Rock, Paper, Shotgun

What do you give the man who owns everything but is missing the first 20 levels of Rift? Trion Worlds the makers of the rather good MMO Rift, have the answer for you: Rift Lite gives you unrestricted access to the game’s first 20 levels for free. I actually do own everything, so I’m now furious that they’ve undermined my achievement.
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Here’s a 2011 trend I’d hoped had wound down by now: the hacking of games, game services and game websites. Seems Trion Worlds, makers of Rift, suffered an incursion lately, with hackers finding their way into a database containing “user names, encrypted passwords, dates of birth, email addresses, billing addresses, and the first and last four digits and expiration dates of customer credit cards.” Aieee!

However, Trion have declared that “There is no evidence, and we have no reason to believe, that full credit card information was accessed or compromised in any way.” Phew?
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“NEW: INSTANT ADVENTURE! Just add a handful of players and taste piping hot fantasy action, just like momma used to make.” Something like that. Well, actually Trion Worlds don’t really explain it like that, as you can see in their dev diary, below. They do, however, explain that the new Action On Demand stuff will allow you to drop in and drop out seamlessly, without causing your group any issues in their progress: “The new “Instant Adventure” button teleports players to Stillmoor or Shimmersand where challenges scaled to party size await. One minute you could be purging a nest of cultists with a small group … the next you’re fighting alongside dozens of players in a massive raid against the Blood Storm’s mightiest forces.” Sounds like there’s some clever maths involved! (Don’t forget to read Dan’s huge interview with the Rift team.)

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MMORTS! MMORTS! Try saying it as a single word. Sounds ominous. Anyway, that’s a collection of letters that refers to but a few games, and End Of Nations is one of those. The forthcoming MMORTS from Petroglyph (Universe At War) and Trion Worlds (Rift) has opened beta sign ups. I thought they did that weeks ago, but not according to a new video bulletin which implores you to support the game in every possible way, which you can see below. That’s going to be weekly, apparently. Mm.
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When did we last write about Trion’s MMO Rift? Oh, May. Just two months after it launched, then. Whoopsie. Well, fortunately Trion have put out a video showing how the game’s grown over the last seven months. It’s jolly dramatic, and conveys both that Rift is holding its own against the big-boy competition, and that for all the talk of freeform progression in other respects it’s holding fast to genre convention. I.e. “bored of WoW? Come hither, come hither” is the presumed message.
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We saw the Gamescom trailer from forthcoming MMORTS End Of Nation last week (although reposted below), but there’s also a piece by Petroglyph talking about the metagame (also below) – which is the whole conquering-the-world thing that the game has going on. They talk about how you can deploy anywhere on the map to help friends out in the their conquests, and talk a bit about how that wider conflict will play out. We also learned last week that the game will indeed be free-to-play and so if Dan’s message about the game from Gamescom (which read simply “strong”) is to be believed, then we might be in for a cheap treat of RTS persistence.
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Just when we thought we’d run out of ways to make jokes about how End Of Nations is a bit like saying “the sea”, another big news story comes out of the MMO RTS. It’s going to be fuh-ruh-ree. Which of course means it’s going to be Free To Play. Co-developed with Petroglyph (the former Westwood team responsible for Command & Conquer), Trion Worlds are claiming that the AAA game’s single player and co-op campaigns will be completely playable to the end without a fee, as well as offering access to 50 player multiplayer battles in the persistent world. So, is there a catch?

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One of the more unusual announcements from E3 was that of Defiance, a cross-platform MMO, that is also a cross-media project incorporating a TV show alongside the game. It’s being developed by Trion Worlds (of Rift) and the television channel SyFy. Anyway, it turns out that the game is “set in a futuristic San Francisco Bay Area”, and will be a mission-based third-person shooter, in which you can play as human or alien races. I’ve posted the full fact-o-thing and screenshots below. Click for full size.
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