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I'm a bit confused as to what the pull to this game is?
I know I could read about features and etc, but I'm wondering what its offering that makes you want to play this mmo over other mmo's.
Also, I saw one of the videos on youtube and the UI and graphics sort of reminded me of WoW, though someone said the game is still in the alpha stage so I'm wondering if you know whether that aspect of the game will differentiate itself more at a later stage or will it still give off that WoW feeling? I realise this might be a subjective thing to a certain degree but thats what it reminded me of anyway.
I also realise that the WoW UI, graphics and style appeals to alot of people but I dont feel that way so thats why its a little bit of a turn off to me... also it sort of gives me the vibe that they are selling their intended visual idea of the world away for a appeal to a broader audience for a bigger subscription base.
So hopefully someone can explain why this is a game to keep tabs on... oh and if you could quickly just throw in what base of players this game seems mostly aimed at, whether its mostly, pvp, rp, crafting, pve or a mix of things and etc.
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1) Class System. Building your own unique classes within the archetype I think will be very fun. I hate cookie cutter builds that everyone uses especially in PVP. THis class system I think will make PVP very interesting. In other games if you know the other classes you know what abilities they have. In Rift every fight is going to be an unknown b/c you are never going to know what they could throw at you today.
2) Dynamic Events. Rifts are just the tip of the iceberg. They have built the technology within the game and can essentially can use it however they see fit. This is huge for me I can't stand how everything in an MMO game world is static and never changes.
Phasing isn't the same. Its instances which separate players into tiny little worlds. This to me is not an MMO.
3) Seamless world. I hate instances and I hate loading times and instead of MMOS moving away from this they seem to be moving more towards it which I don't get. Rifts big draw for me is it has a big seamless world with interesting stuff (I hope) going on in it where players will be encouraged (again I hope) to participate in.
4) Emphasis on using this seamless world (at least it seems that way from the info we have) instead of instant teleportation and stupid things like that which make WoW a simple lobby game now.
5) PVP is being designed and incorporated from the ground up and not being added as a side 2nd thought deal. We don't have much information at the moment but the Rift team has plenty of Warhammer devs working on it and they have stated PVP is an important part of the game. I hope we get some really good World PVP action like in vanilla WoW and DOAC with maybe some RVR lakes and good PVP objectives.
6) Content is being designed to be challenging again. Some of the feedback from the players who went to Gamescon was saying how level 20 instance bosses they were doing could have been T1 raid content if they had a few more skills. I am really tired of games not offering challenging content. For me if something isn't challenging then there is no point in doing it and I don't mean something simply taking a long time to achieve. I want raid bosses that take good group play and teamwork to kill and I don't want it watered down with Heroic modes of the same content but hitting harder ect..
This is why I'm interested in Rift and what I HOPE Rift will be.
Really what I'm looking for in a game is your standard MMO with an emphasis on a nice big open world where players interact with each other to do PVP and down challenging content and Rift looks like the best bet to me to have this. Guild Wars 2 is my only other hope, but honestly the 50 minute video that was released recently did not impress me at all. The combat looked easy to say the least and the story line was almost like a single player game.
i have a question for AZZ. I agree with you post except for the part where you hate instances. Instances are why i play mmo's. They are a controled enviorment where the Devs can throw challages at you. With out instances you could get to an area and half the mobs have been killed already or if the boss is very hard you could just have 2 groups team up to kill him and take turns with the loot. Instances are nessacery. Try making a non instanced raid. That would be a mess. I would just like to hear why people don;t like instances (cause I hear it alot) and what would you prefer to have instead. Thx
I can accept and understand that some instancing is needed for Raids and Dungeons. Like you said it lets developers design challenging content that everybody has equal access too. I also think that there should be a lot of open world dungeons and raid bosses though where players have to compete with each other and the other faction to down it.
I don't like instance because it takes the massive out of the mmorpg. It also takes the random element out of it, and makes content non contestable. I like having to PVP with the other faction to have the right to do the PVE content, and places like these are always hotbeds for PVP action. The Rifts are going to be a great example of this I think and will generate some great PVP action between the factions on who gets to have the right to kill the raid boss that spawned from it and get the loot.
Raid bosses designed properly and in a dynamic world can also be scaled in difficulty to accommodate more players then is maybe intended for the boss.
1) So its class system is based on that you choose a class like a mage and then instead of getting certain spells/skills at certain levels its more like you get to pick between 2-3 spells at certain levels and build a somewhat customized set of abilities?
Or is it more like you choose a class and theres a pool of 50 spells from wich you can pick whatever you want and as you level up rather then getting new more powerful spells you simply get to pick an addition to your spellbook to use?
Interested in hearing more about how this works/is intended to work in the game.
2) Nice to hear its going to have dynamic events but to what extent? As far as what the devs have claimed that is, since I guess its hard to say exactly what kind of dynamic events will take place as the game isnt even out yet. Have they shown any example of this in any video? Would be interesting to see.
3) I dont really mind instances, usually feels like they are able to create fun events within those instances that they cant do in the open world, with dynamic events that might change though I guess. I personally like the feel of having a story that pulls you in when it comes to games, instances seems to be the best way to tell a story to an individual player in mmo's.
4) That sounds good but teleportation isnt really bad if its the alternative to a boring time wasting "auto-walk" moment. I'm all for immersion, as in experiencing the world and journeying in it but when you're spending way too much time traveling and its not made to be fun, then it can get a bit frustrating.
5) I'm not really much into PvP so I dont really have much to add or to ask about that.
6) Well I hope this part is true, its always more fun achieving something within a game if it was a challenge.
Thanks for your answers, hopefully you or someone got time to expand a bit about the class/skills system and to what extent or what the devs have promised as far as how the dynamic events system will work.
EDIT: Actually looking at a gc video that was posted in another thread, explaining and showing the class/skills system so I kinda see how its going to work and it looks kinda cool actually. Initial impression is that it sort of seems like the talent tree WoW uses but you also get skills in a pool within that tree that you can replace and change as far as wich skills are in your list of currently useable skills.
if you read the hands on from massively.com, you will read that the basic mechanics is alot like WoW, you will get bashed by RIFT fans for calling it talent tree´s tho, even if they look alot like it, its more like an expanded talent tree where you choose your class and not just boost abilities.
over all to me it looks alot like a WoW/EQ2 mix in its core gameplay, with a more dynamic world and classes. as for open world and instances, a fansite did have a Q&A with dungeon designers and they clearly stated that there is no public dungeons, and afterwards tried to safe it by saying areas in the game world could be seen as dungeons, but to me doesnt sound like being designed as such - all harder, bigger and intresting events is in instances.
personally hope they make the open world bosses be a meaningful choice of playing the game, but havent seen any indications on this yet....only thing revealed so far is that you need to slay them in defense of the cities in Telara, but could have some suprises in it, can only hope :P
read the massively hands on, atleast I found it to be a good read about this game, way prefer reviews rather than the teaser video´s, and please mind the reviewer is a WoW player, so is the reason she compare RIFT to WoW alot....so far the few Ive read have all been very positive, especially with it being an alpha build in mind, atleast this is something helping on my personal hype for this, a positive first time impression is always good.
crafting, not much is known of it yet, but exlusively based on screenshots its a copy of WoWs crafting, but screenshots is not much to go from, ppl on RIFT forums already complaint about it tho.
PvP/PvE the games main focus is on PvE, but agreed with Azz that the fact you can shift between 4 builds anywhere in the game world should make PvP less predictable.
just dont expect too much of a new MMO experience in this game, its not what they are promising, they so far promised a traditional MMO with some extra twists.
NOTE: I stopped here had to interject
You really need to experience open world raid bosses before trashing them. Some of the BEST, no THE BEST, times I had in WoW were in vanilla killing the 4 dragons on one of the original 6 servers, Stormreaver. Every fight ended up being 100+ ally vs 100+ horde fighting for the same raid boss. These were 3-4 hour battles of raid vs raid vs boss. It was epic, and we did it weekly. It was what our guild played for. In pve only servers open world bosses may be a drag, because it would just be a fight for the most damage, or last hit, or however looting works. However, since pvp is a huge focus for rift I doubt that will be a problem.
Also griefing can still be done with instances. The same guild on the same server (going back to vanilla wow) prevented hundreds of horde from raiding MC/BWL EVERY night. 40 HarroW slaughtering any horde for hours until they gave up and disbanded their raid. Stormreaver had the most epic open world pvp I ever experienced, and I came from Lineage2 which was another open world game based solely on pvp.
I agree that instances can be nice, but IMO there needs to be a wealthy mix of both; each with seperate rewards.
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gc-10-rift-planes/703481
pretty much THE best basic explanation of the class system on the net
and for me the game's hook is basically that it has everything I liked about previous MMOs + the absolutely incredible class system and the lore.... a lot less vague and shady than GW2 and a lot less single player than SWTOR
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well i have only played LOTRO and WOTLK WoW, so that is my MMO Experiance. This Open world raid boss idea is something i have never heard of but it sounds like great fun. Thx for the response.
Well said and I agree.
I forget which video I saw but it was a lower level dungeon and there were mobs perched high up lobbing fireballs at the group while they fended off hordes of goblins. The dev made me laugh when he said something along the lines of "everyone in your group will get this and get out of the way except for that one guy who's always there getting himself killed"
I would just like to point out, that although i agree with you to an extent, in so much as i do believe instances have a place in MMO's, i just would like to point out that EQ1 was around and kicking for 5 years before the idea of instanced raid or group came about, and it certainly wasn't a mess. If anything it added to the feeling of a real world, because a lot of the raid bosses were in very deep corners of normal group dungeons. For example Sebilis was where the dragon Trakanon resided, at the very deepest end of the dungeon, prior to that was enough variation and space filled with mobs that the dungeon could support 5-7 groups all XPing in their own areas with their own chances at unique loot and never having to see each other unless they wanted to.
Its very cool when you're in a group fighting in a normal group area and you start seeing zonewide messages from a pissed off dragon/giant/whatever, and you do a /who and see that a crapton of people are there that are in the same guild, so you start cheering them on in /ooc, etc.
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Kind of. The impression I got is that each class is put into one of 4 archetypes, so the Reaver, Champion and the Paladin are in the "warrior" archetype, the Purifier, Sentinel and Inquisitor are in the "cleric" archetype and so on. You start off with just one talent tree, which belongs to your chosen class (Reaver, Inquisitor, etc). However, later on you can unlock a second and third talent tree later on, which can be chosen from any of the other classes in your archetype. That means a Reaver cannot have a Sentinel's talent tree, but he can have one from the Champion or Paladin. Imagine if in WoW you could swap out the warrior's Arms talent tree and replace it with, say, the paladin's Retribution tree.
Correct me if I'm wrong someone but from my understanding of it, each "soul", or talent tree if you prefer, has "roots" and "branches". Along the roots are actual abilities like "mortal strike" in WoW (you can tell I played a warrior), and along the branches are passive upgrades like "increase strength by 3/6/9%". As you put points into the branches, you slowly unlock the roots, but you cannot put points into the roots directly. So to unlock the warrior's "Mortal Strike" ability, you'd have to spend maybe 10 points in the Arms talent tree first, perhaps boosting strength and crit chance or something.
I've also read somewhere that you can also swap out a combat-based talent tree for a "social" talent tree (not sure what they do exactly) or a crafting one. Souls (talent trees) can also be collected, found, earned and even traded, so they won't all be available to every player straight away.
Depends how the loot for these bosses are handled and if there are other options to acquire the same loot.
Coming from a game where world bosses dropped the best gear for 4 years, i honestly want no part in that again. Having to camp bosses 24/7 in groups of 20-40 against hundreds of other people is not something i want to participate in again. It's not competition and only leads to griefing and botting. Leave the competition where it matters, in PVP.
I agree with everything else you mentioned though.
WIth respect to the highlighted part I'd describe it more like you are a Warrior in WoW (since you use WoW as an example) with all of the Warrior talent trees available to you and then you open up a slot that allows you to add all of the Paladin's talent trees. WoW's talent trees per a given glass allow you to specialize a particular flavor of that class but you are still within that class. Rift's system allows you to fully marry up 2 (or 3) classes with the restriction of 51 points to disperse amongst the 2 (or 3).
So you won't be able to go all the way up the branches of 3 classes. You can with one, or you can go half way up 2 or go 1/3 of the way up 3 or any variation there of.
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Keep in mind though b/c you can mix and match different classes unlike WoW the classes are going to be more specialized instead of all in one type things. For instance the Reaver class is more of a tanking class. It may have some damage abilties but its focus is tanking. The champion class is a DPS focused warrior class. It can wear the same armor and may be able to tank to a less extend but in the end its focus is DPS.
So i wouldnt say its like getting all the warrior abilities as the Warrior in WoW wold get an equal amount of damage abilities as tanking abilities.