The dark fantasy MMO Rift is now introducing the fundamentals of the minion system, which will be introduced to Telara with the new expansion.
Rift, the MMO from Trion Worlds, which isn’t currently driving many crazy, plans to introduce a new feature with the expansion “Nightmare Tides” on October 8: collectible minions. This is a similar model to what players of Star Trek Online already know and what players of World of Warcraft will encounter on November 12.
We already discussed this new trend in detail months ago and wondered how individual games would implement these companion systems .
For Rift, the following ideas were chosen:
- Minions are represented by cards.
- Minions count across all characters for each character of the same server cluster in Rift. Players can only own one version of a minion at a time.
- Minions are sent on missions, from which they can return with Dimension items, notoriety, artifacts, or crafting materials.
- Minions have advantages in the form of elemental points that predispose them for specific missions. If a mission favors a minion with fire affinity and you send such a minion into the field, it will have a higher chance to return with more loot. A mission cannot fail; it can only yield more or less loot.
- The missions take place in real-time, and minions have a stamina value that regenerates automatically.
- Minions can be obtained as rewards for a variety of things. Some will also be available in the shop.
Mein MMO says: Yeah, this is essentially the system one would expect. It is basically a variant of the Duty Officer system in Star Trek Online, although there is nothing really surprising or new about it. It is merely a kind of mini-browser game within the game: It gives players a bit more to do and, above all, a sort of display case, where some won’t rest until every slot has the appropriate minion. Clever, but not exactly groundbreaking. World of Warcraft seems to want to go a bit further here.
What else we have about the free-to-play MMO Rift can be found on our topic page.
