A night with RIFT 1.9

Are we over the Guild Wars 2 hubbaballo yet?  No?  Oh.  I’ll give you a minute to collect yourself.

Good.  Now let’s talk about something exciting that’s already happened versus will happen, which is RIFT’s 1.9 patch.  Even with the expansion on its way later this year, the Trion team had time to put out an insanely meaty content update for the summer.  And let me tell you, it’s a joy to behold.  Our guild was going nuts last night exploring all of the new goodies, and while I wasn’t able to check out the new 3-faction Conquest (not being 50 yet), I did get around to quite a few of the highlights in the few hours I had to play.

Stylist: While there are no new hairstyles or tattoos, it’s still awesome to be able to finally tweak how our character looks with the in-game stylist.  Adjusting height and facial features is expensive, but just messing with hair and markings is affordable.  I gave my Dorf a new ‘do and a cool facial stripe, and she’s good to go.

Summerfest: With the patch comes a one-month Summerfest event.  I looove RIFT’s festivals, because they always have you doing something different, and plus, the rewards are usually awesome for fluff lovers.  As far as I can tell, the bulk of Summerfest is a scavenger hunt across the land.  There’s two versions, a lowbie and a highbie one, and I took an hour to complete all five steps of the lowbie ones.  They’re actually pretty clever and even funny, and you get a nice pile of currency when you’re through it.

One of the best activities was a “human barrel ride” down the falls in Scarlet Gorge.  You just do a bunch of jumps off ledges into pools, attempting to hit rings on the way down.  It’s silly, but I was laughing the whole time.  Awesome stuff.

I also did the new fishing and cooking dailies, which didn’t take up much time.  I haven’t worked that hard on my fishing skill, but everyone tells me that it’s worth it because of the cooking buffs, so it’s on my to do list.  Plus, it’s a really relaxing activity for the end of a play session.

My two big gripes about Summerfest are the annoying hedge maze that is a pain to navigate with your camera, and the relatively few ways to earn the currency.  There’s bug squashing and a dog show for Ascend a Friend owners, but it’s certainly not as varied as the anniversary festival was.

I did learn that there are rare pets roaming the countryside that you can trap, and I’m determined to hunt a few down between now and the end of the event.

Auto-bag sort: This isn’t something I’m going to use terribly often, but I applaud Trion for putting it in.  It’s the little conveniences like this that make RIFT a cut above the competition.

Mentoring/instant adventures: The new lowbie IAs weren’t working when I first logged in, but after a hotfix, they came back up and I spent my last 45 minutes doing my first IA in the game.  Because the new mentoring system can temporarily lower your level so that you can participate in these and still get XP and rewards, IAs now cover the gamut from 10 to 50, even though there are none from the 29-45 range.

The Instant Adventure that I got thrown into was in Gloamwood.  I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it turned out to be a modular, multi-stage quest where your raid does an activity in an area of the zone, then it tells you to go somewhere else and accomplish a different goal, and so on.  At first we were squelching torches, then headed over to Spider Avenue for a showdown with a big mama, then we had to face off against a horde of vampires in the cottage.

It’s not so frantic that you can’t follow what’s going on, but it definitely keeps moving and I wasn’t bored.  The final activity was a rift, and it was certainly fun to be doing those with a large group of players.  So IAs get a big thumbs-up from me, and I’ll be sure to do at least one of these a day from now on.

Conclusion: So while I haven’t fully explored the patch, I’ve touched on the highlights and found it a great addition to the game.