Rift Lite Announced, First 20 Levels Available For Free

With the release of patch 1.7, Trion Worlds has officially launched Rift Lite, which is essentially a free trial of the MMORPG that'll take your character up to level 20 without any restrictions. To explain more about it and the v1.7 patch, here's a new interview with design producer Adam Gershowitz on Ten Ton Hammer:
TTH: What can you tell us about the new 20 player raid Infernal Dawn?

Adam: That's the big question right? It's coming pretty soon as far as raids go. We have just started internal testing and at this very moment there are folks here playing through it here and on our PTS through private invite that are testing some of the encounters. The zone isn't done, the encounters aren't done, we are still tweaking the art and balancing the game so it will probably be a couple of months before its ready. The main thing we are doing with this raid is to make sure that we learn from some of the mistakes we had on earlier raid releases. We have a lot more players with a ton more expertise and knowledge of how the game works now than we did earlier. After the game has been out for a year you gain some really good players that know the finer points and our designers are a lot more experienced, so we are able to give it a really high level of polish.

Even though we had considerable player involvement in developing Hammerknell it was released within a few months of the game being launched and even with the experience of prior raids, most players were barely ready to hit Hammerknell. One of the nice things with Infernal Dawn is that we have a lot larger pool of players to pull from for testing. It's no longer just 3 or 4 top guilds, but we have a lot more people that have gotten through a lot more content, that are helping us test this out.