Exclusive Rift Dev Diary Coverage
You may have read our Rift coverage from E3 which gave a quick overview of some of Rift's core game mechanics. Only a month later, the developers at Trion Worlds have graced us with an exclusive Dev Diary video that goes over what was covered at E3 in more detail.
First, we learn that when a character is created, a player must choose a Calling. A Calling comes in four archetypes – warrior, rogue, mage, and cleric. It defines a character's starting skills, basic play-style and the types of Souls that they can attune to (e.g., a mage can attune to Warlock and Elementalist Souls and a rogue can attune to Nightblade and Ranger Souls).
A Soul is, in essence, customization options for your character. It is your talents and abilities and how you spend your points will define how you will play your character. Each player will start with a single Soul that mirrors which Calling they chose at creation and players will be able to unlock additional ones as they level up in the game. A few examples on how to obtain Souls would be questing and killing monsters or player versus player combat. Players are allowed to equip three Souls at a time.
The video goes on to explain the Affinity system, which is how attuned a character is with each Soul. The more points allocated to a Soul, the more spiritually attuned their character is to the Soul. It goes without say that the higher the Affinity level, the more customization options a player will have access to.
Each Soul will have a Soul Tree that gives the player access to many different abilities and bonuses (better known as Traits within the Rift world). Each Soul Tree is split into two distinctive parts – the Roots and the Branches. The Branches are where you spend your points and as you do, it will unlock the core abilities within the Roots portion of the tree.
On top of all of this, players can bask in the knowledge that they will never be boxed into a single choice. Players will be able to switch out Souls as they please and redefine their play-style at whim.
Be sure to check out the official site for Rift: Planes of Telara for more information!
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