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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.

I played the beta for this, and wasn't that impressed to be honest. To me it actually did feel like WoW, and since I have already invested so much time in my WoW characters, I decided it would be a waste for me to get invested in this. Plus I'm one of the many who bought into Warhammer and Aion, and invested a lot of time in both basically for nothing. I'm hearing Titan will be epic, but I'm even weary about getting into that.

Blizzard already has WoW, so Titan is going to be something new and exciting.

/hopesanddreams

Played beta and retail and didn't care for it. Cookie cutter grindgrindgrindlolgrind MMO as far as I'm concerned. If you liked WoW but hated the abomination that is Blizzard's writing, maybe Rift will suit you better.

I've played WoW a lot a few years ago and then again very recently with a trial. I don't like WoW at all but Rift held my attention for quite some time and I'm tempted to subscribe (if I had moneys). I wish I could go back and refund the year or two I spent on WoW and spend it on Rift instead

I wish I could refund the 4-5 years I spent on WoW.

Agreed. I've beta tested more MMOs than I could care to count. I actually took it seriously too, finding bugs, trying to exploit and break the game, etc. All MMOs are the same grind and chug. WoW is a bit more polished, but at its core this is what it really is. when something innovative is brought to the table let me know.

Hey Sacrieur, RIFT has been brought to the table.

Here are some screenshots from my daily grind fest lol...

So I log on as normal and something isn't quite right... So I check out the map:

Every Green crossed swords icon is a Life invasion, consisting of a few mobs and an elite hero-type mob. When you mouse over them, they'll show arrows designating where that invasion is going. As you can see, Quicksilver college and Argent Glade have been pretty much over run. The green swirly things are Life Rifts, and these have started spawning inside our town (Argent Glade). And the Green plus icon in a square is a Life Foothold where the invasions spawn from.

So, as you can see we're getting dominated pretty big time.

I start going around killing shit, and getting killed respectively. Namely, I bumped into


Who pretty much stomped me in one hit. I decided to respawn at the graveyard and there were a bunch of other players just as confused as I were. We partied up and started roaming for Rifts and Footholds we could close, steering clear of the higher level shit. After about an hour or two, the entire Guardian population on the server seemed to have converge in Silverwood. There were level 50+'s roaming around on insane mounts killing shit.



So, roaming around the map killing stragglers I soon found this dude:

I drew aggro by accident (my stupid skeleton was on aggressive) and started pinging the map like mad for my party to come to the rescue. About 12 other dudes turn up and



So, I fucking hated WoW. It was boring, monotonous, awful to look at, and ultimately boring. I only got sucked in to it since school was pretty lame and a group of mates played. But if I have such a strong aversion to all things MMO / WoW-ish, why am I drawn to this beautiful game?

It's open-world as it is meant to be. No lame bat rides over pointless scenery for 5 minutes. No barren deserts with obsolete 'grey shaded' mobs that players all but avoid. Instead, you travel instantaneously from A to B through a Portal Gate (but you have to have activated the gates at either end - meaning you need to walk from A to B and pay money before you can instantly travel between A to B). And good luck handing in a quest when all the shop keepers and quest-folk in your town have been slayed, due to shit like this going on.

I picked up a quest earlier that involves me hunting down 3 players from the Defiant faction. They were spotted in the region and since this is a PvP server, the PvE environment (ie: quests/grinding/playing) is bent in order to facilitate PvP encounters.

I havn't even been raiding yet, nor have I done a dungeon. There is too much going on to delve into the game any deeper and I've just hit level 15 (the limit for a trial account). Whereas, a couple weeks back I decided to see what was new in the WoW genre just for lulz. I made a tauren druid and was level 20 after a day of playing and bored out of my skull.

As far as MMO's go, rift blends PvE and PvP perfectly. The only other thing that can compare is EVE but that takes dedication and years of training - whereas Rift is able to satisfy both the casual gamer and the insane MMO addict.

I still think Aion is the most beautiful MMO out there right now, and when I beta tested Rift, I just thought it looked too similar to Aion and was turned off by that.

To me "open world" should include long trips and empty deserts, as that's what makes it open. I have to admit I actually liked how long it took to get from A to B when I started playing WoW. Running through an area took a while and I appreciate how huge that made the continents feel. Having to wait on a boat for the duration of a trip was fantastic to me, and I didn't care if it wasted time or whatever. Granted 5 years in, that became more of a pain, but then Blizzard was smart enough to let us use flying mounts in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, so that made travel faster than before. I've never been a fan of being able to teleport to whatever area you want to go to next (aside from porting to a major city, I guess).

From my Standpoint, this is like another WoW clone...
I'm willing to try its trial version since you've boasted it so much... but from your descriptions and the videos you've posted, there's nearly zero innovative things about this game.

The only positive thing I can say right now is that being able to play around with "souls", each with their own tech-trees and stuff, is a good design choice. In WoW, everyone of each class usually wears the same thing and use the same tactics because it does the most DoT. It's the same problem that Terraria has right now.. there's always some tech trees, armors, and weapons that does the most damage. In that case, it is not a choice for the player to think about.. but more of a calculation.
By having three souls to choose from, i think people will genuinely have to choose between their styles of playing.

But countering that is the huge abundance of tech per tech-tree... all of which looks pretty redundant, wordy, and cluttered.

That's the really innovative thing that I like about Rift when doing a straight comparison to WoW. They may seem cluttered and wordy as you rightly say, but it forces you to think about your characterisation. What souls go well together, which souls complement each other, what sort of play style do you want your Rogue/Mage/Cleric or Warrior to have...

It essentially means that 99% of the time, every player you meet or party up with will be different to you. I'm shit at maths, but doesn't a selection of 3 unique options out of a possible 12 give you an insane range of possibilities? And then factor in that each soul can be skilled differently depending on your play-style.

The party system also gets my vote. As soon as you get within range of a Rift or an Invasion or any sort of entity that has been made harder on purpose - to provoke grouping / party combat - you'll get automatically invited to the Public Party. And I hear the dungeon system works similarly, you basically tick boxes saying what role your character is (which is limited by your gear and what you've skilled - eg. a high dps rogue can't tick healer or tank, wheras my hybrid warlock can be healer/tank or dps). And everyone is given a meta-level based on their gear, attributes and skills. You just click a button and you're automatically put into a group for a specific dungeon. No more spamming local chat with things like "LFG - need healer" etc.

There're 8 souls per Calling... allowing the players to choose at most 3... with 4 callings.
So the possibilities should be (8x7x6)x4 = 1344 total different possibilities
(Correct me if I'm wrong pl0x ><)

And then there're still the tech trees and abilities.

Unholy, have you ever liked a game?
Have you ever even tried any games?

Portal,
Portal 2,
Half Life,
Half Life 2,
Left 4 dead,
Left 4 dead 2,
Terraria,
Transformice,
Civilization V
SC/BW,
Tons of SC/BW UMS's,
GT 5,
Little Big Planet,
Bioshock, which I've only played the demo, but Love it already
All Mainstream Mario Games and Mario Karts
Super Smash Bros. Series
Kirby Series
Pokemon Series
Legend of Zelda Series
Assassin's Creed 2 minus the story,
Crash Bandicoot 1,2,3, Mario Kart knockoff (which i played till i broke TWO of my controllers), and Mario Party knockoff
Spyro 1 and 2 (3 and onwards sucked)
Sly 1 and 2 (3, again, lacked in comparison)
Loads of Bomberman games except 3D ones
Runescape (which I regret playing and am fully ashamed of liking before)
Pinter's Point 2, also known as Poy Poy 2.. which is super rare and underrated (in NA)
This Game.. which is surprisingly addicting, and difficult.. and was featured by psychotaku


...
I mean the list goes on and on..
The question you posed is a pretty stupid question. I mean, it isn't a bad thing to be critical about a game. It's what drive games forward. And for all the games I've listed, I can still find complaints about them (except Portal, of course)
But since you've had the ignorance to ask the question.... I'll give you a pretty stupid answer

I've liked and tried games that don't suck.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jun 2 2011, 5:15 am by UnholyUrine.

About half of those games, being the only ones I've played, I did not give a quarter of a damn about, except for BW, and it sure as hell wasn't for the story.

You aren't nearly as critical as I am. Don't let SEN get to you man.