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The Good, The Bad, and the Outdated
Looking through the lists of new games I deciced to give this one a try since they are offering a 7 day free trial. After the 7 hr download of 9GB's of data I worked my way through the into screens and started my gameplay.
What I was expecting based on the hype and Rifts place on MMORPG's best game lists, was benchmarking technology and innovative, new thinking with a great storyline and gameplay.
It didnt take long for dissappointment to set in.
What I found instead was what seemed to me as a frankin-game. Lets take bits and parts of older games and see if we cant stitch them together and make something that appears new and interesting. Hey it was a good idea maybe and Dr Frankenstein made it work.. sorta. Only problem was instead of creating new and better life he instead ended up with an ugly deranged monster.
Now, Im not saying Rift is a total failure, again, if you create something even if it is out of old parts you might succeed in some ways. For awhile at least the game will draw in some of the folks bored with WOW or just looking for something new. They may find some intertainment for awhile, but honestly, this is just my opinion, this game is a bubble.
Some problems I see right away with Rift:
1: Graphics engine seems right out of the 90's, it may have some better eye candy on the outer layers, but the engine itself is way outdated. Its the sort of sluggish style of animations that give some people (myself included) a literal headache after playing for a few hrs. People can call the graphics eye-popping if they want, the same way you can take a pinto in some wrecking yard into a garage, give it a new coat of paint and a detail, and call it eye-popping too.
2: Gameplay is very old fashioned and again, way passed its time. Very simplistic enviernment with not much to offer via storyline, enviernmental content, realism, or questing.
3: GIving players diverse options for character individuality is good, however, it can be overdone too. IMO using 8 talent options for 3 skill trees per player class is abit much.
4: Not enough uniqueness in this game is the main killer. Most MMO players will get the feeling they have been here before right away and will soon find this game played out.
Comments
1. I can not agree here. If you want to see outdated blocky looking go no further then the marktet leader called WoW.
2. Not enough realism? That was the main complaint of some people was that it looked too realistic. Graphics card issue?
3. Go play WoW or wait for GW2
4. This is kind of a hyperbole statement. Is it just every single feature seems played out. If so tell me what other game has Rifts that spawn NPC's that come and destroy your face because I never saw that before.
5/10 - Some parts sound like trolling
WoW has used that type of mechanic for one time server events
The rift idea is nothing more then a giant public quest which was an idea taken from Warhammer. So, yeah, it isnt played out but its not new either. Plus the idea of mobs taking out your quest givers is fail IMO.
GW2 would like to talk with you then. The entire idea behind GW2 is they take out what is basically your quest givers and if you fail to act you are screwed. In Rift they put in a reset timer because that tends to piss people off.
Pure, you can do much better than this. your claims of parts sounding like trolling, when you pretty much smeared his own post with your own troll reduction sauce, are amateurish at best. I've seen you on different boards over the years, white-knighting it up, and for what cause i have no idea. i used to enjoy your Aion antics, and would actually agree with you to some extent in that game, however, when i saw that you'd come to Rift months ago...the fanboi in you had become far too strong.
i happen to agree with this fellow, because Rift is probably the single largest ripoff piece of trash i've ever seen. Was there starting at beta 4, supported the game because it SEEMED as though it was about to break the mold...and then absolutely everything this fellow just stated happened and then some.
However, i'm glad some of you still derive enjoyment from this game. Just don't go at this guy calling him trollish when he clearly made an intelligent assessment based on his experience. it mirrors many others out there.
the TL;DR: Rift is a trash ripoff for many of us. However, i'm glad some still derive enjoyment.
You do realize not everyone hates WoW, but does not like Blizzard as a dev? This genre is heavily dominant for a reason and it is not for a lack of trying from other MMO's. The Op has his own opinions and posting stuff that is not true is trolling.
If the graphics are garbage then post a screenshot. I got a folder full of them and videos to prove he is full of it. He does bring up some good points, but saying every feature sucks is kind of silly.
alrighty, THIS is the Pure i know and love. i actually agree that the graphics are solid. No screenshot needed for that, however, i can see why he would find the engine tiring. i played Rift heavily at launch and for 2 months after, and i actually began seeing exactly what he's describing. it's not neccesarily and issue of how good it looks, because it really does look good. After a while it just becomes stale to look at and once that sets in you start to notice all kinds of flaws. this is normal for any game i suppose, but if you're having fun i'm certain your brain won't even try to notice things like that.
my issues with the game are far and away NOT the inital view of graphics. it's much deeper than that and i believe that's what this fellow is trying to point out as well.
Guidl Wars 2 doesn't have quest givers. There's NO quests in the game. There's around 1500 dynamic events at launch. The entire persistent content in Guild Wars 2 is comprised of these events.
The main progression in the persistent world is dynamic events, and your progress won't be hampered by attacking NPC's. Quite the contrary is true.
What does happen is, if one of the NPC's in the town were the main supplier for Divinitiy's Reach's hops produce, then there will likely be no more Ale in the bars of the cpital city and that will likely kick off another another event.
You also don't recieve any event notifications by clicking on an NPC. If you witness an NPC screaming "Help! My town is under attack!" as he's running out of a town that's engulfed in flames and he is cut down mid-stride by a barrage of arrows from bandits in the surrounding area, then I'm pretty sure you can figure out an event's nearby...
Have no idea why you brought GW2 up in this. That has nothing to do with what I said. GW2 aims for some "personal quest" BS that is nothing more then a story line quest chain and a bunch of public quests renamed "dynamic events" to fill in the rest. You're statement might have made a little sense if I even mentioned GW2 but I didn't. I have no idea why you would say "GW2 would like to talk with you" cause the game isnt even out yet or even in beta. Also, its a game, you should have said Arena Net would like to talk to you. Though at least GW2 isn't going to rip people off 15 a month for their craptastic game unlike Rift.
Videos have already shown there are quests with people just stupidly standing around with things over there head. So saying there are no quest givers and no quests is a lie. They just renamed it to your "personal quests" but they are still there.
yep havok graphic engine at its best (lol)
Are you thinking of the scouts?
About Rift, one thing I would agree is that the game engine is very taxing compared to the level of graphics involved. It's not a bad looking game but it has a high cost of performance to it.
Really?
As someone who actually PLAYED games in the 90's that statement cracks me up.
Here's one of my favorite games from the 90's Descent 2, amazing game, played the hell out of it.
Here's an average rift SS.
Yeah thats totally the same... pretty sure one of those zombies has more pixels than the entire D2 screen.
I agree Rift isnt "amazing" but saying the graphics are from the 90's is just insane heh.
No, this is a scout
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGbWGs2SRe8
Different uses of the word for different games. Scouts in GW2 scout out the zone and tell passersby what is going on. Scouts in TF2 simply use a different meaning for the word.
Something entirely different man. I'm talking about the scout system in which you think are quest givers.
I was joking but no, the video I saw after the person talked to the person it started a quest of them running after mobs. Not scouting stuff, but the scout idea to find events sounds pretty helpful.
lol told you. It was a 5/10 with some hyperbole. The one guy above who posted the screenshot from the 90's thanks for the laugh. I miss the Duke Nukem days.
I only played in closed beta first off but my thoughts would be:
1. The graphics were fine to me but they felt near 100% like Warhammer Online, same engine after all, yes?
2. Yes true but to many people if something is not broke don't fix it? I like the old school style and I am open minded and ready to try anything new, but I don't demand it be new and if is not new it is crap.
3. If anything more complex the better, 8 felt like far too few to me once I saw that they just worked like spec trees in other games. They could have made it about 15-20 options per class, that would have been better.
4. This is the one I more or less agree with you on. I liked Rift fine but it didn't really draw me in
It could be because when I was trying it I had Warhammer active for the past 6-7 months so I was really really used to that style of graphics and gameplay at the time.
Well he said he wants a 8 class system that is most standardized and that is WoW with Elitistjrks or GW2 which simply combines them all and gets rid of healer/dps/tank
Rift has you keep track of 3 separate tanking build tree's depending what role they need you too fill in the raid. Some people can not handle this.
The soul system is obviously a subjective thing. I think it's great but some don't think so. In fact, I don't think it goes far enough. I kind of wanted something akin to the game Titan's Quest. So you would pick two/three souls from any archetype to form your class. Granted it would be hell for the developers to balance but man it would be fun.
To say Rift's graphics come straight of the 90s seems like a gross exageration, but I will say they were a real disappointment. Rift has a lot of washed out, muddy looking textures spread out all over the game world, and it doesn't help that, for the most part, the zones are all uninspired and forgettable. The world of Telara just lacks the unique charm of Azeroth or even EQ and EQ2's Norrath. There are a number of dungeons but they're just as uninspired as the world around them. The majority of them are just caves with a few teases of decent art design strung throughout, but you're forced back into boring cave hallways almost as soon as you reach an area you'd like to stop and let sink in.There are an acceptable variety of races, but the difference between many of them is miniscule at best, and most of them look thin and tiny compared to character models from other games. For some reason, toons in Rift felt like action figures with plastic swords and bows rather than real inhabitants of the gameworld.
I wouldn't say Rift's gameplay is old fashioned since the MMORPG genre has only seen baby steps at best since 2004, and in terms of themepark MMOs, Rift is actually right up there with Cataclysm WoW in terms of how it easily leads players from ques thub to quest hub, leaving them never at a loss for where to go for XP. The problem is that the quests aren't interesting enough. Almost all of them follow this pattern where you kill x of y, turn in the quest, get a new quest to collect x of y, run back to where you were fighting before, collect items, run back to quest giver, get a quest to kill 3 named mobs in the previous location. It's a lot of running back and forth and dealing with Rift's insanely annoying mob density that makes leveling feel like a real chore. WoW doesn't have a mob density problem, so you can more easily run to your quest area and kill only what you need for your quest and nothing else. WoW also has rather unique quests that have you piloting vehicles or doing all sorts of things that you really dont' see in other MMORPGs. Even LotRO has the book questline. Rift is just kill/collect until you fall asleep from boredom.
Rift's soul system is done poorly. Trion advertises like 20 something distinct souls, but in reality there are like 5 or 6 soul combinations that actually play unique from one another. The rest of them just result in pressing 3,2,2,4,5 instead of 5,3,2,1,7. Multiclassing gives you a lot of redundant abilities, and your skill window becomes clogged up with tons of abilities you'll probably never even use in your rotation. That is, assuming you can even figure out which skills you actually want to use for your rotation. Guild Wars, Runes of Magic, and Final Final Fantasy XI all have a multiclassing system that is lightyears ahead of Rift. The soul system just seems like someone designed after being spurned by Blizzard's decision to nerf talent points, but it just exemplifies all the problems that Blizzard's original system actually had in forcing players to put a lot of points into useless abilities just to get to the "good stuff." This is course is combined with several groups I would get in where the group would be like, "hey guy, can you go bard?" I'd be like "No, I don't have a bard soul set up." They'd reply "ugh, why? Every rogue should learn how to play a bard." I'd reply, "If I wanted to be a bard, I would be playing a bard right now. If we have to have a bard to get through this encounter that we were all put in together randomly via Trion's dungeon finder, perhaps Trion failed at balancing their boss fights for a wider variety of class combinations."
Rift's defenders constantly bring up how Rift's "dynamic events" alone set it apart from the competition. After all, what game has mobs take over ques thubs, preventing you from turning in your quests before you deal with them? What game has randomly spawning Rifts that spawn all over the game world that players can band together and defeat for rewards? What game lets mobs take over entire zones, forcing players to band together to fight back the invasion? Those are all good taglines to use when trying to get someone to play your game, but it's a bit like advertising all the awesome dungeons you can find in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. There's no point in those dungeons if there's no players around to run them with you. Rift isn't suffering from population issues, but after I got past level 20, I can count on one hand the number of times I actually fought a Rift with more than 1 other person, and even so, the Rifts are nothing more than waves of elementally themed mobs spawning over and over until you defeat the encounter. In that sense, clearing a Rift feels no different than the kill x of y dribble you'd spend your time doing otherwise. So since you're not running around in Rift raids from level 1-50, those Rifts become a giant pain in the hind region as they're constantly spawning all over the place, next to your ques thub, on top of your quest mobs, on the way to your quests, forcing you to run off adds or deal with the Rift before you can get on with your business. Speaking of getting on with your business, I can't count the number of times I was out questing when I saw the words "Camp X is under attack!" and it would always be whatever quest hub I was working through. I would complete my quests, run back to the quest hub, sometimes fight off the invasion, sometimes get bum rushed by like 10 mobs vs just myself, but at the end of the day, I would turn in my quests, go work on the next set of quests, and I'll be damned if Camp X doesn't come under attack yet again. The last things are actual zone invasions where a zone name will glow red on your map and the whole area will go to hell, pretty much forcing you to drop what you're doing, get in a Rift raid, and fight off the invasion. Clearly Trion had the idea that this is what players would do, but most people don't give a flip. Some form Rift raids but the ones that don't or the ones that can't get into one just log off. I guess this sort of thing is fun to some people, but not for me, it's a chore. Rift isn't "Dynamic" at all. Rifts spawn randomly, and if you can avoid them, leaving them alone doesn't affect the game world. Mobs that take over your quest hub spawn out of thin air for that exact reason, and even if you don't fight them off, they disappear within like 10 minutes as if nothing ever happened, leaving no lasting impact on the game world.
Thanks Sky, Its good to know you actaully understand the difference between a graphics engine and artwork, and understood the distinction I was making between the two.
Since this mallace fellow keeps bringing up WOW Ill use that as an example of what I mean here. I can take my slower running graphics computer, such as a laptop, load WOW and check the performance. Sure I need to drop the settings down quite abit, however, even on a LT it plays fine and smooth.
This game even with all graphics settings on minimum, shows how the engine taxes playability. Yes on a slower computer you see this at more of an extreme, on a faster graphics machine your eye wont catch the faults as much, but your brain will which is why some people get headaches with engines like this.
I say they're not quest givers because they're not giving you a "quest". The word "quest" comes with a lot of baggage now, and personal storyline is nothing like how "quests" were implemented in other games. I cringed when you even associated personal storyline with traditional quests.
Of course, they're "stupidly" standing around because you should be able to enjoy your own personal story at your own pace. He won't tell you something in the game's happening when it's actually not. He told them "collect this, this, and this, and you can participate in the great hunt." or "go help Logan Thackeray at the garrison". That was tutorial. I know what you're talking about, and that was the very beginning of the game.
Also, you failed to note the epic boss battle that followed afterwards inside that very same tutorial.
Personal story is instanced and, well, story centric. And it involves the same kind of content found in other traditional singleplayer RPG's. Where player choice has a permanent impact on the world around you, and shapes the way your character evolves throughout the storyline.
Here is any example of GW2 storytelling inside dungeons, and another review here of how well it was implemented throughout the dungeon.
Enjoy.
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Saw this post flash by on main page, decided to reply. I don't really get this argument, if I check performance when playing AoC, it can be a resource hog and suffer in performance, but I'd challenge everyone who'd say that the graphics engine is therefore from the '90s. Maybe some specific examples of what makes this engine feel like from the '90s, isn't it the same as Warhammer used btw?
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."