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A short but Sweet Review for Rift
Since there is no more NDA attatched to the EULA, and I just can't resist posting a review.
{Mod Edit - Leave warnings to us. }
For those of you that have read my past reviews on other games, then you should know how I break it down, with explanations attatched and detailed to the best of my ability. Provided my insomnia plays nice that is.
-graphics, To say the least, the graphics are stunning. Everything from a simple rock right down to the gear your character is wearing shows that the developers have taken attention to detail to new heights. The spell effects are a nice touch with their bloom effects, though they can be a bit debilitating if your graphics cards are not up to spec to handle such intensity. There's very few times where you will encounter a massive amount of lag. These times being when there is high player traphic, and during invasions. Both of which can cause a good deal of lag. While you can set the graphic settings to something more comfortable, there doesn't appear to be much of a difference between low and ultra settings. Not a bad start considering this game is still in its beta test phases.
-sound, The sound is beautifully timed and on par with what one would expect from Trion. At least I can safely say that they didn't borrow any sounds from other games. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the goblins cursing at you as you close in on them in combat. All the sounds, by appearance, appear to be freshly made just for this game alone.
-UI, The UI appears to be a marriage of several different games, and what a beautiful wedding it must have been to produce a wonderfully built UI that is intuitive, and easy to use. The best part, in my opinion, is that it doesn't clutter up your main screen, nor seems to interrupt your ability to mouse target. Finding your bags and your character sheet couldn't be any easier.
-gameplay, From what I have seen thus far, is flawless. Not much I can say beyond that. Character creation is simple, not many choices in regards to how you want to style your character. Though it does restrict players from coming up with rediculously deformed characters. The starting class choices are the usual four base class fair, with the option later on to chose three out of a possible hundred or so combinations of sub classes. Each of which are very different, and suit many different styles of play. While they still have a long way to go in regards to rounding out each of these, it's coming out nicely thus far.
-forum community, Not one I like to review on, but this needs to be said. They all appear more or less like a bunch of 8 year olds out on a trolling spree. Throwing out random or otherwise targeted troll spamming of ligitimate posts in an effort to upset and otherwise disrupt what could be a well established community. The forums, while moderated, seem difficult for the moderators to keep up with all the useless spam going on. If your looking to post bugs or feedback, your better off not doing it here.
-ingame community, Strangely enough, the overall maturity of the player population here seems far more mature than what can be found on the forums. Where on the forums you will find your posts spammed out with useless drivel, in the game you can find help easilly by friendly and mature players. It's not to hard to find a group if you wish to find one, and rift hunting parties are always forming up to drive back invaders. Wether they're impromptu, or just a glorious chaotic scattering of individuals fighting for their lives. In either case, I see alot of promise in this community.
Overall, Trion has done well thus far as far as keeping their player base well informed. Getting ahold of a GM in game is likewise very easy to do, and they respond as quickly as they are able. While the forums are made up of immature school aged children by appearance and demeanor, the community in the game more than makes up for it by being friendly and helpful. I see great things in this game's future as it slowly edges towards its impending release date, and thus far I cannot deny that this will be one of the best MMO's out there. If it goes up for MMO of the year, this one has my vote!!
Thank you all for taking the time to read this review. I never claim to be a professional by any means of the word. As you all should know, a review is a formed opinion of observations made wether professional or unprofessional. Until we meet again!!
Comments
Well, the forum is full of people with an agenda, and people that get a little too pissy if someone doesn't bother to take 1 minute and posts a thread thats been asked 1000 times.
Once the game has been released, and a few weeks in, a lot of the trolls will probably move on. I see posting why you didn't like something, and then moving on....But people seem to not be playing a game, and moaning/crying in their forum is their game.
I have played a lot of MMOs that I didn't like, I post what I don't like, then I am gone, if its a game that I may like with a tweak, I may stay around and try to sway something, but I would say its more the internet now, than their forum. Its what people do, go read a news story and look at the comments, people have nothing better to do.
Even if its ment to be a short review I miss some information.
Are the quests fun ?, also after 50 quests
Are the rifts fun ?, also after 50 rifts
How is the grind if any ?
This is my personal opinion. The quests are same ol' same ol'. At the moment, I enjoy them, but that is more because of the scenery. I probably don't want to do them a second time. Rifts are fun, even on low level. I think the rifts are getting way more complicated on high level, but don't take my word for it. Grind is something you should experience yourself. Everybody sees grind differently, as in almost all games you 'grind'. But.. I didn't felt like doing repetitive stuff yet.
My thoughts on the game.. It is VERY polished. Don't believe the trolls. The game absolutely is ready for launch, something we haven't seen in about 5 years (except a few games ofcourse). However, I don't like this style of gameplay anymore. Slowly I am moving on towards more action based gameplay like Global Agenda, APB, DC Universe, GW, hopefully GW2 (and as the exception: the new sandbox gem ArcheAge!).
So if you like the traditional MMORPG style you won't be dissapointed.
The reason I didn't say if the quests or rifts are fun, is mainly because that gets to down close to personal than a general observation. What might be fun for one person, might be a borefest for someone else. So I stay as far away from commenting on if quests are fun or not whenever I review.
I do not disagree, but I would like to point out that is a very recently development. In fact the forum community used to be quite good till a couple of weeks ago. Moderation was hardly necessary. I guess the recent change has caught the moderators off guard.
It takes one to know one.
Funny thing is this community here on mmorpg.com is just as bad or worse generally from what I have seen over the years. But that's why most don't review the forums, as every single game in existance has trolls and immaturity unfortunately. In-game community is based solely on individual experiences, so it's hard to review that as well.
As far as quests, I am also in this beta and honestly they seem somewhat above average to me. Though that could be because of the rifts/invasions randomly popping up as I go through the game, but it's a nice break from questing every hour or so as one pops either right next to me and I have to be on guard or further away along a path I need to take. It's always great seeing raiding parties with multiple groups running around and destroying the rifts as well, makes the game feel much more alive while I am out exploring and questing.
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-Currently playing FFXIV, and BDO.
What, if any, is the consequence when you die? How big is the world? Is it overly instanced? Is the pvp open world or instanced?
I agree with many of your points/opinions. Overall I found the game not to my liking... I couldn't shake the WOW meets WAR feel of the game. Not that either of these was a deal breaker or the reason for my dislike of the game, but when I tallied the pros v. cons of the game it came up short.
I agree with your mentioned features somewhat. About UI: UI is very intuitive, maybe 3rd place sharing with some other games.
Sadly you didnt mention few bad things:
Mining (or any other gathering proffesion) is just horrible too simplistic. You find rock. You click it and get material in few seconds. Thats all. There are way too few resources imo, their spawn location change only a bit and arent connected to map place at all from what I saw.
Crafting is horrible and simplistic as well.
Chat was bit hard to folow when doing quests, fighting or just running. It may be just me, but some games seems to pin down it better, some worse. It may be size of it, font, color or whatever, i dont know. I just didnt like it too much.
Bit lacking class descriptions. I wanted to be necromancer as they usually support their summons and rarely get in close combat. But after few battles and later, I found that I was doing most of damage and getting huge aggro, while summon seemed like DoT spell. Dont know if it is somewhat wrong description, my expectation or ballance.
Way too fast spawn. But I guess it is due to beta. Tried to close some sort of mini rift for quest, and mobs were spawning every second or so (it is supposed to be solo quest), next to impossible to do it. Also same with some other quests.
Nice review
Here are some of my thoughts...
It's a decent mmorpg, from what I have played in beta.
But it think the game is pretty generic, this doesn't mean it's bad, but I was hoping for some new special features...
Rifts are nothing more then a sort of public quests and there isn't much variation in these rifts (it's always the same stuff just with different type of creatures) it will get boring after a while (unless they add more variation to it)
Dungeons are pretty generic but like mentioned above, they are far from being bad. (good design and fun to explore)
Classes are pretty fun, allot of variaty and that is imho a big plus in this game. Combat feels allot like other known point and click (or tab-target / keybinds for the pr0's) out there. But it does the job pretty well.
I haven't tested PvP yet...So no comment on that.
Achievements are also present in this game...Achievement hunters will be very happy as it has allot of them and they seem pretty fun to collect ! (including artifacts(like EQII collections)/mounts/books/titles/... to collect )
Finally the artstyle in this game is good (to awesome), it's allot more mature then for example WoW, but yet allot more fancy looking than EQII... Trion did a really good job on creating a unique world with it's own lore.
I would recommend this game to all "classic" mmorpg fans out there.
If you are tired off WoW / EQII / LotrO / ... or just want a new "unexplored world' (lore-wise) to discover, then Rift might be the perfect choice for you.
Please get back on topic and refrain from baiting other users into arguement. Also, if you feel someone is breaking the RoC, report them. Do not take it upon yourself to issue any sort of swift justice. Calling someone a troll because you feel they are baiting someone into an arguement is also against our RoC. In the end both people end up getting an infraction when it may have only been one.
Thanks.
I was wondering how much variety and uniqueness is available within the game ? One of my hates in mmo's, that there appears to be variety in character creation , but in practice its surprising how many times you meet or see people with almost the same character as yourself bar a different hair colour or style. Is there any option to be ugly , small and green like a hobgoblin or are they mainly variations of chisel-jawed models with the option to have grey skin to appear 'evil' ?
What are the rifts you mention? At first I had visons of the rifts from Aion , suggesting pvp , but somewhere on this site someone mentioned the rifts being similar to random public quests like in Warhammer Online. I liked the pvp in warhammer, but I found the pve quests and public quests in particular repetetive and pointless , more of a distraction . At first , running through the game , sure, you think they are different and fresh take on pve, but after a week you quickly realise how pointless they are and avoid them like the plague if you have the option. Is this the same in this game?
Reguarding pvp , is there free-for-all pvp , or is there any limitation to high levels going to low level areas to gank? And if they do, is the gameplay such that high levels are totally immune to attack simply because they are x levels higher and thus every attack against them is miss , resist, dodge and so on? I have to ask , as this is such a gamebreaker for me . I like open world pvp , and a good group of low lvels should be able to see a high level as fair game even if its challenging .
Rifts are like portals that open up. Each rift has a type (life/fire/water/earth/etc...) , based on that type there will be enemies you have to defeat. There are minor and major rifts (the major ones are elite monsters and you need allot more ppl to be able to close them) It's a PvE event btw
As for character customization , there aren't really allot of different options here :
- face shape
-eye (color/brows/rotation/size)
-mouth (size )
-hair (type/color)
-extra feature (facial tattoos / color)
-Height (tall or small )
All of those making use of slider bar and color picker
I hope that gives you somewhat an idea. Imho it's pretty poor, but the class(skills) customization makes up for it.
QFT
IMHO this biggest plus this game has is the souls the combinations as I see it will lead to complex debates. Not as complex as the meta game for GW and builds but more complex then most anything else. I agree the quest are same ole same ole but I noticed that if you rift grind you level at a good pace only issue is you need folks (and sometimes a lot) willing to travel.
Is the game a WoW clone? IMHO no but its from WoW generation and thus theme park to its truest.
Something I wanted to point out is pet pathing is remarkable in this game. I tried it with multiple pets from different classes. I jumped off bridges into water up and down mountain etc etc. Not once did the pets get lost.
The game is polised very pretty and a good representation of what we see in MMOs today. Will it be a hit? I don't know with SWTOR someplace in the future and GW2 out there in a year (maybe) there is a lot you could speculate. The thinf that gives me an inkling that it might be just fine ok is its polish I could see this game get 200k scrips keep em and never have trouble or maybe more because overall its solid.
I haven't played this for very long, but all I can say is it reminds me of Warhammer too much.
I don't know what games you have been playing,but for a next generation AAA mmo tittle(as Trion claimed it to be) coming out in 2011: graphics,animation and world design feel nothing more than poor to me.Just zoomed in into a tree and it felt like it was designed by an 8 year old girl.
If you were just looking for the bad in my review. Sorry to disapoint you with that. But here is what I will say in responce to your post. Mining isn't nearly as bad as you claim. I have had no issues with that. The nodes appear in the exact same spot everytime, and if your not using the track node feature that you get from your gathering trainer, then of course you won't find them. Also, if you can't find the node X number of minutes later, it's probably because someone else is gathering from that node as well. Either way, trying to say that gathering and production are to simplistic is far off the mark. There are, however, other games out there that have more complicated crafting methods. Which, in my opinion, isn't something I myself prefere. Who wants to babysit their keyboard every single item to make sure it comes out the way you want it?
Chat wasn't to bad, as you can filter it, change the font size and color, and whatever else you need to do with it. Class descriptions seemed good enough to me. But then again, I'm used to the old school: Tanks tank, healers heal, rogues DPS, and mages nuke everything in site.
I very rarely encountered fast respawn rates. The quest you mentioned where you have to destroy some nests is going to have respawns either way. After all, your trying to destroy a nest.
Oh I completely agree. I know the quest and personally I loved it that they would respawn trying to defend it.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Here's my short review:
1. It's fun.
2. Rifts & Invasions are epic!
3. It's not wow!
4. It's not war!
5. I'm in love with a cleric again, after all these years.
I'm going to correct myself. There was one other area that I did come across. I just didn't have the time to comment on it sooner. It's a story line quest where you have to gather some objects down near the shore NW of the capital city. That area has some crab looking things with basketballs for bodies that have a quick respawn time.