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My initial thoughts after a free weekend
WhiteLantern
Member RarePosts: 3,319
So, the boys and girls behind Rift decided to offer up some free "try before you buy" weekends and I opted to partake. I rolled up a mage and took her to level 10 in a few hours of playtime. Now, I reallize that this next comment will make me sound like a hater, but the first thought out of my head was "generic high fantasy". I really found nothing compelling to make me want to log in.
The rifts, which I thought would be a big draw for me, felt.....meh. The first time I helped close a low-level rift, I thought "awesome, I've actually influenced the world!". When that rift practically respawned immediately and was also back again the next time I logged in (in the same exact spot), it lost some of its coolness.
The graphics were quite nice and the character customization was cool. What I saw of the landscape was nice and screenshot-worthy. I honestly don't remember the sounds or music at all so I'll chalk those up to lackluster as music is normally the first thing to jump out at me.
The soul system is really interesting and adds some real nice opportunity for unique builds if a person isn't interested in following the FotM builds. I liked that, as I spent points in the various trees, I automatically gained new spells and abilities not necessarily related to the skills I was putting points in. Handy.
In the end, the pros of this game seem to outweigh the cons, and, on paper, the game is well worth investing in. Unfortunately, the one real major (for me) con: generic feel, lost me. I simply couldn't bring myself to care about the world. The game failed to hook me in the first few hours and so I'm out. For those that enjoy the game: congratulations, I think you'll enjoy it for some time to come, but for me, it was just too much "meh".
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Comments
Deja Vu, didn't someone else post this exact review after the last trial, or am I just imagining that?
I don't know, I've read this same review a ton of times only with different posters and different words. It sums up the initial feel of the game for a lot of players.
I was a bit different, I liked the story of the gods bringing me back to smack down the defiants. I like the rifts, they add a nice distraction and I have met some cool people doing them. I love the soul system and that my rogue does not have to have the same skills as all the other rogues. I do agree this game is a lot like WoW and does not bring much in the way of NEW ideas but it is holding my interest, hopefully until SWToR comes out.
No you're not imagining it because I did post a similar thread yesterday, but oh well.
I play on the Defiant side and like the game. Just wondering though....did you read the quests or any of the many books you may have collected from the starting area the main city and abroad...or talk to the little hologram machines...or speak with non- quest -givers to see what they had to say (some have a word balloon you can click on for info)?
Myself..I thought all of these together are pretty well done as far as lore and questing goes.
Agree with the OP, for me having played UO, EQ 1 & 2, WOW, LOTRO, Warhammer and few others Rift just wasn't all that special. The best quality was the class combinations which were really fun, I really enjoyed the necromancer and the different combos, but other than that it didn't wow me (parden the pun)
Right now lotro is free to play
Rift is $15 a month
There is nothing that Rift does that is worth $15 a month over what lotro offers for free.
This, pretty much. Rift clamors itself as a PvE game, so lets compare Rift to another PvE centered game (LOTRO) in regards to the things that make PvE themepark MMOs great.
Content: LOTRO > Rift
Quests: LOTRO > Rift
Size: LOTRO > Rift
Immersion: LOTRO > Rift
Community: LOTRO > Rift
Storyline: LOTRO > Rift
Beauty: LOTRO > Rift
Price: LOTRO > Rift
Polish: LOTRO = Rift
Rifts: Rift > LOTRO
The only aspects I can't comment on are Rift's end-game and high level PvP as I haven't tried them yet, but something tells me those are not Rift's strong points either. Kinda hard to justify the subscription price.
I for one, did not particularly care for LOTRO. I did not care for it at launch. But NOW that it's F2P I REALLY can't get drawn in.
Editted for the sake of honesty.
You might not have liked the game, but saying its launch was terrible is a flat out lie. Most people will agree LOTRO had one of the better launches as far as MMOs go, up there with Rift in terms of polish.
Please do not bait each other into argueing. Thanks.
It would be stupid not to compare each game in their CURRENT state. Nobody's going to say "you know, X currently has a lot more things going for it than Y, but it wasn't like that 5 years ago, so I'm going to go with the shittier game now.
Pretty much how i felt after the trial, except i had more cons then pros for the game. It just doesn't seem like a game I want to invest any time in but there seems to be alot of people who like it.
I think in all final analysis for comparing Lotro to Rift you have to go with lotro's equivalent to rifts and that would be Chicken Play
Chicken play > Rifts
or maybe someone should do a poll
LOTRO does have a lot of things going for it like its amazing & helpful community and its supposed wealth of content (really just 2,000+ trash quests with some story ones in-between) but from my weekend with Rift I discovered 2 key features that trumps LOTRO. That's the soul system, which is a theory-crafter's dream and the fact that it has some actual PvP and not some MPvP garbage. Those 2 things are enough to get me (someone who hates the subscription-based model) to buy a 30-day timecard for the game, however those 2 great features are somewhat marred by the games inevitable "Flavour of the Month" builds.
Yea. . .heavily theme-parkish single-player-esque lobby-system non-organic rpgs that offer much of what is overtly familiar and redundant tends to do that.
I think Rift is a great game based on the rifts and how they affect the world. The lore is rich if you explore it, graphics are amazing, and the soul system offers a lot versitility. The combat animations are not that great and the fast-paced leveling are my only teo gripes but they are minor.
It's funny, I've seen this review about 10 times now...
Why bother? At the end of the day, the quests are still just generic click the NPC, be led by the nose to the glowing waypoint, repeat 10,000 times to level cap, just like everyone else. Nothing unique about the quests, the quest rewards, how they function in the game, nothing.
I'm sorry did you just try to say LotRO is immersive? The game with the invisible walls, endless fields of baddies hanging out over every square inch of the Shire and other places, has caves that announce "You don't have the proper quest to enter" when you try to explore, and floating icons over every NPC giving you the same quest over and over again?
LotRO may be better than rift, but its still just a bad WoW clone, which is a shame, because when it was called Middle Earth Online, in alpha, it was a unique sandbox game.
To give my two cents on Rift....
It's a great game. It's not my dream game (close, but not quite), but I will be playing it for the time being. The only thing it's missing for me is a non-generic combat system... I would rather have something like DDO, where you actually have to click to swing a sword and aim at the creature to shoot/cast... So until I find a game that has as many classes, or near as many, as Rift with DDO combat style, beautiful graphics (Rift graphics set my standards), intermixing classes like Rift, and mass PvE spawns (Rifts), I will be playing Rift.
So, anyways, back to giving my two cents... The game is a lot better than any other MMO I have played so far. The combat system is generic, but there's more to it than just the way you attack and the action bars. In Rift, you actually have to think about what you're going to use. For example, I am a Paragon (dual wielding warrior)/Reaver (basically a death knight. Death warriors. Spread disease by the touch of their sword, dots, aoe dots)/Beastmaster (2 handed weapons, pet) and I have to think what dots to use against my enemy and what attacks I should use/etc.
The rifts are pretty cool, though they can get a little repetitive. Invasions are awesome and I never get tired of them. I actually haven't seen a rift in the same place over and over every time... They're always spontanious. In fact, I was walking once and a death rift where I had never seen one open before opened right above me, and then a fire rift opened right next to it... Yeah, I was doomed... I have seen them in highly populated areas mostly, so I assume that's where they open most and the OP is thinking he's seeing it in the same place over and over again. They're not programmed to respawn, they're programmed to open anywhere at any given time.
Dungeons are really hard, so you have to think there too, which is good... I enjoy a challenge...
It's harder to level up... In WoW, it's "Congrats, you easily leveled up, now go do it again you idiot..." while in Rift, it's "Wow man, you did great! That sure was a sweat! Now we're gonna make you glow and show you a cool animation and actually reward you with a useful power! Now try your hardest and do it again!"
I have yet to PvP much, so I can't tell you anything about that.
Public questing is cool, but it can get on my nerves sometimes because sometimes you'll have to wait like 5 minutes for an NPC to respawn.
The only thing I think Rift is really missing is a dungeon finder and a warfront finder, which they claim to be adding soon.
Also, it could use some more races.. Bahmi and Kelari skin color are the same, so it doesn't have to much diversity when it comes to color on those races... And since there's only 3 per faction, they could definitely use some more, especially on the Defiant side.
Overall, I love rift, and I will definitely be sticking to it (until my dream mmo comes along).
ly be sticking to it (until my dream mmo comes along)
I don't get how Rift can be someone's dream game. It's virtually identical in every sense to several MMOs that are already out there... are your dreams set so low?
Well, people do like different stuff. Just because you're a sandbox advocate, it doesn't make your dreams grander, sorry to say. Discriminate gamers due to our game specific choices are silly, sorry to say.
Would you rather have all other big title MMO you love all in one and better + only have to level one character? Or would you rather play a bunch of seperate games and have to level many different characters, never getting anywhere in any of them because you have to share time in all of them, etc. etc.... I'll take the first option very much...
Plus, you not only have 32 classes to choose from but you can intermix 3 classes at once, which is the main thing that drew me to the game, because it has always been my dream to see that exactly in a game...
But anyways, Rift is not my dream game, but close, as I said.
Gah, you make me all sad yet again over what happened with Middle Earth Online.
At launch of LOTRO you could still glimpse some of the original work and the game was somewhat faithful to the lore.
Now, it is bland, generic high fantasy (can anyone say Runekeeper?). What is worse is that it went F2P. And if Tolkien hadn't got himself into a spot of tax trouble all this never would have happened.
May Turbine rot in a special kind of hell.
Not that I'm bitter or anything...
I'm not a sandbox advocate. I'm an advocate for making a game that isn't 95% WoW clone.