Arclight Rider Mount

First up is a golden version of the Arclight Rider mount.

The Arclight Rider mounts are generally available during the Arclight Ascendancy Promo Week. For it to appear in the Live files before PTS, I’m going to take a guess that we’ll have a new Arclight Ascendancy Promo Week this Thursday at 3:30PM Server Time.

Greathound Mounts

Remember the Greathound mount from the Grey2k USA Worldwide Promotion back in September? Three more skins have popped up in the client files with the latest hotfix!

The mounts are described internally as “mount_greathound_grey”, “mount_greathound_red” and “mount_greathound_white”, although their actual names might be different.

Just a refresher – here’s what the normal Greathound mount looks like: (thanks to Slipmat for posing on his alt!)

RIFT Greathound Mount. Model: Slipmat@Zaviel

RIFT Greathound Mount – Idle Animation. Model: Slipmat@Zaviel

And as another refresher, here’s the concept art for all four Greathound mount skins:

RIFT Concept Art Hound Mount by RIFT Lead Concept Artist Sven Bybee.

(The white one would go perfectly with the polka dot dress)

Speculation on Appearance

So when will they appear in-game? No clue.

I don’t think Trion will be doing another Grey2K USA Worldwide promotion so soon after their last one though. Lockboxes, direct credit purchase, a new Greathound Promo Week and achievement rewards seems the most obvious choices.

• The white Greathound could go well with this year’s Fae Yule World event – similar to Trion’s release of the Snow Ki Rin mount (Achievement Reward: “For Whom The Jingle Bell Tolls”).
• The grey/black Greathound could also go well with Fae Yule, since Trion had a black Vaiyuu ‘Nightbringer’ mount added in previous years (Achievement Reward: “The Nightmare Before Fae Yule”).

A for the red Greathound, wouldn’t it be nice of Trion if it was a reward for that ‘rewards for days played’ thing CM Ocho mentioned during last month’s RIFT Reddit AMA?

Of course, all of this is pure speculation.

Storm Wing Horse

[Update: The mount has appeared in the latest Unicornalia Promo Week as “Celestial Unicorn” Mount].

Not a skin, but a rig for a new mount popped up. It uses the horse’s rig, but its internal name is “horse_storm_wings.ma”. Looks like we might be getting some kind of Pegasus-like mount.

What looks to be the wing portions sticking out right at the front does not look like other large wings in the game which tends to have multiple segments. The wings on this horse mount clearly aren’t going to have as many moving parts as Mecha Crucia.

Given the lack of multiple segments, it seems these wings are probably going to be similar to the wings on the unicorn badgers [rig][badgers]. The wings will likely be static (as a whole) with minimal moving parts; perhaps stuck close to the body of the mount.

Of course, it’s also possible that the mount doesn’t actually have any wings, and the ‘wings’ part is just referring to some kind of texture on the mount. Perhaps the ‘storm’ part signifies that it’s an Aurora/Nebula-type mount.

Other Info

Two other tidbits:

• Lady Justice and Enigma rigs popped up. There’s also config files for Enigma, Dark Genesis and Lady Justice. All final wing bosses from the Mind of Madness that aren’t being released until some time in December.

• There was a config file for mount_tiger_white_epic_01.nif, with mount_tiger_swim_move_forward animation. The config file is probably referring to the Armored White War Tiger mount, or some variant of it. Previous datamining already revealed swimming animations for the tiger mount (as well as a whole bunch of other mounts), but perhaps the latest file signifies that there will be an amphibious tiger mount soon on Live.

Some new mounts in the latest hotfix. My guess is we’ll be seeing one of them at 3:30PM server time this Thursday – pure speculation though.

Be sure to tune in on Friday as (if things are on schedule), Trion will likely have a RIFT livestream on their twitch channel possibly revealing some 3.5-related content.

For past PTS Updates, click here. You can also find past PTS/Live datamining here.