Trion held their latest Friday RIFT Livestream on 5th February 2016, talking about RIFT 3.6: Celebration of the Ascended, some further tech talk, about recent additions/changes to the game as well as other additional content tidbits.

Click here for a replay of the 5th February 2016 RIFT Livestream video on twitch.tv.

Legend:
Black/Normal Text = Livestream Summary.
[Dark Blue Text] = My own comments. i.e. May not be indicative of actual content.

Trion had their 5th February 2016 Livestream with Live Content Designer Michael “Kerilar” Hansen, Lead Engineer Dan “Snedhepl” Hollinger, Game Director Christopher “Archonix” Junior and Senior Community Relations Manager Eric “Ocho” Cleaver.

Table of Contents:

• RIFT 3.6: Celebration of the Ascended. Carnival of the Ascended; Intrepid IA: MoM; Five New Souls; Merging Chat Channels.
• Other Future Content. March Stuff; 10-man Raid.
  
• More on Multi-Core. Testing On-going; Improvements.
  
• General Info. About Recent Changes
• Livestream Giveaways. Multi-core alpha test invites!
  

As always, any additions or changes mentioned below can be subject to change prior to hitting Live.

RIFT 3.6: Celebration of the Ascended

2016’s first big updated will be with RIFT 3.6: Celebration of the Ascended, slated for an early April release. The release will be in two parts:

• Part 1 will open up the Carnival of the Ascended world event, with all new rewards and new quests.
• Part 2 will be in early May and will introduce the release of Intrepid Instant Adventure: Mind of Madness.

Five New Souls

As part of the RIFT 3.6, five new souls will be released.

• One new soul per Calling (5 total).
• Will be in a new Soul Pack for Credits, with a similar price to the current Dream Soul Pack. (so approx. 5k Credits).
• There’s already testing for some of the souls.

The Warrior’s Beastmaster will also be looked at with reference to the new souls, although no details or ETA was given.

No exact ETA was given on when these new souls would be released, but Archonix did mention it would be some time in RIFT 3.6.

Maelstrom

One of the souls was teased as potentially being called Maelstrom.

I’m not going to say the word Maelstrom. – CM Ocho.

Yea, I’m never going to say “We’ll talk about Maelstrom in 3 weeks”. – Archonix.

Merging Chat Channels

• All primary chat channels will be merged across shards on your region/cluster. These are the Level channels (1-29/etc).
• Crossevents@Faeblights (for NA) will become an official channel that everyone will auto-join when they hit Level 65.
• For EU, they will have a stand-alone Crossevents channel as well.

From forum messages, Trion has not 100% confirmed what will happen in terms of different languages when it comes to the EU Crossevents channel.

There will also be other content that Trion has yet to reveal.

Other Future Content

What About March?

Trion mentioned that there would be fun stuff happening during March, but that they were not ready to reveal any information just yet.

• Finalising some “pretty awesome rewards and plans for the month of March” – Archonix.

Snedhepl will also talk more tech stuff over the coming weeks, with a possible RIFT livestream on 12th February as well (depending on what other Trion streams end up doing) as well as another article write-up.

New 10-man

No details or ETA, but a new 10-man is planned.

More on Multi-Core

True multi-core support will be released first, amongst other tech improvements coming our way (including 64-bit support).

• Trion has been working on true multi-core support for RIFT for over a year now.
• Testing has already begun, with current testers using a special addon. They can test on Live clients without affecting other players.
• Testing has been done across a wide spectrum of machines, including old ones.
• Testers are under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (“NDA”).
• Snedhepl mentioned that in best case scenario whilst participating in a Ravenous Devourer zone event, he experienced ~20% fps increase.
• Engineers have not yet done heavy-testing performance tuning yet, so more improvements might be possible.
• More players will be added ‘soon’ with each passing week. At some point, testing will be open to everyone.

The only real issue with multi-core support is “thread-contention issues”, where two things try to access the same stuff at once. Cases of this issue have been “amazingly minimal” – Snedhepl. Some minor stability issues are still being worked on.

The Benefits

In short, if your CPU has multiple cores (2+), you’ll see improvements in performance. Doesn’t matter what CPU you have – if it has more than one core, it’ll benefit. As you get higher up in terms of no. of cores, you’ll begin to see diminishing returns.

Snedhepl also mentioned that they’ll look at the option of allowing you to limit the no. of cores used by the game.

ETA On Multi-Core Support

No ETA. It’ll be ready when it is ready, but they’ve already been working on it for more than a year.

General Info

About Recent Changes

Trion briefly went over some of the changes that have been made in recent weeks to the game, including:

• Turning Earring Slot unlocks and Planewalker: Water attunement (amongst other things) to Credits-only.
• Referral Program no longer having REX.
• New benefits for Patron, and the removal of some options for F2P, including removing soul damage for patrons, having stacking of charges be patron-only, and only allowing patrons to specific queue for dungeons.
• Currency cap for F2P increased to 5,000p (up from 2,500p).

Some of these changes are experimental and Trion will take a look at feedback.

You can read more about these changes in Trion’s articles below:

• Patron Rewards Get Even Better!
• Last Chance To Get Earring Slot Unlocks And Planewalker: Water With Voidstones!

Other Info

• No plans to turn Primalist into 61pt.

• A RIFT livestream ‘might’ appear as early as 12th February, depending on scheduling with other Trion titles. If it runs, Snedhepl will be back to talk tech.

• Snedhepl has another write-up planned, similar to the recent “Leveling Up The Tech In RIFT” post.

Livestream Giveaways

Livestream Channel Giveaways

During the Livestream, a handful of livestream chat channel viewers received:

• 1x Celestial Razorback Mounts to 5 livestream viewers.
• 1x Multi-core Support Alpha Test Invite (for next round of test invites; under NDA) to 10 livestream viewers*.
• 1x 30-day Patron Pass to 10 livestream viewers.
• 1x Ultimate Nightmare Edition + Multi-core Support Alpha Test Invite to 1 lucky livestream viewer!

*Multi-core Support alpha testers will receive an addon that works on Live shards. Will be under Non-Disclosure Agreement.

Congratulations to all the winners!

You should receive information about your prizes in the ‘Inbox’ or ‘Other’ Tab in your Twitch inbox within the next few days.

(From Left to Right: Kerilar, Snedhepl, Archonix and CM Ocho.)

Latest Livestream revealed some interesting new information not mentioned before, including that we are getting 5 new souls (one for each Calling) in RIFT 3.6, which is being released in early April in two parts.

Trion didn’t mention many details, but you can look forward to new rewards and stuff to do in March as well. Multi-core support pre-alpha testing is already underway and the amount of players who will be able to test it out will increase over time.

Depending on scheduling, we might see another tech-based livestream with Snedhepl on 12th February, and there’s bound to be more information released over the coming weeks.

Past Livestream Summaries can be accessed here.