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What's the big deal about Rift?
SkullyWoods
Member Posts: 183
in Rift
First let me say that I haven't played it so I'm not bashing. Just wondering why the game is as popular as it is. It seems like the main mechanic of the game is that you get these random 'rifts' that open up and you get to fight monsters that come out. Is it that a lone that so many people are drawn to or are there other aspects of this game that have greater appeal? Maybe I'll win the free 1 year sub and find out for myself...
#TeamVainlash
Why did Marceline's dad eat her fries? I mean...cause she bought them and they were hers...
Comments
Mostly it's that they're the only company since WOW to actually capture 80% of what made WOW awesome (when everyone else got a mediocre 50%) and on top of that they're aggressively patching the game with a completely ridiculous amount of new content, much of which is rather unique stuff.
Trion is a solid dev and if TSW doesn't pan out in the long run I definitely see myself falling back to RIFT again to engage in the endgame, which I feel I haven't even scratched.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Try the free trial. I think it lasts forever until level 20 or somthing like that. Then you can see for yourself.
I personaly tried it on some free trail and it was really boring... Most fun game I tried this year was TERA online.. The combat was really fun
...
In a nutshell, this is probably it. Trion never stops impressing me with the speed at which they put out fantastic content. I don't think any other dev even comes close.
Currently playing:
Rift
Played:
SWToR, Aion,EQ, Dark Age of Camelot
World of Warcraft, AoC
trion is a very good new company they keep bringing new and better content combined of what the others mmos brings
this company future is bright if they support all their future mmo's projects like they do atm with rift
Rift isnt that popular.
Its a game that makes a strong first impression but people tend to grow tired of it fast. Most people have positive things to say, but it doesnt have that quality that sucks (most) people in long term. Also, it has a great company behind it and that makes people generally post positive things about Rift even if they got bored of it because they want trion to succeed.
But as far as its popularity, when it opened last March it had 58 NA servers, all were active (a lot were high pop even) . By February this year it was down to 16 servers, all but one or two was active. Now only 6 of those 16 servers are active (the other 10 never have more than 400 people online at once), and this is right after a major patch.
Nobody knows for sure, but I would say its probably around 200k subscribers....Which isnt a bad number but its certainly not 'popular' with those numbers.
rift is a good game and doesnt require raiding even though there is no excuse to not pug GSB,ROS,DH, and GP for T1 gear. If raiding isnt your thing you can farm Events and use the currency to buy "raid" gear. There is other stuff also that can keep you busy. Good game and good company however im waiting on Defiance before i sub to them again.
I'm not sure there's a "big deal" about it. It's a solid game, lots of fun for us Achiever types. The developer is frikkin awesome.
It's not that popular to the best of my knowledge. It is stable, though.
It's a relatively well done game that implements many features people like in WoW, mostly concentreated in the endgame (Rift's pregame has a lot of issues, which ultimately drove me a way, but also some nice components).
Furthermore, Trion is very good at constantly updating the game, so your subscription money actually goes somewhere.
I guess my reason for calling it popular is mainly due to the mmorpg rating/hype list which currently it's the second game on the list in the ratings whereas the rest of the top games are hype. Looking into it more since my OP I can see it being enjoyable. I would have tried the trial by now but I'm waiting on my rig which should be done next week so I'll probably try it then. Thanks for the info.
#TeamVainlash
Why did Marceline's dad eat her fries? I mean...cause she bought them and they were hers...
Trion added content insanely quickly after launch.
With the addition of IA's in low level zones, as well as the ability to Level-Down anywhere you want and participate in anything and receive rewards for your level, it's pretty damn amazing.
Prior to this, the lower level zones were obselete once you went through. This opened up the entire world (which will triple in size come expansion this fall).
They've had some hiccups with 1.9, but they are an amazing dev company. One of the few that hasn't Sold Out, too. They and their MMO, Rift, are solid.
I'll be gobbling TSW soon for a while, but I'll still be in Rift (at the very least for Raids).
every new triple A game that advertises on mmorpg.com always ends up in first or second when they release. This company kisses butt to their advertisers and its obvious with games like tera and SWTOR still way up the list. Play rift through 20 and see its just a cookie cutter clone of wow with public quests. The people praising it are people praising the rate of patches even though the patches mentioned break content and the game gets buggier. Look at conquest on their official boards and the hate going into the posts and people quitting over it as you are spawn camped before you can log into the zone. Rift is just a clone with a clone mentality dev team regardless of the few fans left opinions of it here. You can go see that 3 servers hit heavy load and a couple more on medium the rest are completely dead servers. If they consolidated the rest of the servers they might have 4 or 5 servers full of players left at the most
To be fair they had, and, to this day, have, easily the smallest MMO world I've ever seen. If they hadn't added content quickly they'd have bled players even faster than they did -- and, as someone who was helping run a major guild in Rift, the bleeding was pretty bad as it was.
As for what's the big deal? As others have said, there really isn't one. Rift does most things fairly well, but is ultimately the very definition of a WoW clone -- for both good and ill. The world is interesting enough, the lore a poorly thought out joke, the dungeons are fun enough (if, by this point, nerfed so hard and so often it's sad), the classes work well enough (albeit there's far less variety than might seem at first blush), the raids are fun enough (IMHO the 'tear' raids are better, just my opinion). Crafting tends to be rather weak, though they've added stuff since I left so that might have changed slightly and you could make better-than-starter gear once you ground out enough tokens. Unless things have changed drastically in the last few months, the variety of gear 'looks' available is downright sad (healing chest piece drops in the water tear raid, looks identical, and I mean identical, to what my girl had at level thirty... And that's the norm, or at least was), the same is true to a certain extent of the environments and raids. Zones tend to be drastically different, yet all the things you'd expect (sandy desert zone, snowy mountain zone, blah-blah-blah) and with very little variety within the zones themselves. Raids tend to contain nothing you haven't seen a trillion times before, the mobs are just scaled up and given new abilities. OTOH, raid mechanics were certainly more than varied enough to keep things interesting.
It's a serviceable game, with the right group/guild it can be a lot of fun. I don't share people's love of Trion -- honestly they're ludicrously arrogant and more than a tad narcissistic -- but I, like many here, hope the game does well and may go back for a look-see once the expac drops. I really don't get people's need to love or hate on the companies behind games, anyway, always has struck me as odd.
I wouldnt call it stable. We know there is an expansion coming, but we don't know if Trion will be able to afford keeping up its current pace with the subs trickling away as they are. There are a pair of very large gorillas in the room that could have a devastating effect on Rift's population. Rift is actually in a very dangerous position right now. Its in no danger of closing down, but it mght have to look at alerntaive revenue streams if it wants to keep up the development pace. But then a cosmetic cash shop wouldnt kill the game, it already has two mounts you can buy as it is.
True.. and you even gave it an optomistic review of the situation.. Just in the past weeks, the EU servers were cut down from 16 to 10.. It's estimated that the EU has about 50,000 subs.. Then you have the NA servers that as you said has 16, but only Wolfsbane gets above Medium while 10 servers are pretty much inactive and can't get out of "low" population.. I suspect they'll thin down those 16 servers too.. That estimates NA with a pop around 100,000..
My issue with Rift when I played was very linear gameplay, mobs every 2 feet, and a pure raid grind mechanic for end game.. The Rifts themselves are more a secondary activity, then the primary focus of playing.. However, I wouldn't say it's popular.. I think more and more people are getting bored with the "raid" grind formula, and probably one major reason why Rift and SWTOR had troubles keeping subs.. Tera is using the same formula as I hear, so the jury is still out on that new release.. and TSW I have no clue about their end game ideas..
another failure trying so hard to bash a game that he probabl stoped around lvl 10 dude go back to wow and keep your trashy opinion for yourself.
rift might be the legitimate successor of everquest, at least it looks like trion is working to this goal and with the upcoming add on 'storm legion' it seams that they will take a huge further step into this direction. rift did what wow did years ago, taking a lot of typical features of older mmogs and mix it together. but rift is the better wow, not in numbers thats for sure, but in many other ways especially if you keep in mind what both games accomplished in the same timeframe. just remember what features and amount of content wow had after 2 years of launch and then look at rift at the end of this year what they will have.
(and for all these 'wow clone' shouters ... just remember that wow is just a clone from everquest and some other very old mmorpgs and back in 2004 a very bad clone)
well, for someone who played everquest (1 or 2) for a long time, world of warcraft was boring back in 2004/5 and didn't offer something new, even less features, but the most of the todays mmog community started with world of warcraft and its understandable that they say the same about rift. but for the beginners or those, who love these oldschool concepts, rift is the best choice to go with.
another big advantage behind rift is 'trion worlds', a startup company which came out of nothing back in 2006 and had some of the biggest media and leading venture-capital companies as partners and investors right from the start. and they had high ambitious when they first came out and presented their 'three game plan' with rift, end of nations and defiance. but no wonder, when you look into their team full of designers from everquest, world of warcraft, warhammer and aion. when i saw rift in its early testing stage it was back then the most polished and best programmed game i ever saw next to guildwars 1. what they did with this heavy modified gamebryo engine was amazing.
is there anything negative?
as i said rift is based on the old school concept of mmo(rp)gs, if you have enough of this concept with all the gear and quest grinding go play eve online, but if you like this kind of game, rift might be the best out there.
Agreed. Rift is an unapologetic Progression game, and pepole who don't like that game style won't ike Rift. However, if you do like Progression (and some of us still do), it's hard to find a better place to get your gear/power/upgrades fix.
The reason? A lot of western players enjoy what a WoW style MMO has to offer and Rift has not been bashful about being a WoW clone from well before it launched. Now take that and back it by a company (Trion) who has, thus far, proven to put their money where there their mouth is (offering content updates that rival some companies versions of xpacs) and it's hard to deny Rift as a contender for it's intended audience (IMHO, the WoW crowd who is bored of WoW but still crave more of the same).
The reason I highlight the "western players" in the previous statement is because FAR too many people seem to think WoW and games that hope to emulate it are the end all be all in the MMO community. This is so far beyond the reality it shouldn't even be a topic and yet twice today I had to post to the contrary. But I digress.
The real reason Rift is such a great success is because of Trion. It's been a LONG time since a company has stood behind a MMO in a way they have and still came out on top (in the black). Regardless of the "size" of the game world, fun factor is all that really matters and at the end of the day, and for those that enjoy the Skinner Box playstyle, Rift delivers in droves.
What? The two games are extremely different.
EQ was focused around a massive, sprawling, immersive world that felt huge. Rift has a tiny world where everything is packed in so tight and has this claustrophobic feeling.
EQ had a wonderful selection of races that had their unique traits and personalities and cities, Rift has a couple of races that no one gives a damn about.
EQ was a social game that required grouping and encouraged teamwork along every step of the way. Rift is a mostly antisocial affair (part of this is game design, part of this is the players). People solo almost all of their gameplay time, even when in an IA, rift group, or invasion raid. The groups are smaller and the raids are extremely smaller.
Rift tries to please the PvP crowd, which results in nerfs for the PvE players. One of EQs strong points is that it decided rather early on to ignore PvP, which made for a better PvE experience.
And of course the biggest one, Everquest was about the journey and not the destination. Rift was designed around the notion that the game starts at the level cap (the developers even said this)
EQs marketing: youre in our world now
Rifts marketing: youre not in someone else's world
I like the old school (WoW) feel it gives me. I remember when I first started WoW many years ago, you have to watch what you were doing and/or going or you would get your a** handed to you. Now, you have to try pretty hard to die. In Rift, if your not watching what your doing, it's easy to die.
Yes Rift is small but not claustrophobic. Can you give your opinion w/o throwing in the attitude?
Rift game DOES NOT start at level cap. I can tell you haven't played the game. It is the journey in Rift that makes the story. What I don't like is the end grind - non-stop.
The 'nerfs' as you call them are rebalancing and yes they do affect PvP and PvE but the OP builds in PvP are also the same ones OP in PvE. What is the problem with making it more fun?
I played EQ and although interesting found the grind there to be of the same quality as Rift.
Rift is also getting more and more content - and the reason the developer said that around the end game - was it basically ended there. They want people to stay around and play, so they added end game content. You obviously read the quote out of context and ASS-U-MEd what it meant. It meant the opposite of what you said.
ha ha.. very well said.. I about fell off my chair when I read that Rift successor of EQ... I almost had to run outside to see if my Ford Sport Trac is truely a Caddilac Escalade.. So many simularities.. lol Rift is to EQ, as Honduras is to the United States..