What color is the sky in your world?

When Rift‘s first expansion Storm Legion hits, you might be able to answer that question without sarcasm.

We got a big dose of player housing at PAX, and if you’re into planting your petunias just so, then you’ll love what Trion Worlds has in store for you later this year.

As you might already know, each housing area is carved from familiar landscapes, and there will be plenty of choices – “up to 30,” we were told, and you’ll get your first one around level seven. The desert one we saw looked like it could have been ripped right from Shimmersand. It started with just a small hut and a pool of water, but there were already plenty of additions by the time we got to look at it.

While the freeform placement of decorations wasn’t that new or exciting – though it did allow for some remarkable jumping puzzles – the things that really opened my eyes were the scalability of items and the ability to control the sky.

Yes, you can control the sky using special orbs that can make it rain or produce an intricate starfield pattern or, we imagine, produce any number of other uncommon vistas.

As for the more ground-based phenomena, you can resize or rotate objects pretty much freely, so if you want giant flowers or super-tiny statues, go right ahead. Also, if you have two similar elements, like a pair of moss-covered rocks, that you want to merge together into one larger rock, you can overlap the two and the textures will blend in seamlessly.

And yes, guild halls are in the works. They’ll be bigger.

But Storm Legion isn’t just about having a place to live. It’s also about going to where monsters live and kicking their butts, and they don’t get any bigger than the uber-dragon himself, Regulos. While Trion isn’t quite ready to show off the big guy yet, we did sneak into his lair, and it fits his modus operandi perfectly with cracked and blackened terrain, giant spikes protruding from the ground, and floating spiky islands. Floating spiky islands!

We did get to check out a couple of the bosses in the Regulos raid, including a giant mechanized spider-like critter called the Locomotive Bulwark, and the more human-sized C1-ON3, which looks not at all dissimilar to the androids of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Regulos’ domain is just one of seven new dungeons Trion has in store for Storm Legion, as well as having one ready to roll out before the expansion hits.

Finally, there are four new souls coming in the game, one for each calling, and we got a sneak peek at the harbinger, the first melee-focused soul for mages. And yea verily, mages were buffed.

Thanks to Russ Brown and the Trion crew for giving us a look at Storm Legion!