Housing Brings a Whole New Dimension to Rift

I know I'm totally late to the party, but I have of late become enthralled with Rift Dimensions. How late, you say? OK, OK . . . it was yesterday. I decided to claim the loyalty rewards for having been subscribed for over a year right after launch. And since the awesome folks at Trion Worlds are not complete buttheads like those over at EA/BioWare, I didn't have to pay additional fees to collect those loyalty rewards. One of the rewards is the awesome bowler hat you see my avatar wearing in the pictures below (Scooterz got one, too). Other rewards consist of the Faen's Retreat oasis dimension and some furnishings. This is on top of the much smaller instance, Warden's Point—plus furnishings—I received from the dimension tutorial quest I received in Freemarch. Scooterz didn't see the point of the wood planks she got until I showed her how scaling stuff up and sticking it out from an outcropping would enable something like the gravity defying patio you see below.

My blogging friend, Belghast of Tales of the Aggronaut fame, formally organized his old WoW guild, House Stalwart, this week in Rift. He invited Scooterz and me to join him on Faeblight, and we connected last night. He's already got a guild hall going with an awesome dimension designer in the guild named Rae. Head over to his blog to see some of the great things she's already done with the place. And she's not even done yet.

Just seeing "half-finished" possibilities like that really stimulates my creative juices. I've always been fascinated by building and interior design; but, strangely, never ended up in a game where player housing was any kind of thing. When I first joined WoW, I would hearth (sounds like heart, not earth, btw) back to an inn at the end of every play session. But that wasn't my home, it was a place where I sojourned. Blizzard has for years ignored player clamor for housing of some kind. I'd had hopes that the ships in STO and SWTOR would be that. But Cryptic's efforts at ship interiors have been halfhearted at best, and BioWare offered no customization whatsoever. They even made a joke about it, with the ship's droid mentioning having repainted the captain's quarters the exact same color as before. In any event, I can see myself getting very wrapped up in the possibilities of having my own space in Rift. And so below, Scooterz and share the one thing I purchased for my home: a place to lay our heads.