So at first I was liek: omg generic wow clone.
But then I was liek: fuck. must subscribe. asap.
Things that set it apart, in my opinion, are the graphics. This game looks absolutely stunning. And I realised only after playing for a few hours that my settings were on medium-to-lowish. So I cranked them up to super maxified and my fps fell to <20 . PC-upgrade required. But hell, it sure beats looking at cartoon-like WoW models and textures. The ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing and lighting/shadow depth is superb. When you're travelling through a forest, it's actually a shaded grove and fits because of the attention to detail. Sure, my computer can run SC2 on maxed settings and get 50+ FPS, and it achieves 50 FPS on the default (detected) medium-low settings that it chose for me, so it is definitely playable. Without turning this into a hardware / benchmarking review, I'll end my first paragraph with letting you know that your piece of shit computer can run it on the lowest settings, since there is a massive jump in med-low, to low-low - settings wise.
The story-line. WoW has been recycling the same old lore and pricinples which are nearly 20 years old now. Rift is fresh and new. You either side with the Guardians, who are chosen by the gods to save the world from planar invasion and dragons / or you side with the Defiants, who utilise technology and planar energies but ultimately want to stop the dragons invading also. Lore-wise I can tell it has been heavily influenced by Magic the Gathering - with elemental planes, creatures like Aelfwar (evil elves really), and Ifriit (fire elementals etc). But also it borrows 'slightly heavily' from Oblivion - in that the world is being invaded by different Planes.
I havn't delved too much into the story line since it's only a 7 day trial and I've been trying out the gameplay more than anything else, and it definitely does not dissapoint on this front.
The skill system is the much talked about 'Ascension System'. Your character begins life as a Soul, and you choose your 'role' which represents what your character was in a past life. These roles are Warrior, Mage, Cleric and Rogue - but the game goes so much deeper than that. Each Role has 12 'Classes' within it. And you can choose up to 3 of these classes at anyone time and customise the hell out of your character.
For example, a Rogue has things like Marksman (ranged dps), Riftwarrior (blink teleport), Nightblade (stealth critical). And what is really cool is that each 'class' has a full skill-tree consisting of 'branches' and 'roots'. Conceptually, what this means is, every time you level up you gain 1 skill point (as per normal), and you invest this point in the 'branches' of the skill tree. As you expand the branches, the roots automatically unlock further abilities and passives - adding further definition to your character in that respective class.
So, my first character was a bit of a fail. I went Riftwarrior because Blink-Teleport looked cool in the preview videos, being able to instantly blink every two minutes up to 15 meters while in combat. The Riftwarrior is a mainly support/harass based class - which has it's definite bonuses in PvP but isn't really geared towards PvE. So, as my second soul specialisation I chose Saboteur - which focuses on bombs, grenades and traps - and things were picking up. The synergies between the classes are endless. All of a sudden my 'escape' skill Phase Shift (blink) was allowing me to control the battlefield when I'd throw an explosive grenade the slows everything in an AoE.
I went a Mage for my second character, choosing Necromancer (summoning / death magic / damage over time), Warlock (curses / disables / heals / support) and Dominator (crowd control / polymorph / slows etc). And the game came alive. Using your summoned skeleton to hold aggro while you micro-manage your curses and poisons on multiple mobs at once really accelerated the games pace.
To put it bluntly, World of Warcraft has maybe 8 unique classes... Rift has 48, with an endless amount of choices in the synergies and skills you choose to complement your soul-classes choices. Definite win on the characterisation front. The first few tutorial missions set you up with your first 3 souls, and you have access to all 12 to pick for your role. Gathering later souls becomes a bit problematic but the great thing is, you can reset your souls for free the first time and completely reskill ALL your points in any skills. So it doesn't matter if you start out as a Necromancer and invest 20 points in that soul, but later decide you want to become a Chloromancer (healer), you can drop the Necro and still have 20 points to spend in Chloromancer. And once you acquire new souls, they are yours forever, you can always change between souls .
The real kicker in the teeth for WoW and all competing MMO's is the Rift system itself. The game has two sets of currency: Coins and Planar. Coins are your typical, Silver>Gold>Platinum and drop from most mobs you kill while doing quests. Planar currency is ONLY found when defeating Planar enemies and closing rifts. Rifts are basically randomised events which spawn all over the region you are in, scaled to level and difficulty based on how many players are around. I logged on this morning and saw 4 rifts and quickly went to the first one, banded up with 5 other people instantly (the Party system is fucking win) and promptly closed the rifts and got some good loot out of it. This sort of randomised event creation keeps the massive regions fresh and interesting, all of a sudden travelling from A to B has a lot of possibilities.
Couple this with Invasion events, whereby a Rift or a Defiant/Guardian Foothold has been made in a region, and mobs will actively attack anything along their 'invasion route' until the Foothold has been destroyed... This game simply doesn't become a grind-fest. I was doing a few missions at an outlying outpost, and I came back to hand them in... only to find a Life invasion was right along my path and quickly a group of players materialised and we defeated the mobs. Again, epic win. Furthermore, you can find random artifacts which spawn randomly across the world and are extremely rare and implement them as a 'Set' bonus for your character - again, making the 'massive open world' truly unique and interesting.
TL;DR:
Anyways, go get your free trial and play it. That's all I'm saying.
Note: Looks like WoW - doesn't feel like WoW - at all. It's epic. WoW is dull.
Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 30 2011, 4:42 pm by Cardinal.
None.