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RIFT; the result of unoriginal/non creative game developers -- a review from a beta tester
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OK if your really a dev you should have a clue of what folks hate. They hate copies. I don't care if it copied, warhamer, eq1 or what the heck ever we hate copies. We been there done that. So that should be your first clue. They want something different.
Personall i want a lot of custimizable options for character creation. That is one place were rift fails totaly and uterly. Second public quests. Housing yes folks want good houseing not the crap we got in lotro. OK lets talk about quests and leveling. Lets get some good story telling, I know most folks by 2nd or 3rd alt click though. A more open world with different paths to level, just not via quests or grinding but other options like exploring crafting. Yes lets talk about crafting, I hate genirc crafting, all the games nowdays use that we all make the same thing, points back to swg pre nge now that was crafting.
Basicly I want a lot of content, just not some remake of other games, give us mobs, locations, get rid of dungioun finders no more henchman.
And beyond all other things mike it fun and something that will capture folks attention after we get to end game. Not just more repeatble grind for more and more gear. To often we get the dps meter check and it become about who does the most dammage and who has the best piece of gear. There needs to be alternate paths to gear, as in crafting.
Oh well I will just say that all the above trion failed in ever respect.
Gamers are fickle. They ask for originality, and when given it often times it is hated. Thus how can you expect developers amazingly original. At least they're taking baby steps towards some originality, all the while keeping the game familiar and fun.
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"
~Lord George Gordon Byron
Personall i want a lot of custimizable options for character creation. That is one place were rift fails totaly and uterly. Second public quests. Housing yes folks want good houseing not the crap we got in lotro. OK lets talk about quests and leveling. Lets get some good story telling, I know most folks by 2nd or 3rd alt click though. A more open world with different paths to level, just not via quests or grinding but other options like exploring crafting. Yes lets talk about crafting, I hate genirc crafting, all the games nowdays use that we all make the same thing, points back to swg pre nge now that was crafting.
Basicly I want a lot of content, just not some remake of other games, give us mobs, locations, get rid of dungioun finders no more henchman.
And beyond all other things mike it fun and something that will capture folks attention after we get to end game. Not just more repeatble grind for more and more gear. To often we get the dps meter check and it become about who does the most dammage and who has the best piece of gear. There needs to be alternate paths to gear, as in crafting.
Oh well I will just say that all the above trion failed in ever respect.
We don't hate copies.
Theme park carebear laments lack of originality in theme park game. Is this the height of irony? Am I at the nexus of the universe? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Trammies need to stop polluting the MMORPG landscape. They already have enough games in which to emote hugs and sell garbage by the banks.
I preordered Rift and I am ejoying the game BECAUSE it is similiar to WoW.
I have played WoW for 5 years. I have gotten to the point (after 4 level capped characters and a plethora of alts) that everything about WoW just seems boring and mundane. However, everytime I try a new game I keep comparing it to the things I like about WoW and usually end up going back. Rift is the first game I have played in a very long time that has just enough similarities to WoW that it will keep me from heading back to warcraft.
Similiar but not the same. Exactly what I was looking for. Feels familiar without looking familiar.
I bought a car, Volvo. Appears it is copy of Toyota – 4 wheels, engine in front, seats, 4 doors. Same UI – pedals on floor, wheel in front, gear stick in side ...
Oh wait, it is copy of Mercedes,
Benz...
I played the betas too and I can confirm that the game pretty much feels like an extentions of WoW mixed with some WAR elements such as PQs and PvP over PvE stuff.
It is very linear, has next to no death penalty, world is quite small and the interface and gfx is very similar to WAR, altough upgraded ofcourse. Wardstones are pretty much like keeps in WAR and the classes, altough quite varied, are your basic melee/ranged DPS, Tank, Healer and Support. There are no particular new type of spells in this game but your typical heal, CC and pet summons.
Rifts, from what I can see, just spawn some mobs randomly and then you have a massive amount of people zerging them. Honestly I did not see much point in them as the zerging quite quickly overvelmed the poor mobs. Maybe at higher levels they can get this foothold as people claim but I have not seen it.
Unless the end-game is something revolutionary, which I doubt from the info we have got so far, I dont see this game bringing much to the genre. It is yet another themepark, new shiny package and a few gimmicks. It will follow the same path as the other two AAA titles released, WAR/AoC, and start strong and then to slowly bleed subscribers until there are less than 200k.
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Hm, copying the good and proven isn't bad in itself. Like the UI. I rather have a copy of the WOW UI than those messed up experiments from DCU or FFXIV. Also other things, if there worked, why change them?
I think Rift has some things in common with WOW and some things different; so I don't see it as WOW clone, or clone of anything. When critizising a game, I prefer a hermeneutic approach, critizising the game by itself, not by saying it is like something else.
On a personal level, I'd wish Rift would copy the respawn rate, mob difficulty and mob aggro range of WOW. The one from Rift is several levels too hectic and demanding for my taste.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
It is called innovation, to do the same thing but in a different way. Some people like innovation and some people are more conservative and like the tested and tried approach. I belong in the former and you seem to belong in the latter.
Would not say any of them is "wrong" but generally even conservative people eventually get tired of doing basically the same thing over and over.
I mean how many MMOs have we had, aping WoW? WAR, AoC, Aion, Allods Online, DCUO, STO, CO? How many more themepark, linear, class based and simplistic MMOs do we need before it is enough?
SW:TOR for sure will follow that formula, probably will GW 2 as well and maybe TERA? Is it not time for an AAA title to try a different approach?
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I'm not a game developer, I'm in school for game development.
If gamers hated copies, they'd hate WoW, which a majority of MMO players don't.
WoW wasn't a copy. WoW brought daily questing to MMO, flying mounts, MMO without zoning, casual gameplay, BG, different tradeskills, spec system.
Did they look at some single player RPG and EQ? Yes they did.
But they made an MMO that didn't exist in the market before.
People accepted WoW and EQ as 2 completely different games. The MMO community accepted WoW, it will not accpet Rift as innovation because it is just a clone.
Rift made WoW 2.0. Many do not accept Rift because it is a direct clone without graphics or gameplay innovation at all.
If you do not understand that difference, I would change school >.<
Actually a lot of folks do. Me included. That was why when I logged into rift and saw the character models I though wow. When I saw some of the artwork and mob models I thought wow on some of the monsters then warhammer on others. When I looked at the ui, I thought warhammer, When I started running the quests I though hmmm no imagination same old thing from any other game. Then we got to the public quests from warhammer called rifts now. Same thing. Watched the same animation bug for auto-attack from warhammer. You get where I am going. It only took me a couple of hours in the first beta to identify the fact they were even using the same engine from warhammer even though it is modified. The only thing different is the soul trees, a lot of games have them, but this one you make your choices and on the one part of the tree it fills it in for you taking out some of the guesswork.
So when it came down to it for me the following statement was been there done that, if I wanted to do it again I would. Sorry but I already have game I have invested 6 years into, and I am not going to change just so I can level up a few new toons and learn a new end game.
Oh and if you are in school to become a game dev, honestly the field is full of them. 10 years ago you would make 50 or 60k, nowadays 24k is about starts as there are so many. You might should consider learning java and other things to be a web developer that's where the cash is. This advice coming from an old COBOL programmer who seen better times.
Anytime anyone tries to make this argument they get shot down so I'm not going to try very hard... Rift does NOT = WoW
It doesn't feel like WoW, it doesn't play like WoW, it has things WoW doesn't, it does things better than WoW, WoW did not invent the interface and most games (believe it or not!) do have an interface similar to WoW because that is what is expected. Ever play an FPS? They all play EXACTLY the same. Do people whine about them being "clones?"
P.S. this is essentially a Rift = WoW thread and there is already a place to discuss this.
Most of what you said is a matter of personal opinion that a lot of us do not agree with. But to each their own.
My theme song.
Why you guys can not take RIFT as it is? you know... the whole idea about Rifts from other worlds entering ours, the soul system etc. Why the hell you guys do beta just to make a list of things that are similar to other MMORPG and not just WoW?
Why you guys can not take the lore as it is, a new refreshing adventure. Even tho RIFT may be adding things like a dungeon finder the game its self looks nothing like WoW or any other MMORPG that came before the brain washing titan WoW. RiFT world is 100% different from all other MMORPG, the lore, story, quest, combat, skills, craftiing etc is all different so different that you guys only look at UI lmao.
This, this and uhhhhhh this.
Please stop reviewing games people in betas that only made it to level 5. {mod edit}
You are wrong; EQ2 had open zones; Single player RPGs had tradeskills and casual gameplay, some even had flying rides. Spec systems are nothing new, seriously, where are you getting this false information?
I beta tested Rift to beta test it. I don't agree with your opinions of the game and do not feel that it is as "origonal" as you claim. To me the charater models and animations looked very WoW/Warhammer as does the art style. The UI, Quests, Combat, and Skills are very much like WoW. I didn't try crafting. The world and lore are Origonal. If you like it good for you.
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I had to sit down and play Fallout 3 for a while to get my fill of dirt and grit after Rift beta testing. Rift, is just too polished. This is an area they not only took from WoW, but decided to improve on. There are lights flashing everywhere, the screen is always busy and you can't tell what the hell is going on half the time in a battle, but afterwards, everything is always bright and shiny once again.
Sadly, if they made it feel more like "that dreaded game I won't mention again", it may have held my interest far longer than it did. I just don't want to waste my time playing a watered-down version of a game that's already been out for 6 years without offering anything new. They either needed to give it an overhaul from the ground up, or come up with a new breakthrough in gameplay to pry my wallet open.
I'm sure a lot of others feel the same, just looking at this thread alone. Rift is just going to be one of those MMO's people look back at 5 years from now and ask, "Does anyone remember a game where you...?". They may keep a small subscriber base and limp on for a while, but this game will never really be a revolutionary breakthrough in the market like others before it were (WoW, Everquest, UO, etc.)
It is not false information, he is right. WoW introduced casual MMOs to the market. One which has a very linear path, clear quest markers, almost no downtime and very fast leveling (compared to previous games) and also: quest centered leveling on top of grinding mobs and dungeon crawling as well as instanced PvP battlegrounds.
So WoW was innovative and games like EQ 2 was released about the same time as WoW so they could not possibly have copied each other unless there was some massive leaks and re-engineering going on, which I strongly doubt.
Do I think WoW is good? No, I am into sandbox games. But WoW did things no other MMO had done before and that was to introduce the casual, mainstream gamers to the genre.
Rift on the other hand is basically WoW in a different skin and this rifts gimmick. One which I strongly doubt will make much difference on how you play the game because they are basically random mob spawns, no more and no less.
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WoW took a lot of the features other games already had. Flying mounts and questing as well as instanced dungeons were already in Anarchy Online in the form of Yalms, Mission Terminals and the missions themselves. Even EQ had instanced dungeons and daily quests with the LDoN expansion. City of Heroes used missions (quests) as a main source of progression. All Blizzard did was to take these features, tweak them more to a casual playerbase and release a game based on an incredibly popular franchise. Even the developers themselves admit to this.
WoW is a copy no matter what people try to say otherwise. There wasn't too much innovation involved when the game launched, it was an amalgamation of every MMO out there. And like all other MMOs, the 'innovative' parts (BGs, LFD tool, Flying mounts, etc etc) came a long while after the game launched. Flying mounts came 2 years later with the BC expansion (where as in AO you could get a Yalm right at the start). BGs were what, almost a year after launch? Daily quests came into frutation a little after BC launched. Basically when WoW launched it was nothing more than a very streamlined version of EQ with some bits of other games tossed in the mix.
Sadly people tend to forget that WoW is 6 years old and most of the 'innovative' features started coming in at about the 2 year mark. Instead they compare Current State WoW with a game that is just launching, a game that is offering what WoW offered at launch - a familiar formula with its own tweaking of basic features. It's like compairing the foundation of a new building just being built against the Sears tower.
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?!"
Yes WoW did take alot of features other games had but the meaning of innovation is NOT to invent but rather re-invent. I.e. take existing elements and do it in a different way.
EQ and WoW are very different animals. They are both themeparks yes but EQ was hardcore with corpserunning, high exp penalty and very steep leveling curve where as WoW was casual. And EQ, even though it had quest, was NOT quest based as it was not the main means of leveling your character but rather grinding and dungeon running was. WoW was the first MMO, released on a large scale, that allowed you to do quests to get exp as main means of leveling.
AO was released same year, only a couple of months before, and it was in a horrible state. So dont try to say WoW copied that game. Finally if you want to delude yourself into thinking that WoW was just a copy then ask yourself this: How is it possible that just a copy would become the largest MMOG ever and is today neck and shoulders above everyone else?
Admit it or not WoW did something right to earn the devotion of so many people and the fact that so many devs tried to ape WoW (and basically only Aion becoming a success) is just another proof that it stands in its own class. Rift will come and go as it offers basically nothing that other game already has, short of some gimmicks, and it will share the same fate of WAR and AoC. Which is sub 100k subs in one year.
But I dont think the devs will mind that because for sure they will earn money from people thinking it is the next great thing, just like the millions of people who bought into the WAR and AoC hype.
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I think you got your dates mixed. AO was released years before WoW. WoW and EQ2 were practically released together and EQ2 had a more quest focus orientation than WoW. In fact, in EQ2 you could opt to stop gaining exp from mob killing and do it from quests alone.
For me the difference between EQ2 and WoW at the time was that WoW felt like a world, while EQ2 felt like a game, especially given the constant loading screens and the higher computer specs necessary. Funny how things change over the years.
Edit:
Did some checking. AO was released in 2001, WoW in 2004.
EQ released in 1999. AO in 2001. WoW in 2004.
What WoW did right was it released in a far more polished state than previous games, had a major budget behind it and a dev team who weren't amatures as well as having one of PC gamings biggest IPs.
And again, WoW wasn't the first to make questing a main source of EXPing. CoH and AO both had missions (CoH Missions being more quest like where as AO's were randomly generated).
If WoW were named something else and released in the same state it was just by a different company I am willing to bet it wouldn't have caught on as well as it did.
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?!"
Sorry I mixed up release of CoH with AO. In any case, this discussion is going nowhere. But if you want to think that WoW is just a copy then go right ahead. No copy will become the titan WoW has become, to think that is just deluding yourself but probably explains why you would think Rift would be a success.
It wont, it will be more or less like WAR/AoC. 100k subs, 1 year after release.
I played WoW, EQ and Rift Beta and where as Rift feels alot like WoW, WoW felt nothing like EQ did.
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