- May 12
- 6 min read
0.4.22 brings a new game mode - the Rift Sealing Protocol!
Patch Notes | | | 12 May 2026 |
GAMEPLAY CHANGES (Highlights; more details below)
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VISUAL AND AUDIO UPDATES
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GAMEPLAY UPDATES
– Aleco, Lead Designer
Today’s patch introduces the Rift Sealing Protocol, a new feature design for our most experienced players who are seeking a great level of challenge. It also brings some major changes to the S+ difficulties, a text simplification and formatting pass, new legendary relics, and some Hero balance changes. Let’s dive in! Rift Sealing Protocol The Rifts have been wreaking havoc on our world for far too long. At last, thanks to the breakthrough scientific discovery of the Rift Anchor, the guilds have finally found a way to collapse a Rift with the new Rift Sealing Protocol. The Rift Sealing Protocol (or RSP for short) is a series of missions which greatly increases the difficulty of a run. RSP was designed for players who are after the highest level of challenge that Rift Reborn has to offer, and is intended to be so difficult that even the very best players should expect defeat more often than victory. Those who manage to complete all of the RSP missions and defeat the final boss earn one point on the new Win Streak Leaderboard, which tracks the longest consecutive RSP win streaks each patch. Players who have already won a run on SSS difficulty can opt into RSP at the start of any SSS run by clicking on the check box before the run starts. The list of RSP missions is the same each game:
We put a lot of effort into designing, iterating, and implementing RSP, and we couldn’t be more excited to hear your feedback on it. Once we’ve had the chance to read your feedback and collect some data on the mode, we plan to make some adjustments to it in upcoming patches in order to ensure its best experience possible and is hitting the right level of challenge. Difficulty and System Updates While building and testing RSP, we spent a lot of time thinking about the existing difficulty modifiers (C through SSS) in Rift Reborn. In order for the RSP missions to feel streamlined and relatively manageable, we found that it was necessary to elevate the baseline difficulty of SSS itself. To accomplish this goal, we did away with the most boring and least impactful of the old difficulty modifiers, created a spicy and flavorful new difficulty modifier for SSS, and made a few re-arrangements to the order of the modifiers. Our target for RSP was to hit 100/100 on the difficulty meter, but in our early testing we were finding that only 40 of those difficulty points were coming from the baseline challenge of SSS difficulty itself. This meant that the remaining 60 points had to come from the missions of RSP, which led to a bloated and slightly overwhelming list of RSP missions which didn’t feel very fun. By raising the difficulty of SSS from a 40 to 60 on the difficulty meter, this allowed us to tighten up the RSP missions to a much better spot while still hitting our difficulty target. Difficulty Changes:
The following system-level changes have also been made:
Text Changes As part of a continued effort to simplify, clarify, and generally reduce the amount of text in the game, we’ve created some new text formatting rules and updated a large number of the text boxes in the game. In some cases, we decided to modify the existing functionality of a few existing abilities in order to make them easier to read and understand (for example, we removed the Backup ability on Zuri’s Stoneskin passive). The clarity and brevity of our text boxes is extremely important to us, as one of the biggest problems that new players face when learning RR is the sheer amount of text they have to consume in every shop. We would love to hear your feedback on our recent text changes (particularly our changes to Rush/Stall, Backup, and the new Lasting keyword), and plan to continue updating and improving our in-game text as much as possible in future patches. New Legendary Relics We were very happy to see the warm reception to last week’s change which added an additional slot in the Super Shop for a guaranteed Legendary team-size relic. Following up on that change, we’ve added 3 new team-size relics (Ascension Mandate, Critical Mandate, and Desperation Mandate) as well as 5 new “normal” Legendary relics (Defensive Energy Crystal, Martial Energy Crystal, Arcane Energy Crystal, Heroic Capacity Expander, and Omnity Enforcer) in order to bolster the size of each relic pool and better ensure players aren’t running into the same Legendary relics each game. Hero Updates I decided not to title this section “Hero Balance Changes” like I normally do, as many of the changes below were made more to simplify or streamline the ability than to make it weaker or stronger.
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