My review and impression of Rift.

whosaidwhat

Well Originally I wasnt planning on getting Rift, but after watching a gamebreaker tv video, and seeing how Jasmine literally got her rocks off talking about the game so I decided to do the Digital CE,, hate being a sucker to redheads.  So I get the code for beta, download and log in.

So first let me say that the best way to describe rift is that it is a WoW business model clone.  By this I mean that Trion took game aspects of other games and merged them into one game.  Though sadly they didnt go above and beyond.   Blizzard had done some thing better in taking ideas, but not much. 

Now having seen game play footage I was impressed with the graphics.  Well, not so when I logged in.  The character creater is not bad, but not great.  Good mddle of the road creater.  You wont spend to much time making a character that you wont see much of since you cover most with armor, yet still can give it that personal feel.  I created a human warrior.   Hit play and i was loading into the game.  When game stoped loading, I saw the in game world and was, well hugely disappointed.  Till that point I had no idea that game is using the warhammer online engine, and having played warhammer online for a month, I do hate pvp.  I had the distinct feeling of a deja vu moment with War.  The graphics in the starting zones, both guardian and defiant are bleh, boring, nothing to exciting, which is really a same, the environmental graphics out side the starting zone are much better.  So for me, the game really didnt get better till I was out of the starter zone.  Outside the starter zone the graphics are the environment are great.  The 3 zones I explored were well done. 

Well the biggest part of Rift, imo, is the soul system.  This is confussing at first.  Though I quickly learned about them and chose my warriors first soul.  Now many of the souls are similar to the classes of EQ2, or at least from what I experienced.  And the play style, attacks, spells, are very close to WoW.  For example, the paly soul gets the same shield throw as WoW palys and the rogue calling has the exact same finishing move as WoWs rogue.  Yes yes i have heard it over and over again that well all games have frostbolt or weapon attack.  But Trion could have at least made some effert into making more differences.   So there are 4 callings, and 8 starting possible souls, thats 32 souls.  WoW for example has 10 classes and 2 talents for each so thats 30.  So really the soul system is not anything special.  BUT where the soul system does shine is the abilty to have 4 sets of souls for your calling.  This creates alot of flexiblity for game play.  I can solo for a bit, group for a bit, raid for a bit, pvp for a bit, still have pvp.  By the time your lvl 10 you can have 2 roles.  That helps out alot especially with the rifts and the invasions.

Questing in the game sadly is lacking.  Its general questing, nothing excitng here.  Even the quest helper makes it boring, no need to think, follow the arrow to where you need to kill, kill or gather, go back and turn in quest.  Where questing does change abit is when the zone invasions happens.  But stll not enough to make questing so generic.  So sadly, questing is to much a a bleh grind in Rift for me.  As well as very linear, which sadly this appears to be the standard now in mmos.

Now for the Rifts, which is the name sake of the game.  This is one area where Trion did a big clone.  Both from Anarchy Online and War.  Rifts are general fair.  Rift pops up, go to it kill untill rift closes, get loot.  First beta i did it was a pain becuase no one wanted to group.  But with last beta they added public grouping, which really did help.  Even though the rifts are a nice break and needed to get your 5 other souls in the begining they become repetative.  Last beta, after I got the last of my souls, I avoided the rifts as much as possible.  Loot was great, mostly junk except for the collections you might get.  And exp was nominal compared to questing or grinding kills.  Could rifts be done any way to make them better, yes, but how, not sure.  Maybe make  them have some type of dungeon mechanics, like one player has to move an npc to a certain point while others whack on the others npcs.

Invasions on the other hand were great and really a good way to piss you off.  They gave great exp, since generally you faught multiple invasion groups as well as give the same loot as rifts.   So when there was a zone wide invasion you could pick up alot more loot then rifts.  Now where invasions were rough was when 7 groups of lvl 18 elites run down a road where mostly lvl 10ish players quest/hunt.  Or in the last beta, lvl 30 of the opposite faction would come and get players flaged and wipe out players.  In one invasion 3 30 defiants, oh and i played on a pve server, stood in the middle of a group of invasion npcs while public raid was fighting invasion.  Most got flagged and they wiped us.  If this was on a pvp server it would be a big deal, but on a pve server they need to disable the ability to tab target flaged players.  Other then that invasions were the better part of the game

As for crafting, first off I am an alt whore. I mostly create alts so I can have crafters.  I like crafting so every game I ever played I would have max crafters.  So with there being 4 calling, I need to rethink how I would have all crafters.  I had one of each calling in the betas.  But for me to do all the crafting choses as well as the harvesting needed for them I would have to create new alts.  So I am going to have to rething I have crafting done. That said.  Crafting is way to WoW like for a different mmo.  Tier lvls are 75 points.  Just like WoW.  As well as easier then heck to lvl it up.  Yes it was low lvls but still, was really fast.  They need to up the amount of materials used to make items.  The one thing I did like was the items that are made for craftiing are like LOTRO, they actually are usefull.  As well as having crafting dailies to pick up other recipies.

Now I want to talk about the one aspect of the game that I really think is great.  The amount of npc models.  I have never seen anything like that.  Though I am afraid it wont be that way till end of game.  But still, this gives the game a "i havent been here killing that npc before feeling".  That at least for me made the game more enjoyable.  Really enjoyable actually.

Is the game polished and ready for release.  Yes it is, but the game is so middle of the road in everything that I believe many will be disappointed.  Though as with all mmos, there are the lovers or fanboys or girls who will say and stay with the game.  Cough cough ,Jasmine, GBTV, Cough cough.  Though I hope the game does well since I hope all mmos do well.

Ok now for pros and cons:

Cons:  Reused engine, WoW feel, average questing, crafting.  Rifts/invasion. 

Pros: Environmental graphics, Rifts/invasions, Souls system

So who is Rift for.  Rift is for the WoW haters who secretly love WoW or actually sucked at the easiest game in the world. WoW burnouts

Who rift isnt for.  Players that are looking for something new.  Those that believe in hype.

Should you buy the game.  No.   I highly recommand geting a beta invite if they have a beta event again, if not wait till they do trial accounts.  If I had not bought the digital copy I would have canceled my order.  Im not saying the game is bad.  But the game is just to average for me to want to invest money into it.  Hell if I had the ability, I would make Gamebreaker TV's Jazmine do a dirty dance to get my moneys worth.  Oh well you when some you loose some.

Last thing.  The hype of Rift is way way to high atm.  Read the forums at many sites as well at rifts site to see whats going on. 

maji

Stuff I liked about Rift:

• 
  graphics are ok, albeit not jaw-dropping
• 
  quite a number of talent trees to choose from
• 
  polished

 

Stuff I dislike about Rift:

• 
  combat is boring, slow, monotonous and unchallenging
• 
  they didn't even try to make the quests interesting, 90% of them are "kill x of y"
• 
  very linear gameplay
• 
  only two starting zones
• 
  sound is disappointing at times
• 
  huge amount of the game is directly copied from WoW

 

In short: it's basically more of the same. People who want more of the same will be happy about it. People looking for anything new will be disappointed.