True, good points. Can you really advance with PvP equally with other methods? Open PvP or just Warfronts? I hear this in some games, but it isn't ever very realistic.
I guess we will find that out this weekend. The limited PvP I did last event I was already level 20 so didnt notice any XP gains. What shocked me was killing some gaurdian player and looting a few world drop items off his corpse (which was pretty neat).
There are 3 types of people in the world. 1.) Those who make things happen 2.) Those who watch things happen 3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
I wish people would hold back a little on their " reviews" until more of the game is up and running. Trion has 1 zone per side and only allowing you to hit 20. Warfronts and pvp have yet to be going and if you been in all 3 betas so far, you know there has been great improvements. Wait till feburary when it's close to release, then review for those not in beta.
70 monk eq1 80 bruiser eq2 43 druid wow Currently playing : rift
Thanks to all the replies. Not exactly an encouraging set of responses and my brief flare of interest in Rift has more or less died. Surely companies (other than Anet) are aware there is a general disillusionment with grindy, meaningless questing?
Thanks to all the replies. Not exactly an encouraging set of responses and my brief flare of interest in Rift has more or less died. Surely companies (other than Anet) are aware there is a general disillusionment with grindy, meaningless questing?
Strap, TBH you're getting a lot of people who don't know how to play the game. They're all stuck in the same WoW mentality that puts MMOs to death. There was only ONE person right, so far: Paradoxy. It is apparent that person played both Alpha and Beta because he's the ONLY one who has any idea what he's talking about.
Questing in RIFT is the same, boring grind that every MMO has out there, true. However, IMO, questing is the last resort to leveling in RIFT. My first toon, I thought the only way to level was to quest. It's what we're taught to expect. We're spoon fed our levels after doing menial tasks that make us feel worthless.
RIFT actually has a different approach. They threw that in there for the masses who need the mind numbing chore, but the rifting is where you're going to get that feel of importance. If you don't close the rift, invasions pop up. Your questing NPCs, your Healers, and your vendors, all of them get killed.
The best way to go about leveling is to throw a few quests in there along the way, but go rifting! You can get some great gear (for the level) from it and plenty of experience. My third toon didn't do ONE quest outside of the tutorial. All rifting and dungeons and she had better gear than the other two who did questing for the majority of the levels.
Also, a good point was brought up earlier. This is the very early stages of the game. Trion is the ONLY company I've seen that so closely follows their testers feedback. Every beta has changed to show this in an extreme way. I'm convinced by launch, their product will have been shaped the way the players have requested and it will grow 100x faster than WoW ever did (content wise). WoW's had over 7 years of maturing and now they're just throwing crap at the players to try to keep them interested. You know they're looking at RIFT when their next expansion is going to include, GASP, rifts! HAhahahaha...
Thanks to all the replies. Not exactly an encouraging set of responses and my brief flare of interest in Rift has more or less died. Surely companies (other than Anet) are aware there is a general disillusionment with grindy, meaningless questing?
Remember that people are judging questing content on level 20 and under. How exciting is questing at that level. It's not fantastic mind you, but it's not awful too. The writing in Rift is pretty good to excellent. The quests themselves range from interesting to good to meh. None of them are the most amazing thing you'll ever see though. What I found was I would do some quests, then a rift would open or an invasion would come up from behind me and kill me. I would get back to where I wanted to go and find my quest hubs gone and a foothold in its place. I would end up grouping with a few people in the area and we'd fight to clear it out. Sometimes it went smoothly, other times reinforcement invasions would come and we'd have a mess on our hands. When it was all said and done I'd turn in my quests, the time would be 4 am and I'd be like 'how is it so late?'
Thanks to all the replies. Not exactly an encouraging set of responses and my brief flare of interest in Rift has more or less died. Surely companies (other than Anet) are aware there is a general disillusionment with grindy, meaningless questing?
Strap, TBH you're getting a lot of people who don't know how to play the game. They're all stuck in the same WoW mentality that puts MMOs to death. There was only ONE person right, so far: Paradoxy. It is apparent that person played both Alpha and Beta because he's the ONLY one who has any idea what he's talking about.
Questing in RIFT is the same, boring grind that every MMO has out there, true. However, IMO, questing is the last resort to leveling in RIFT. My first toon, I thought the only way to level was to quest. It's what we're taught to expect. We're spoon fed our levels after doing menial tasks that make us feel worthless.
RIFT actually has a different approach. They threw that in there for the masses who need the mind numbing chore, but the rifting is where you're going to get that feel of importance. If you don't close the rift, invasions pop up. Your questing NPCs, your Healers, and your vendors, all of them get killed.
The best way to go about leveling is to throw a few quests in there along the way, but go rifting! You can get some great gear (for the level) from it and plenty of experience. My third toon didn't do ONE quest outside of the tutorial. All rifting and dungeons and she had better gear than the other two who did questing for the majority of the levels.
Also, a good point was brought up earlier. This is the very early stages of the game. Trion is the ONLY company I've seen that so closely follows their testers feedback. Every beta has changed to show this in an extreme way. I'm convinced by launch, their product will have been shaped the way the players have requested and it will grow 100x faster than WoW ever did (content wise). WoW's had over 7 years of maturing and now they're just throwing crap at the players to try to keep them interested. You know they're looking at RIFT when their next expansion is going to include, GASP, rifts! HAhahahaha...
Interesting - thanks PortiaBell. Did you find that the Rifts grew repetetive though, I mean as a way of leveling?
Simple question really, posed to those in the beta who actually read quest text. Are there quest chains? Did they surprise you? Make you smile?
They are really bland and uninteresting. As bad as EQ2. If you compare to games that had well-written and intersting to follow quests like LoTRO and TR, Rift's are quite bad.
That being said, if you stop questing and actually do the instances and rifting, the game is lot more fun. I personally like the game and plan to buy it. But if you're looking for an immersive questing experience alone, this is not for you.
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall Currently Playing: ESO
Simple question really, posed to those in the beta who actually read quest text. Are there quest chains? Did they surprise you? Make you smile?
They are really bland and uninteresting. As bad as EQ2. If you compare to games that had well-written and intersting to follow quests like LoTRO and TR, Rift's are quite bad.
That being said, if you stop questing and actually do the instances and rifting, the game is lot more fun. I personally like the game and plan to buy it. But if you're looking for an immersive questing experience alone, this is not for you.
I know you did not ask me but I started to tire of them. Really they are just critter spawners. Quite often a zerg of players would turn up to deal with stuff, less often (in remote places) you would struggle to seal one hoping people would turn up. They could do with scaling each stage to the number of players that are right there right then. Actually they don't really need to wait stage to stage to spawn more.
The bigger problm is getting geared up without questing. Rift/open world drops and crafting don't really cover it. You get about half a dozen greens (gernerous) and maybe a blue in a dozen or more hours playing. Chances are most of it won't be useable by you. Quests are where it is at as they give you level/class apropriate stuf and they give it often.
Currently the quests are way over chained, they go from hub to hub. The last quest at one hub is speak to the guy at the next hub (that's fine). What is not is that in far too many cases, if you have not done the previous hub the guy at the new hub won't talk to you. Miss one and you need to go back. Couple this with the fact that you often need to have a conversation with the first guy at the new hub to unlock it and you can see why people are complaining about 'Rift on Rails'. This is not all the time but way too often.
It's pretty easily fixed. Make it easier to get equiped through Rifts/Crafting. Break lots of links for unrelated quest chains so you can jump back in to questing
Remember that people are judging questing content on level 20 and under. How exciting is questing at that level. It's not fantastic mind you, but it's not awful too. The writing in Rift is pretty good to excellent. The quests themselves range from interesting to good to meh. None of them are the most amazing thing you'll ever see though. What I found was I would do some quests, then a rift would open or an invasion would come up from behind me and kill me. I would get back to where I wanted to go and find my quest hubs gone and a foothold in its place. I would end up grouping with a few people in the area and we'd fight to clear it out. Sometimes it went smoothly, other times reinforcement invasions would come and we'd have a mess on our hands. When it was all said and done I'd turn in my quests, the time would be 4 am and I'd be like 'how is it so late?'
True questing can get better or worse later.
But they were rather boring and easy to find, all NPC stand in a few areas and offer quests that are close to them. Usually kill X creatures or gather X things. Compared to Tortage in AoC it is bad and rather soulless.
I would say questing is the worst thing in Rifts, they feels like the standard quests Meridian 59 invented and most games have had. I really hope they have some longer and more interesting quests later like the HQs and signature quests of EQ2.
But as you said, it is premature to judge the entire game on the starting quests, they are just to learn the ropes for noobs.
If indeed Rift have the same quests all the way up that is something the game needs to fix.
The bigger problm is that to get geared up. Rift drops and crafting don't really cover it. You get about half a dozen greens (gernerous) and maybe a blue in a sozen hours playing. Chances are most of it won't be useable by you. Quests are where it is at they give you level/class apropriate stuf and they give it often.
I did get a blue drop every 2 hours or so in the open world after lvl 10.
But I think that you should do dungeons to get good gear like in most other games so I don't think that it will be a big problem. Crafting could however get some buffs, it was useful items but not really good ones.
The bigger problm is that to get geared up. Rift drops and crafting don't really cover it. You get about half a dozen greens (gernerous) and maybe a blue in a sozen hours playing. Chances are most of it won't be useable by you. Quests are where it is at they give you level/class apropriate stuf and they give it often.
I did get a blue drop every 2 hours or so in the open world after lvl 10.
But I think that you should do dungeons to get good gear like in most other games so I don't think that it will be a big problem. Crafting could however get some buffs, it was useful items but not really good ones.
I never once got a blue drop. Greens yes, no blues. Unless you are talking the planar essences.
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I really don't get the idea that rifts are more fun or better than quests. (although currently you get far too much xp for doing very little in a rift)
Even the boring quests have more variety than a rift. Stage 1 kill 6 mobs, Stage 2 kill 4 mobs. Stage 3 kill boss-like mob (high hp, nothing special mob) Stage 4 repeat stage 3.
Unless of course you are talking about the mega events which will not be so commonplace outside of beta, but then again whacking on the same mob for 30 minutes is about as fun as watching paint dry.
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I like the game and have pre-ordered, I just dislike the people that say that people don't know how to play the game. People said that with FFXIV...
Drop the next-gen marketing and people will argue if the game itself has merit.
Thanks to all the replies. Not exactly an encouraging set of responses and my brief flare of interest in Rift has more or less died. Surely companies (other than Anet) are aware there is a general disillusionment with grindy, meaningless questing?
Strap, TBH you're getting a lot of people who don't know how to play the game. They're all stuck in the same WoW mentality that puts MMOs to death. There was only ONE person right, so far: Paradoxy. It is apparent that person played both Alpha and Beta because he's the ONLY one who has any idea what he's talking about.
Questing in RIFT is the same, boring grind that every MMO has out there, true. However, IMO, questing is the last resort to leveling in RIFT. My first toon, I thought the only way to level was to quest. It's what we're taught to expect. We're spoon fed our levels after doing menial tasks that make us feel worthless.
RIFT actually has a different approach. They threw that in there for the masses who need the mind numbing chore, but the rifting is where you're going to get that feel of importance. If you don't close the rift, invasions pop up. Your questing NPCs, your Healers, and your vendors, all of them get killed.
The best way to go about leveling is to throw a few quests in there along the way, but go rifting! You can get some great gear (for the level) from it and plenty of experience. My third toon didn't do ONE quest outside of the tutorial. All rifting and dungeons and she had better gear than the other two who did questing for the majority of the levels.
Also, a good point was brought up earlier. This is the very early stages of the game. Trion is the ONLY company I've seen that so closely follows their testers feedback. Every beta has changed to show this in an extreme way. I'm convinced by launch, their product will have been shaped the way the players have requested and it will grow 100x faster than WoW ever did (content wise). WoW's had over 7 years of maturing and now they're just throwing crap at the players to try to keep them interested. You know they're looking at RIFT when their next expansion is going to include, GASP, rifts! HAhahahaha...
This is hillarious.
Rifts are the exact same thing regardless of what rift is opening, they are not dynamic, and they respawn in the same place. They are fun for a couple hours, but leveling the entire life of a character on these would be the most repetitive mind numbing thing I can think of doing in an MMO.
You can't even leave the opening area without doing a quest line. You can't advance the story without doing the entire quest line. Before you couldn't even get your souls unlocked without doing the entire quest line. Still there will be quests that unlock more jobs that you will never get if you don't do the entire quest line.
This game was designed to be played as a quest grinder. Just because you and some others found out that you can advance as fast grinding out Rifts doesn't mean that all the others who do the quest grind are idiots and don't know how to play the game. You could advance in WoW by grinding mobs, but over time Blizzard made the questing faster. The same thing will happen here. 99% of players in WoW advanced via quests not grinding mobs because it was designed to be a quest grind just like Rifts was.
Again the game is designed to be a quest grind, and Rifts are an added feature that can be mixed in to advance. They are not all that dynamic or fun after a while, and at least in WAR with public quests you had variation between them instead of the same Rift opening up for the thousandth time in a pre determined location.
The vast majority of players will be doing the quests, and the answer to the OP's question is here. The quests are incredibly boring. Still make what you want of it. I will be trying to level without questing and doing as much PvP as I can to see if it is viable and any more fun this weekend.
Thanks to all the replies. Not exactly an encouraging set of responses and my brief flare of interest in Rift has more or less died. Surely companies (other than Anet) are aware there is a general disillusionment with grindy, meaningless questing?
Strap, TBH you're getting a lot of people who don't know how to play the game. They're all stuck in the same WoW mentality that puts MMOs to death. There was only ONE person right, so far: Paradoxy. It is apparent that person played both Alpha and Beta because he's the ONLY one who has any idea what he's talking about.
Questing in RIFT is the same, boring grind that every MMO has out there, true. However, IMO, questing is the last resort to leveling in RIFT. My first toon, I thought the only way to level was to quest. It's what we're taught to expect. We're spoon fed our levels after doing menial tasks that make us feel worthless.
RIFT actually has a different approach. They threw that in there for the masses who need the mind numbing chore, but the rifting is where you're going to get that feel of importance. If you don't close the rift, invasions pop up. Your questing NPCs, your Healers, and your vendors, all of them get killed.
The best way to go about leveling is to throw a few quests in there along the way, but go rifting! You can get some great gear (for the level) from it and plenty of experience. My third toon didn't do ONE quest outside of the tutorial. All rifting and dungeons and she had better gear than the other two who did questing for the majority of the levels.
Also, a good point was brought up earlier. This is the very early stages of the game. Trion is the ONLY company I've seen that so closely follows their testers feedback. Every beta has changed to show this in an extreme way. I'm convinced by launch, their product will have been shaped the way the players have requested and it will grow 100x faster than WoW ever did (content wise). WoW's had over 7 years of maturing and now they're just throwing crap at the players to try to keep them interested. You know they're looking at RIFT when their next expansion is going to include, GASP, rifts! HAhahahaha...
This is hillarious.
Rifts are the exact same thing regardless of what rift is opening, they are not dynamic, and they respawn in the same place. They are fun for a couple hours, but leveling the entire life of a character on these would be the most repetitive mind numbing thing I can think of doing in an MMO.
You can't even leave the opening area without doing a quest line. You can't advance the story without doing the entire quest line. Before you couldn't even get your souls unlocked without doing the entire quest line. Still there will be quests that unlock more jobs that you will never get if you don't do the entire quest line.
This game was designed to be played as a quest grinder. Just because you and some others found out that you can advance as fast grinding out Rifts doesn't mean that all the others who do the quest grind are idiots and don't know how to play the game. You could advance in WoW by grinding mobs, but over time Blizzard made the questing faster. The same thing will happen here. 99% of players in WoW advanced via quests not grinding mobs because it was designed to be a quest grind just like Rifts was.
Again the game is designed to be a quest grind, and Rifts are an added feature that can be mixed in to advance. They are not all that dynamic or fun after a while, and at least in WAR with public quests you had variation between them instead of the same Rift opening up for the thousandth time in a pre determined location.
The vast majority of players will be doing the quests, and the answer to the OP's question is here. The quests are incredibly boring. Still make what you want of it. I will be trying to level without questing and doing as much PvP as I can to see if it is viable and any more fun this weekend.
This. And:
Even if you would level primarily through Rifting, then you would still grind a lot. Every single stage of the Rifts has the objectives kill x, kill x, and kill x. With the occasional tap/activate x. Quests in Vanilla WoW were probably harder than those in Rift. Because, in Vanilla the developers didn't draw a circle on your map, throw some quest items at it and say "Fetch!"
Even if you would level primarily through Rifting, then you would still grind a lot. Every single stage of the Rifts has the objectives kill x, kill x, and kill x. With the occasional tap/activate x. Quests in Vanilla WoW were probably harder than those in Rift. Because, in Vanilla the developers didn't draw a circle on your map, throw some quest items at it and say "Fetch!"
So wait I don't get it. Let's complain about the quest grind in Rift and make it out to be worse than WOW. But now WOW was harder than Rift. But Rift is easier than vanilla-WOW because they give you a helper. I am just confused at people's arguments. On one hand its too grindy. On the other, its too easy.
Questing in vanilla-WOW was a piece of cake. All you had to do was read the quest and it told you exactly what to do or where to go. Read the quest - what a novel idea. Maybe if people would learn to read the quests and stop treating them like a means to an end and just follow the pretty little arrow to do them as fast as possible, it might seem less grindy.
Oh wait, thats right - we have to be the first to tne end game so we can then complain about being bored and the lack of content.
Geesh, no wonder the MMO companies keep churning out cloned games....it seems gamers have forgotten how to play or lost the desire to actually play a game and experience what it ahs to offer. Why don't we just get rid of leveling anf let everyone be max level automatically!!!
The quests are so boring and repetitive that reading them aside from the main story quests will just make you even more bored. I think that at least with WoW it was kind of new in a way. You know the quest grind that covered from start to finish in an MMO. This feels like the same old tired thing and the quests just aren't inspiring or fun. I got into the lore and read the quest text from 1-18 the first beta weekend. By the end of it I was so burnt out and bored that I don't think I could do it again. It was the same over and over. I could start predicting what the text would say for the same type of quests. The actual questing is the easiest I have seen. Each quest draws a yellow circle on the map where the quest takes place and where you can get items. There is 0 thought required and 0 difficulty.
The few and far between story quests had some decent reading at least. If they can make story quests seperate from the quest line and hubs to where I can do story quests, rifts, pvp, etc. without doing the whole line of crappy quests I may still play.
Even if you would level primarily through Rifting, then you would still grind a lot. Every single stage of the Rifts has the objectives kill x, kill x, and kill x. With the occasional tap/activate x. Quests in Vanilla WoW were probably harder than those in Rift. Because, in Vanilla the developers didn't draw a circle on your map, throw some quest items at it and say "Fetch!"
So wait I don't get it. Let's complain about the quest grind in Rift and make it out to be worse than WOW. But now WOW was harder than Rift. But Rift is easier than vanilla-WOW because they give you a helper. I am just confused at people's arguments. On one hand its too grindy. On the other, its too easy.
Questing in vanilla-WOW was a piece of cake. All you had to do was read the quest and it told you exactly what to do or where to go. Read the quest - what a novel idea. Maybe if people would learn to read the quests and stop treating them like a means to an end and just follow the pretty little arrow to do them as fast as possible, it might seem less grindy.
Oh wait, thats right - we have to be the first to tne end game so we can then complain about being bored and the lack of content.
Geesh, no wonder the MMO companies keep churning out cloned games....it seems gamers have forgotten how to play or lost the desire to actually play a game and experience what it ahs to offer. Why don't we just get rid of leveling anf let everyone be max level automatically!!!
Why do you expect people to read the quest when they don't need to? The majority of the gamers only reads the quest if he isn't sure where to go or what to do, the Rift developers completely remove that issue by throwing circles, markers and arrows at your map.
Just as a side note, I intend to level off PvP this weekend. If I can't well...
I'll still play, just be sorely disappointed =P
Be intrested how you get on. This was one thing that they got right with WAR at launch. Sadly they messed that up when they made it more effective to grind a single arena at each tier over and over. Decimated the PVP lakes in one fell swoop.
I am just confused at people's arguments. On one hand its too grindy. On the other, its too easy.
Hard/Easy is a completely separate from 'grindyness'. Hard/Easy refers to challenge whereas grind refers to repetativeness of the tasks. Increasing gridiness does not make a game harder though the fact you have to repeat a task over and over to get your carrot can give that ilusion, that was a concept The Jolly Green Ranger Brad McGrind never got.
So wait I don't get it. Let's complain about the quest grind in Rift and make it out to be worse than WOW. But now WOW was harder than Rift. But Rift is easier than vanilla-WOW because they give you a helper. I am just confused at people's arguments. On one hand its too grindy. On the other, its too easy.
Questing in vanilla-WOW was a piece of cake. All you had to do was read the quest and it told you exactly what to do or where to go. Read the quest - what a novel idea. Maybe if people would learn to read the quests and stop treating them like a means to an end and just follow the pretty little arrow to do them as fast as possible, it might seem less grindy.
Oh wait, thats right - we have to be the first to tne end game so we can then complain about being bored and the lack of content.
Geesh, no wonder the MMO companies keep churning out cloned games....it seems gamers have forgotten how to play or lost the desire to actually play a game and experience what it ahs to offer. Why don't we just get rid of leveling anf let everyone be max level automatically!!!
Why do you expect people to read the quest when they don't need to? The majority of the gamers only reads the quest if he isn't sure where to go or what to do, the Rift developers completely remove that issue by throwing circles, markers and arrows at your map.
Um, then why even bother? That's like saying Why read a book if you know how it ends, or why watch a movie that you have seen before?
Maybe because that's part of the game and part of the story?
If you do not want to read quests in a quest based game, then I would highly recommend sandboxes and advise anyone to stay away from quest based games.
It just puzzles me that people complain about the questing when they do not bother to actually experience. Of course iof you just grab the quest and go, its going to be boring. I usually read the quest and then use the circles/arrows/whatever to make sure I am going in the right direction that the quest itself directed me towards. I find it a little more interesting that way.
The great thing about Rift is that you have several options for leveling at release. Other than the soul quests you don't have to do any questing to level. You can rift, warfront, open world pvp and who knows what else they haven't shown yet. This is all available day 1 too .. i can't wait to see what they develop in the coming months just like all of these other games that have been out for years that folks compare to Rift.
If you want to quest then it has a system that is just like every other mmo's. Which is puzzling to me why people complain about it and then point to something like WoW's quest system as being "unique". They're the same as far as I can tell except that Rift adds in circles (like other games). Its not as if I were ever puzzled by a WoW quest and if someone else was ... well, I'm sorry lol. Also you can just ignore the circles, right?
But hey if linear questing is a game breaker then there are plenty of other pve centered mmo's one can choose that don't have linear questing ... uhh, well actually I can't think of one. Someone help me out? I just assumed there were alot of games with "dynamic" non linear pve questing out there the way so many people were complaining about Rift's system. That's odd, isn't it?
Yeah because doing the exact same as everyone else is the only way to go. Why would anyone be dissapointed in getting the exact same thing that is out there in all the other cloned boring themepark MMO's. We are just wild and crazy gamers...
The quests I did weren't all that memorable. Some of the later ones on the Guardian's side were fun, like turning students into sheep, but for the most part they were pretty standard quests.
Some of the (Story) quests could have been neat if I had read many of the other quests, but I didn't. The good thing (imo) was that I didn't really need to read the full quest text.
I'm a fan of the Half Life or Bioshock style "quests". A voice over, short blurb and several quest objectives to achieve. You're not running from quest hub to little quest zone and back twenty times. It could be as simple as having the people you turn quests into being out in the field instead of back at the quest hub. You could have one quest with several objectives in a chain instead of 4 different quests that each have to be turned in at the central quest hub.
That said, they are definitely workable, but it's not the strong point of the game.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
After playing 3 beta's, I really don;t think the quests are supposed to be the main feature of the game. They are one means to level and enjoy story, among many other means. Most agreed they need work, but they are serviceable and enjoyable to some extent.
It's the dynamic events that are supposed to be in the spotlight in this game.
Comments
I guess we will find that out this weekend. The limited PvP I did last event I was already level 20 so didnt notice any XP gains. What shocked me was killing some gaurdian player and looting a few world drop items off his corpse (which was pretty neat).
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
70 monk eq1
80 bruiser eq2
43 druid wow
Currently playing : rift
Thanks to all the replies. Not exactly an encouraging set of responses and my brief flare of interest in Rift has more or less died. Surely companies (other than Anet) are aware there is a general disillusionment with grindy, meaningless questing?
Strap, TBH you're getting a lot of people who don't know how to play the game. They're all stuck in the same WoW mentality that puts MMOs to death. There was only ONE person right, so far: Paradoxy. It is apparent that person played both Alpha and Beta because he's the ONLY one who has any idea what he's talking about.
Questing in RIFT is the same, boring grind that every MMO has out there, true. However, IMO, questing is the last resort to leveling in RIFT. My first toon, I thought the only way to level was to quest. It's what we're taught to expect. We're spoon fed our levels after doing menial tasks that make us feel worthless.
RIFT actually has a different approach. They threw that in there for the masses who need the mind numbing chore, but the rifting is where you're going to get that feel of importance. If you don't close the rift, invasions pop up. Your questing NPCs, your Healers, and your vendors, all of them get killed.
The best way to go about leveling is to throw a few quests in there along the way, but go rifting! You can get some great gear (for the level) from it and plenty of experience. My third toon didn't do ONE quest outside of the tutorial. All rifting and dungeons and she had better gear than the other two who did questing for the majority of the levels.
Also, a good point was brought up earlier. This is the very early stages of the game. Trion is the ONLY company I've seen that so closely follows their testers feedback. Every beta has changed to show this in an extreme way. I'm convinced by launch, their product will have been shaped the way the players have requested and it will grow 100x faster than WoW ever did (content wise). WoW's had over 7 years of maturing and now they're just throwing crap at the players to try to keep them interested. You know they're looking at RIFT when their next expansion is going to include, GASP, rifts! HAhahahaha...
Remember that people are judging questing content on level 20 and under. How exciting is questing at that level. It's not fantastic mind you, but it's not awful too. The writing in Rift is pretty good to excellent. The quests themselves range from interesting to good to meh. None of them are the most amazing thing you'll ever see though. What I found was I would do some quests, then a rift would open or an invasion would come up from behind me and kill me. I would get back to where I wanted to go and find my quest hubs gone and a foothold in its place. I would end up grouping with a few people in the area and we'd fight to clear it out. Sometimes it went smoothly, other times reinforcement invasions would come and we'd have a mess on our hands. When it was all said and done I'd turn in my quests, the time would be 4 am and I'd be like 'how is it so late?'
Interesting - thanks PortiaBell. Did you find that the Rifts grew repetetive though, I mean as a way of leveling?
They are really bland and uninteresting. As bad as EQ2. If you compare to games that had well-written and intersting to follow quests like LoTRO and TR, Rift's are quite bad.
That being said, if you stop questing and actually do the instances and rifting, the game is lot more fun. I personally like the game and plan to buy it. But if you're looking for an immersive questing experience alone, this is not for you.
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Quest 1-20 kill this and kill that witht he ocasional put this item in that item.
Just as boring as everything else.
They re really not good at all. IMO it s a sad state of affairs for the MMO genre, that a game like Rift is getting so much hype.
I know you did not ask me but I started to tire of them. Really they are just critter spawners. Quite often a zerg of players would turn up to deal with stuff, less often (in remote places) you would struggle to seal one hoping people would turn up. They could do with scaling each stage to the number of players that are right there right then. Actually they don't really need to wait stage to stage to spawn more.
The bigger problm is getting geared up without questing. Rift/open world drops and crafting don't really cover it. You get about half a dozen greens (gernerous) and maybe a blue in a dozen or more hours playing. Chances are most of it won't be useable by you. Quests are where it is at as they give you level/class apropriate stuf and they give it often.
Currently the quests are way over chained, they go from hub to hub. The last quest at one hub is speak to the guy at the next hub (that's fine). What is not is that in far too many cases, if you have not done the previous hub the guy at the new hub won't talk to you. Miss one and you need to go back. Couple this with the fact that you often need to have a conversation with the first guy at the new hub to unlock it and you can see why people are complaining about 'Rift on Rails'. This is not all the time but way too often.
It's pretty easily fixed. Make it easier to get equiped through Rifts/Crafting. Break lots of links for unrelated quest chains so you can jump back in to questing
True questing can get better or worse later.
But they were rather boring and easy to find, all NPC stand in a few areas and offer quests that are close to them. Usually kill X creatures or gather X things. Compared to Tortage in AoC it is bad and rather soulless.
I would say questing is the worst thing in Rifts, they feels like the standard quests Meridian 59 invented and most games have had. I really hope they have some longer and more interesting quests later like the HQs and signature quests of EQ2.
But as you said, it is premature to judge the entire game on the starting quests, they are just to learn the ropes for noobs.
If indeed Rift have the same quests all the way up that is something the game needs to fix.
I did get a blue drop every 2 hours or so in the open world after lvl 10.
But I think that you should do dungeons to get good gear like in most other games so I don't think that it will be a big problem. Crafting could however get some buffs, it was useful items but not really good ones.
I never once got a blue drop. Greens yes, no blues. Unless you are talking the planar essences.
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I really don't get the idea that rifts are more fun or better than quests. (although currently you get far too much xp for doing very little in a rift)
Even the boring quests have more variety than a rift. Stage 1 kill 6 mobs, Stage 2 kill 4 mobs. Stage 3 kill boss-like mob (high hp, nothing special mob) Stage 4 repeat stage 3.
Unless of course you are talking about the mega events which will not be so commonplace outside of beta, but then again whacking on the same mob for 30 minutes is about as fun as watching paint dry.
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I like the game and have pre-ordered, I just dislike the people that say that people don't know how to play the game. People said that with FFXIV...
Drop the next-gen marketing and people will argue if the game itself has merit.
This is hillarious.
Rifts are the exact same thing regardless of what rift is opening, they are not dynamic, and they respawn in the same place. They are fun for a couple hours, but leveling the entire life of a character on these would be the most repetitive mind numbing thing I can think of doing in an MMO.
You can't even leave the opening area without doing a quest line. You can't advance the story without doing the entire quest line. Before you couldn't even get your souls unlocked without doing the entire quest line. Still there will be quests that unlock more jobs that you will never get if you don't do the entire quest line.
This game was designed to be played as a quest grinder. Just because you and some others found out that you can advance as fast grinding out Rifts doesn't mean that all the others who do the quest grind are idiots and don't know how to play the game. You could advance in WoW by grinding mobs, but over time Blizzard made the questing faster. The same thing will happen here. 99% of players in WoW advanced via quests not grinding mobs because it was designed to be a quest grind just like Rifts was.
Again the game is designed to be a quest grind, and Rifts are an added feature that can be mixed in to advance. They are not all that dynamic or fun after a while, and at least in WAR with public quests you had variation between them instead of the same Rift opening up for the thousandth time in a pre determined location.
The vast majority of players will be doing the quests, and the answer to the OP's question is here. The quests are incredibly boring. Still make what you want of it. I will be trying to level without questing and doing as much PvP as I can to see if it is viable and any more fun this weekend.
Just as a side note, I intend to level off PvP this weekend. If I can't well...
I'll still play, just be sorely disappointed =P
Drop the next-gen marketing and people will argue if the game itself has merit.
This. And:
Even if you would level primarily through Rifting, then you would still grind a lot. Every single stage of the Rifts has the objectives kill x, kill x, and kill x. With the occasional tap/activate x. Quests in Vanilla WoW were probably harder than those in Rift. Because, in Vanilla the developers didn't draw a circle on your map, throw some quest items at it and say "Fetch!"
The quests are so boring and repetitive that reading them aside from the main story quests will just make you even more bored. I think that at least with WoW it was kind of new in a way. You know the quest grind that covered from start to finish in an MMO. This feels like the same old tired thing and the quests just aren't inspiring or fun. I got into the lore and read the quest text from 1-18 the first beta weekend. By the end of it I was so burnt out and bored that I don't think I could do it again. It was the same over and over. I could start predicting what the text would say for the same type of quests. The actual questing is the easiest I have seen. Each quest draws a yellow circle on the map where the quest takes place and where you can get items. There is 0 thought required and 0 difficulty.
The few and far between story quests had some decent reading at least. If they can make story quests seperate from the quest line and hubs to where I can do story quests, rifts, pvp, etc. without doing the whole line of crappy quests I may still play.
Why do you expect people to read the quest when they don't need to? The majority of the gamers only reads the quest if he isn't sure where to go or what to do, the Rift developers completely remove that issue by throwing circles, markers and arrows at your map.
Be intrested how you get on. This was one thing that they got right with WAR at launch. Sadly they messed that up when they made it more effective to grind a single arena at each tier over and over. Decimated the PVP lakes in one fell swoop.
Hard/Easy is a completely separate from 'grindyness'. Hard/Easy refers to challenge whereas grind refers to repetativeness of the tasks. Increasing gridiness does not make a game harder though the fact you have to repeat a task over and over to get your carrot can give that ilusion, that was a concept The Jolly Green Ranger Brad McGrind never got.
The great thing about Rift is that you have several options for leveling at release. Other than the soul quests you don't have to do any questing to level. You can rift, warfront, open world pvp and who knows what else they haven't shown yet. This is all available day 1 too .. i can't wait to see what they develop in the coming months just like all of these other games that have been out for years that folks compare to Rift.
If you want to quest then it has a system that is just like every other mmo's. Which is puzzling to me why people complain about it and then point to something like WoW's quest system as being "unique". They're the same as far as I can tell except that Rift adds in circles (like other games). Its not as if I were ever puzzled by a WoW quest and if someone else was ... well, I'm sorry lol. Also you can just ignore the circles, right?
But hey if linear questing is a game breaker then there are plenty of other pve centered mmo's one can choose that don't have linear questing ... uhh, well actually I can't think of one. Someone help me out? I just assumed there were alot of games with "dynamic" non linear pve questing out there the way so many people were complaining about Rift's system. That's odd, isn't it?
Yeah because doing the exact same as everyone else is the only way to go. Why would anyone be dissapointed in getting the exact same thing that is out there in all the other cloned boring themepark MMO's. We are just wild and crazy gamers...
The quests I did weren't all that memorable. Some of the later ones on the Guardian's side were fun, like turning students into sheep, but for the most part they were pretty standard quests.
Some of the (Story) quests could have been neat if I had read many of the other quests, but I didn't. The good thing (imo) was that I didn't really need to read the full quest text.
I'm a fan of the Half Life or Bioshock style "quests". A voice over, short blurb and several quest objectives to achieve. You're not running from quest hub to little quest zone and back twenty times. It could be as simple as having the people you turn quests into being out in the field instead of back at the quest hub. You could have one quest with several objectives in a chain instead of 4 different quests that each have to be turned in at the central quest hub.
That said, they are definitely workable, but it's not the strong point of the game.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
This thread just made me not want to play RIFT. Thank god my days of quest grinding are over :-)
"I play Tera for the gameplay"
After playing 3 beta's, I really don;t think the quests are supposed to be the main feature of the game. They are one means to level and enjoy story, among many other means. Most agreed they need work, but they are serviceable and enjoyable to some extent.
It's the dynamic events that are supposed to be in the spotlight in this game.