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My Rift Review
blazin-ace
Member Posts: 302
Action oriented PVE is the game’s strong point. Callings and potential soul combos perform well in group roles. The quests still boil down to “the MMO typical” but are fast to complete and you will progress through levels at a good clip. Expect to die now and again. There are “some” fun if simple adventuring areas. Rift based invasions bring you together with a lot of people for open grouping and war across the countryside regularly.
PVP is not competitive, fair, or balanced. It feels like an afterthought to PVE group content considerations. Some callings are overpowered and some badly underpowered. To enjoy it, you mustn’t take it seriously. Open world PVP provides no real reward outside personal satisfaction. Most warfronts are fast with lopsided victories or losses being the norm and ruled by “zerg” tactics. The final PVP warfront is a PVE race against the other team.
RP is not supported well (indeed it feels discouraged) by gameplay and content. The soul system makes your character more of a trapper keeper for various tasks while discouraging the development of an identity. Lore is thin and inconsistent. There are limited emotes, no means of personalization outside of dyes, and no well thought out gathering places safe from a rift.
Crafting is more useful for future alts than a current practicing character as quest rewards are good enough to make the items produced redundant. You end up producing reams of useless goods to salvage or vendor. Most skills are not difficult to level or acquire materials for. The most useful manufacturing skills are runebreaking and apothecary with perhaps a nod to artificer.
There are bugs but not so many and only a few with major impact on play. They are issuing fixes at a good clip and preparing a larger patch. Technically this was the most software sound MMO launch of recent memory. I hesitate to say ever. But for all the skill displayed client side someone had too much sunshine in the mind and failed to prepare for the bad eggs within their own coming player base.
Speed and accuracy of GM response is currently inconsistent. They seem understaffed and overwhelmed. Bots in warfronts and harvesting areas are not uncommon. Reporting them does no good. Adequate gold seller and power leveler spam prevention measures are not in place. Reporting them does no good. There are an unusual number of hacked account reports making rounds in the forums and customer service response times are unacceptable.
Graphics are crisp and of good quality on higher settings. The game is demanding for an MMO and performance optimization seems to be an ongoing task. Nvidia cards perform best but have a few color palette issues while ATI (AMD) cards are more sluggish (get the crossfire profile.) Music is solid. The voice acting needs work and in some cases mixes unique and general voice overs in a jarring way.
So… A bottom line…
Rift is a developing MMORPG that will appeal to casual MMO players looking for quick, action oriented, PVE, game play with simpler raiding. It’s good on people with limited time, those new to the genre, and those seeking the familiar outside of WoW.
If you are hardcore, PVP, and look to skill elite then I would advise you to find another game. Role players are better catered to in other MMO’s like LOTRO. Crafters and auction house hawks won’t be happy.
There is not a lot of end game content available at this time. No need to rush. Smell the roses along the way.
Comments
What level did you play to? That wasn't in your review, and kind of makes it hard to tell how informed you are about the ENTIRE game, instead of just level selections.
Good read.
REALITY CHECK
the game is not "action oriented" at all. its very slow paced compared to other games on the market, think you need to play some that are more "action oriented".
other than that, just a complaint about the game pretty much, you didnt really highlight any good parts, which says you didnt enjoy it that much, and is not a fair review.
Are you serious?
10 expert dungeons
2 Overland Raid bosses
5 Rift Raids.
One Raid Dungeon with 5 bosses. 1 mor raid dungeon scheduled to release within the first 30 days, and another one in April.
PvP
How is this not a lot of end game content content?
You have to enjoy a game to write a fair review?
I guess then all "fair" reviews, in your eyes, must be positive.
My gaming blog
lol, this review seems informed and balanced but is discredited whilst the other review currently in the running is applauded as balanced while he clearly hasnt played past level 20.
Exactly. Funny , how a review gets attacked when it s not all rosey, then one comes out, that is clearly done by someone who barely played past the starting area, is a fair and great review.
Don't forget crafting and achievements if you're into those kind of activities.
A decent review, however, I wouldn't say Rift is as unbalanced as you make it out to be. I am a 31 warrior reaver/paladin specialized, I open world pvp all the time. I only do warfronts now and then...in short stints. I like them but it takes organization that pugs just don't grasp. Once you get to around level 30.....Open world pvp does have a reason (on a pvp server). Scarlet Gorge largescale invasion, defend these wardstones while killing invasions. Right, easy. Then the boss spawns, usually somewhere near the middle of the zone from my experience. When the raid I'm in gets there we always see a raid of defiants on the other side of the boss. So we have people fighting the boss and trying to kill some of the defiants so we can get the rewards from the boss.
This
I am playing without rushing anything, besides I am a very casual player so it will take me some time to reach end content. The only thing that worries me is that I hope to find players to beat these invasions on NPC camps. They are fun and it would be a shame not to hack and slash them when they happen.
I’m sure people will disagree with my take and that’s fine. Just don’t burn me too badly while your high. There are a lot of personal reviews out there on this game. Read them all as I can’t hope to cover everything and they might see things in another light. I did mention good points to the game and never said it was “bad.” It's not.
I can't call it the best thing since spillt milk yet as I feel they've some work to do still. It is one of the better launches in recent memory.
I’m no pro just a typical gamer like most of you and by no means special. Am I fair in my opinion? *Shrugs.* I don’t know. With time maybe you can tell me. I spoke my piece and leave it at that as my underwear isn’t yet burn proof this morning…
LOTRO caters to roleplay? Played this game for many years and i haven't seen it beyond dwarves speaking in Scottish accents calling everyone "laddie" and elves acting overtly gay. ALL the RP guilds I know of are long, long gone now from that game.
I think Rift might well suit hardcore pvpers eventually but it depends on future changes to the game. Currently, yes, hardcore pvpers are qqing their asses off on the official forums about balance issues...but then, they do this in all games. For simple lighthearted PvP Rift is pretty good fun.
Crafting comments are a bit odd and yes, there is currently little market, but it's a brand new game, this takes time. Who knows what anything is truly worth currently?
Apart from that, I tend to agree pretty much with the rest of what was posted tbh (that i can comment on, having not reached 50 yet).
Expresso gave me a Hearthstone beta key.....I'm so happy
Are you kidding? There was one night I decided to try to close out a quest hub before bedtime, yet I was interrupted by an invasion which prevented me from doing what I had intended to do with the limited time I had. You are forced to REACT to random events. That is NOT slowerd paced.
A lot of Rift is about running around with other people on the spur of the moment to save the area. I'd call that action oriented. Its not relaxing or slow in the least. I'm not saying it's not fun, but I totally agree with his assessment on that front.
no, a review doesnt have to say a game is great at all, but when you only say negative things, its not generally a review. i dont even play the game, so no fanboy here at all, it was just a shit review
also just because they spawn a hundred mobs for invasions doesnt mean the game is action oriented. the combat is VERY slow, boring, and just plain not thought out. they focused on the class system, that was obvious, not combat.
No....combat in FFXIV is VERY slow ^.^....combat speed in rift is similar to the speed in Vanguard.
Funny you should mention that. When I was playing and felt the melee combat animations it reminded me exactly of Vanguard.
Except casters...sry guys, no walking and casting
I won't cover every point, but I will point out some stuff.
It does appeal to the pvp crowd for several reasons:
1. Open world pvp is not penalized
2. Where are the class qq nerfs? Instead they are buffing other classes up instead of nerfing
3. After the lvl 20 zones everything after is a mix of the two factions
4. You can not see the enemy on the map so my god you can actually sneak up on someone
5. Warfronts are there for that crowd, but pvp is far from dead in open world considering how
many times I got ganked and re-ganked someone
6. Different rules for pve servers compared to pvp ones. YOU CAN not Guard hump in Rift on
a pvp server.
7. Killing someone gives you double xp, so it is a interesting way to level
8. The game is not gear based. Gear does not equal auto-win..i.e. Aion
9. Open world Rift invasion bosses give out rewards and trust me everytime they have spawned
it has been 40 v 40 + a World boss
10. They have not discounted some type of RvR because it is being requested. It was not an
automatic NO
11. Did I mention classes are not being super nerfed, but other classes are being buffed?
Edit:
12. Also pvp vendor that do not sell OMGWTF uber op gear, but do have gear you can get with favor in different level brackets
Ignore all the comments mate...unless you write a pro review they just wont get it...it's just the guys opinion on what he thought about the game. and to be fiar hes quite honest and hits most points about the game.
I'm playing the game again bow by the way but this time with a group of friends to see if i get a different experience. Solo play is way too fast and you seem to race past most of the content due to the fast levelling. I'm hoping that playing with a few friends we will ignore most of the questing and just explore and play the game.....Questing = railroading!...in my opinion that is
I am not going to be mean here, but his point "pvp is not fair balanced and is pve focused" is just whiney qq.
Any class in this game can drop any other class if you know what you are doing.
Of course it does. Quests in MMOs can only be solved in a single way and that is what makes it railroaded.
Now if someone made a quest system where you could solve the quests in different ways (TOR might have that) things would be different.
Most new games have classes that are OP/unbalanced. Then the gaming company uses the nerf bat. Then a different class becomes OP. And so on. One thing I am a bit disappointed about is the lack of need for a tank 'tank' as healers and rogues (why??) can do a lot of the pvp stuff a true tank does. I see a good many warriors switching to DPS for PvP (warfronts) and dropping the true tank specs.
Oh well.
Some general responses:
If you do it right, you ban the gold farmers and spammers en mass, after you plug the holes they are using. It may look like nothing is being done, but it's just that it doesn't happen immediately. It's annoying, but the developers are easily out manned by the hackers and spammers and such so waiting and doing it all at once keeps you from trying to race the bot people.
I don't know if I'd call the game action oriented, but I do understand what the OP is saying. The game has a lot of activities, and with the rifts in particular, you are responding to events, not moving them ahead at your own pace. Many different things to do, so you can pretty much do what you want. If, however, you want uninterrupted questing, that is not going to happen. Rifts and invasions will get in your way and possibly hunt you down and kill you. :-) That is the one consistent complaint I've heard from a couple of people trying Rift out from WoW. Most of the people I know seem to enjoy it.
PvP doesn't seem to be anything special right now. Don't expect balanced classes 1v1...but then again, expecting balanced classes 1v1 is a waste of time in most mmorpg. We'll have to see what they add to spice up the PvP in the game. It sounds like they might do some RvR with Port Psion as the battleground, which would be really cool.
The people I've talked to who have leveled their crafting to max have been pretty satisfied with it. I'm only doing the gathering, but I can see what the OP means by using crafting for your secondary character. With two characters, you can craft and gather enough stuff to make more than you need and gear for both characters with very few gaps. The crafted gear is comparable to quest gear while leveling. One isn't better than the other...you'll replace quest gear with crafted gear and you'll replace crafted gear with quest gear. Artificing gives you gear that you don't get much of while questing, so it's an exception. Runecrafting and Apothecary give you stuff you don't get at all while questing. I don't know how important potions are in the game, but Runecrafting looks like the moneymaker so far.
The end game has a few different aspects to it. Daily crafting quests that give you tokens you can use to buy patterns for epic gear. Two tiers of expert level dungeons, some 10 man content and outdoor raid content are all in there, so there is definitely content at end game. They are getting ready to add some 10 man Rifts, but I don't know if you enter the rift or if you do it out in the open. I hope you enter the rift and get to see the other planes...that would be really cool. Not much for the PvP crowd right now though.
So, for the most part I don't disagree with the OP's review. I think there is much more to the game than what they've posted though. If they had a free trial, I'd tell everyone and their mother, brothers, cousins, etc. to try it. As it is, I'll just say I enjoy it, and most of the people I know who have played it are enjoying it a great deal.
Notably Missed By The Op:
Character development is a very large time sink. Getting all 8 souls for each character and then working out builds is actually a lot of fun (imo). It's not a trapper keeper, it's a large toolbox that keeps getting bigger as you level and gain new abilities. There do appear to be specific, strong Raid builds for tanks, but otherwise I haven't heard that there is 'one' build for the other parts of the trinity in raids. Even with tanks though, people are switching their roles throughout the raid, going from single tank/healer tank and spank to tank/off tank/heals/off heals choreographed fights. That's just in the two tiers of expert dungeons. I would expect that to continue into the raids, making the role/soul system an integral part of your progression.
If they added appearance slots for characters where you could look like whatever you wanted, with stats from the gear you've collected, the character development would be just that much more awesome. We'll have to wait and see though, I haven't seen any posts from Trion at all about appearance slots.
Whew. All done.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.