Rift is going to turn into a Free To Play model this June – suddenly WoW is looking very alone.
The MMORPG market has been trending towards the Free to Play model for along time now, and despite a few being forced into due to subscriber drop offs (Star Wars The Old Republic, I’m looking at you) others embraced it to begin with, such as Guild Wars 2.
Rift along with World of Warcraft were two of the biggest holdouts in the Pay to Play subscription MMORPG market, but now Rift has changed its mind and decided to embrace F2P (free to play) model too. And, according to developers Trion they have had it planned for a decent amount of time now.
“After taking our time and planning a careful transition, we are very excited to bring an enhanced game experience to everyone, without barriers,” commented Bill Fisher creative director of Rift.
As said above, we’ll be seeing this occur in June 12th this year, and that happens to be timed perfectly with the 2.3 patch – Empyreal Assault. The issue with many of the Free to Play MMORPG models is that they often become a pay to win, rather than pay to enjoy new features, however Bill Fisher wants to assure players that this isn’t the case for Rift’s Free to Play model.
“There’s even more in store for RIFT in 2.4 and beyond, a new set of twenty-player raids will be available, a revamped level-60 version of Realm of the Fae, more Chronicles, more quests, zone events, continued updates to class balance for both PvP and PvE, and much more. You might even start hearing about plans for what we call 3.0 – but that is a story for another day…”
