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review
delete5230
Member EpicPosts: 7,081
I'm an experienced MMO player, I've played most all of them, being board, and giving Vanugard a break ( my best ). I decided to give Aion a shot. Well that mmo sucked in my opinion. Just another eastern game with an eastern feel. Now with Rift I've read good and bad, but what the hell. Knowing that Trion often gives promotional deals, I waited until the time was right....Sure enough they offered the six month anniversary deal and I took advantage, played a few days and subbed.
Before even playing Rift, I was confused with the soul system ( from an outsiders point of view ) I decided to read up on the game. Well, to be honest I was un able to find many 3rd party web sites that cater to beginners. So I found something better, Youtube videos. They have Rift topic videos of everything.
Trying to decide on a class was hard. I would read the basics of each, then find a Youtube video to learn more of each class. And settled on a Rogue. I created a Rogue and I must say I'm very impressed. It reminds me of my old Vanilla days Rogue almost exactly. Here watch this :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_666_23x2g
Now I'm only a level 25 Guardian Rogue, and a level 16 Inquisitor Cleric that I play with my RL friend at work. But it seems that you can create most any counterpart to WoW's classes if you pick your souls correctly. Now obviously playing for a week I can't prove that completely. And I know you can't shape shift like WoW's Druid, but many classes are similar.
Now, as your doing the starting zone tutorial area, you can get all three souls for free with simple quest and should have them all around level 6 or so. DO NOT LEAVE THE STARTING AREA UNTIL YOU DO or you would be like me, and have to buy one from your trainer. Another mistake when I was level 21, I realized I forgot to see my trainer to upgrade my abilities every few levels ( I don't know what I was thinking ).
The Guardian area of Silverwood ( lv 6-21 ) and Gloamwood ( lv 21-27 ) reminds me of WoW's Alliance questing area, even the music. I'm enjoying this very much. Quest are more interesting and many are not your standard kill quest, but have plots. Now for days I was a little un happy with fast leveling. I was out leveling my quest lines too fast, add to the fact that if you do rifts, and dungeons you level even faster. Now after the Anniversary promotion with 50% xp, leveling has slowed down to an acceptable level.
Dungeons and Dungeon finder - So far I did three. Realm of the Fae, Darkening Deeps, and Iron Tombs. All were fun, but short. Each took about an hour and I was disappointed at first because I'm used to long three and four hour dungeons. But it turns out that because of this it reduces the stress of playing for hours, and have people quiting.
By the way most bosses in dungeons have certain strategies that makes things interesting, and hopefully someone would know what to do, or it could be a nightmare.
Que times for DPS classes could take up to two hours, but I find that if I que when I log in and play I'll get to do my dungeon. I guess tanks have it made. But I find waiting is better than playing a baring tank class.
PvP - if your playing a PvP server you would find that Rift has open world PvP and you can get ganked. It's happening to me already in Gloamwood, and so far it's like WoW, however I don't have a lot of experience with this yet.
Rift has battle grounds, and called Warfronts. So far I've played two ( forget the names ) but they are much the same as WoW. Each last about 20 min. and you get a stat page to let you know how you did.
Rifts are fun. Everyone on my server comes running to close them and you can form a fast Raid Group for everyone to get the experience. Now this is a very cool thing,,,,,At times the entire Zone could get infested with rifts, this changes the zone compleatly and you would have no choice but to group in a large 40 man raid party to fight it down.
If your higher level than the rift you can often close them your self. Like I say, they are fun but at times they can get old or in your way if your on your solo quest.
Is the game on Rails ?......This is a hard question, Yes and No. Let me try and explain :
The starting totorial area YES as with every other mmo, levels 1-6. As you get into the real world like Silverwood, or Gloamwood Zones you seem to have pocket areas for your level. Silverwood is large, about as big as say Westfall and Elwynn Forest put togeather. As you make it to the main camp of Argent Glade in the center, the quest will send you to little encampments for your level, and you would basicly do your questing there until your done. YES, you kind of have to do each encampment in order.
Gloamwood is smaller in size than Silverwood, but remindes more like Duskwood in WoW but larger .
Graphics- 10/10, I have two computers, one built for gaming, and with the graphics maxed, it's by far the best mmo to date. My other one is a very cheap laptop, I use for traveling. Since my mic settings are screwed up with my good computer I had to download the game on my crap one to use Ventrilo when playing with my friend. Of coarse I had to lower my settings down to nothing, but it played flawless ( just looks awful )
Game play- 9/10, I love Rift's PvE, PvP Warfronts, Dungeons and quest. well I could see Rifts getting old, but they can be ignored if your not into that kind of stuff.
Rift reminds me of vanilla WoW. Often you can find your self in sticky situations and die alot.
Replay ability- 6/10, Now I could only guess, but only two factions, and two starting zones, along with max level of 50 I could see running out of content at max level. However I guess Trion is working on updates, and patches ?
Disclaimer : don't forget I'm new.......Keep that in mind as you slam my review 
Comments
Actually its a good review and quite accurate..
The thing that is driving me away from it though is the community.. I feel like I am running around with computer generated NPCs alot of the time. People just arent sociable in RIFT..
They made the game WAYYY TO solo friendly. IMHO... Hit and run grouping also annoys me, where people auto join and then leave manytimes without so much as a hello or a goodbye...
These are my pet peeves with RIFT..Ohh that and the new patch system has me patching for 30 minutes every other night. As I am playing from Wireless internet (verizon) Not true broadband.
As a truck driver I really enjoy MMOs for the social aspects of the game as much as the gameplay. RIFT is by far the most unsociable, solo oriented MMO I have ever played in 13-14 years of MMOs.
When you told me that "you decided to give Aion a shot ... I knew how sad this review was going to be.
Any MMORPG player worth their salt doesnt try a AAA MMORPG two years after release --- unless they were abducted by aliens or just hit age 12.... etc ....
You do say you are new , but any review of a game should include some understanding of the games post launch history. All you are doing is reviewing the opening few levels in a game thats months past launch.
Caveat Emptor
Well thanks Mr. Expert on reviewing,
It's all clear now
I tend to pick up games when I become interested in them. Sometimes that is when they launch, sometimes not. No biggie. Good review.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy.
______________________________
"This kind of topic is like one of those little cartoon boxes held up by a stick on a string, with a piece of meat under it. In other words, bait."
You must have never played LOTRO , that game is super easy and solo almost all the way
I have a level 19 Cleric that I'm playing with a friend as a Duo, he is a Tank/DPS were also using a voice chat program to keep communication better. We made a rule that will only play this character together to keep levels the same.
I must say that we argue a lot. His Idea of questing and harvesting are different than my Ideas. I'll try and keep him healed in the open world, but you never know when he would run out of healing range. He believes is harvesting every nod and I say lets not harvest at all for respect of the other. He will at times run into a hard Rift and blame me for not keeping him healed. He will take every quest in a major city and will be confused on what quest were doing, I say take three quest at a time. More often than not the mobs are so easy and were fighting the same monster that we are not leveling any faster than if we played solo. This is all done with Voice chat.
MY POINT :
Vanguard is the ONLY game made for playing as a Duo because every mob or monster hits hard. NO OTHER MMO THAT I KNOW OF IS GROUP FRIENDLY IN THE OPEN WORLD. Sure you can add group only quest, but that pisses the population off because they feel that they are shorted if they can't do them alone, yet they are shy and most will not ask for help anyway.
Rift is no different than most every mmo.
I think this is more of an issue of the new trend of MMOG's to sprint everyone to max level, where most of their content is generated for. Not something I like but I think that's the reason.
Rift just keeps on giving !
Now this may seem like its no big deal to the Vet's that are playing. But after playing for a few weeks I got a revelation that was right in my face..............The sole system is extremely deep, much more so than I even imagined.
Yes, you get to pick three soles before your level 6. BUT you can also buy another roll. I knew this but seemed to ignore it until now. Let me explain with a few examples :
1) I'm playing with a friend. He is a Warrior I'm a Cleric. Now to me playing a PURE Tank, Healer could be somewhat boring yet we would like to be at the top of the food chain when were queuing for dungeons.
So with the purchase of another roll we can have the best of both worlds....I have a Cleric caster roll that is a pure nuker, somewhat low on healing, and I could change to a Cleric healer roll that is a pure healer when playing Dungeons. My friend can switch from a pure dps to a pure tank when doing dungeons....this is a great idea !
2) I was playing a Dungeon a few days back with my Rogue ( forget the name and my level ) and I was somewhat low for it, and the lowest level of my group. When we were at the final boss we wiped three times. As we were trying to develop our game plan I was getting a /tell from the tank asking me " do I have a Ranged roll with my Rogue ". I just did not understand, I kept telling him that I was spec for assassin. Needless to say, shortly after I was kicked by the grop....I was pissed and could not understand for a few days........NOW the revelation hit !.....I was low, up front, and taking too much damage for the healer. IF I had a ranged roll such as a Ranger as an alternate, we could have finished. My fault, I did not understand the full mechanics of Rift.
Now lets see WoW do this ! After all who likes to play a week WoW Priest, or a boring Warrior class in WoW ?
Wow died long time ago, boring quests and 123...123...123 and paying monthly fees to have always nerfs/boosts to care their whining costumers, its a childs game right now, even lore its death after cataclysm, Rift its far away better , still haves to less innovations, and one of worst its the pvp (i call hybrid pvp),
nice reviews, but a couple of things. silverwood is no where near as big as two WoW zones combined. someone on this site i believe, made comparison maps of several mmo worlds...and Rift is small. they do a fine job of breaking the zones up with differing elevations and such, but the zones are small.
also while the soul system theoretically allows for many different combinations, if you get to lvl 50 and start doing any of the 'endgame' - expert dungeons or raids - expect to be specced like everyone else, if you want to keep up.
anyway good luck and have fun, rift is a good game.
True, it's a really good game. Out of all new MMO games released in past 2-3 years Rift is definitely one of the best although it's not game for everyone. In my review what I meant is that after at least a few games that were decent at the very best Rift was to me something a bit refreshing.
Although Rift is not really copy & paste of WoW as it has at least as much taken from other games such as Everquest I would say that it kinda often fails to catch what made those two great titles. In vanilla WoW for example even reaching level 60 was kind of an achievement. Even more nowdays in WoW reaching cap takes depending on playstyle between 4-6 weeks (sometimes even more if you really are casual). At least 6 weeks it took me to do so from 1 to 85. Now month later with the same playstyle, the same amount of time spent in the game per day in Rift I've managed to reach 50 within less than 3 weeks. And if I didn't have like 2 or 3 days off when I just logged in to say hello then it could be even 2. That's comparison of how long is leveling content. Some ppl like it, some don't.
And as for endgame content? PvP is lacking heavily as I said in other post. It's fun more less up to level 40 or so but at 50 it can be a very different experience. As for PvE expert dungeons got nerfed heavily, to me it was disappointing as original difficulty was ok, it needed only revision of some boss mechanics to make it more friendly for melee. Raids are definitely fun. Tanking Greenscale was to me really entertaining every time we went there. RoS trash reminded me of MC in it's difficulty, just a bit easier although in both you need to be careful. Bosses there were also a lot of fun. I was a tank in pretty much every MMO that I played with exception of LotRO and WAR. But I have to say that Rift became one of those few MMOs where playing such content was to me some real fun.
To sum up my review:
- It's all over again same. Rift doesn't bring anything really new to genre
- Short content that is way too casual friendly.
- Lacking PvP
- They tried to copy EQ and WoW but in most things they missed what made those games such great titles
- Soul system that still needs work
- With stuff as cross shard LFG for dungeons it smells a bit like WoW these days. If you are lazy to do already casual content then just queue one time after another. Shortens already short leveling content
+ Soul system as an idea of it. Was a bit risky to propose such class system but then Trion had balls to do this
+ Rifts and invasions - in general are fun. Sometimes it's dull content and it feels really unexplored by Trion yet but then in a few months it may be different
+ Endgame boss encounters. Simply fun stuff
+ Audio visual part of the game. Gloamwood as one of the best examples here
+ LFG tool that makes it easier to find group for daily and group quests. It reminds a bit of old LFG tool from WoW
If you are hardcore player then there are better titles including even WoW. If you are casual then Rift may be for you.