Paeroka’s Ponderings: Goodbye, Rift?

As some of you know, I love Trion Worlds and the games they have created – well, most of them, at least. I have not always agreed with their decisions, but I don’t expect to do so. They are in it to earn money, after all (employees want that to afford a roof above their head, food to eat and all these luxuries… :p).

My favourite game is Rift and even though it has aged – and not too well in certain areas – I still love playing it. Most of all with the dimension feature which in my opinion is the best housing system we have in MMOs right now… I assume EQ2 players are raising their hands in protest now, but since using the auction house was severely limited for f2p players, I never got into their housing.

When I read that Trion Worlds has been sold to Gamigo, my first thought was that they would continue operating under Gamigo, but that the business model (or what you need to pay for or how many things you can/need to buy) would likely change. And then I read about the massive layoffs. This is rumoured, but a source said that only 25 of 200 people stay – for now. Of course, in this situation, I do sincerely hope and wish for all the former Trion employees to find new and good jobs fast!

Trion Worlds is the developer of Rift, Trove, Defiance2050 and Atlas Reactor. They are the Western publisher of ArcheAge. That would only leave about 5 people per game. How viable is it to think that they can continue running and developing an MMO like Rift with this amount of manpower? And even if Gamigo brought in new developers, how long does it take for them to work themselves into the code of a game that’s over seven years old?

My sub for Rift is still running until April 2019, but I am not counting on having that much time with the game left at this point. The best we can probably hope for is a long period of maintenance mode before they pull the plug. I do hope I can finish my dimension as it’s been a “work in progress” for so long. I never really expected to be finished with it, though. It was nice to go there and just add or change little things and see it grow over time.

At the same time, I am hoping for a miracle in which Gamigo pulls out lots of developers that continue with Rift. But I just don’t think this is very likely at all. So, the next step would be to find an alternative for me… an MMO with solid housing. Wildstar is shutting down as well or this would have been my new home. I don’t even know which other options there are currently.

I am ending this rant here now with a couple of screenshots taken on Sunday, when RoughRaptors appeared on a EU shard for his ExtraLife stream. It was a lot of fun, so thank you for that! The dinos we fought were players transformed into these creatures, by the way.

 

I regularly have rants and ramblings in my mind, but never really know if I should post them, so “Paeroka’s Ponderings” is where I will try to give these rants a place. Sometimes they will make sense, sometimes they won’t.