RIFT: Planes of Telara thread

[Vagabond142]

Weeeeeeelll.... I wasn't really interested in this game. I signed up for beta a long time ago (I sign up for a LOT of betas, I'm a good tester and give good feedback). I know, however, that there is definitely some interest from what I've seen in the WoW thread, so to clean taht up, I've started this thread.

Beta 5 event was very lackluster, lots of lag, some broken quests, things not working, and I was about done with it then.

Beta 6, however... I think that this beta weekend event (Friday to today) has completely changed my mind. The game is smooth, lag free, everything just simply works, and the pvp (I LOATHE pvp) is actually.... fun... o____O

I'm very tempted to preorder, I think that this game will garner a fair bit of interest and have a stable population.

I'm going to finish this beta out till 11 am and then give my review around noon Testing dungeons next XD

[Zewind]

I played a bit of the beta 5. I couldnt get into it. I felt it was WOW with more realistic skins. I think WOW has ruined MMO's for me.

[natejj]

Just another WoW ripoff with some garbage "innovative" mechanic... "OHHHHH RIFTS". BOOORING.

[403Gemini]

Curious... what is a "WoW" ripoff by definition?

Health bar/ Mana Bar/ Spells / Classes and Races?

Holy christ that's almost every RPG before WoW...

[BigMass]

Originally posted by 403Gemini
Curious... what is a "WoW" ripoff by definition?

Health bar/ Mana Bar/ Spells / Classes and Races?

Holy christ that's almost every RPG before WoW...

They’re %100 correct. I played the beta. It’s a WoW clone that’s clunky, with a shitty UI and repetitive gameplay. It’s almost a step down from Allods. You can’t take WoW, tweak a few things and say it’s a new game. People aren’t going to leave WoW for a WoW clone, and people that quit WoW because they got sick of it (like me) aren’t going to resub to a WoW clone to do the same old shit over again.

There are about 100 things wrong with MMO development currently and the lack of innovation is a big reason they all suck. Lucky for SWOTR it has a huge IP, huge brand name and is going to come on the cusp of WoW dying of old age. Because if it wasn’t for those things that game would be failure as well. One game that tried a few new things and actually could have been good was Age of Conan. But of course it ended up being just another unfinished POS that has no content past level 20 so everyone ended up quitting.

You can add RIFT to the next list of mcshitty MMOs along with the recent Aion and FF14. If anything All Points Bulletin might be fun when it gets released FTP.

[Thaco]

Originally posted by 403Gemini
Curious... what is a "WoW" ripoff by definition?

Health bar/ Mana Bar/ Spells / Classes and Races?

Holy christ that's almost every RPG before WoW...

they stole WoW's ideas before it was released.

[403Gemini]

Originally posted by BigMass


They’re %100 correct. I played the beta. It’s a WoW clone that’s clunky, with a shitty UI and repetitive gameplay. It’s almost a step down from Allods. You can’t take WoW, tweak a few things and say it’s a new game. People aren’t going to leave WoW for a WoW clone, and people that quit WoW because they got sick of it (like me) aren’t going to resub to a WoW clone to do the same old shit over again.

There are about 100 things wrong with MMO development currently and the lack of innovation is a big reason they all suck. Lucky for SWOTR it has a huge IP, huge brand name and is going to come on the cusp of WoW dying of old age. Because if it wasn’t for those things that game would be failure as well. One game that tried a few new things and actually could have been good was Age of Conan. But of course it ended up being just another unfinished POS that has no content past level 20 so everyone ended up quitting.

You can add RIFT to the next list of mcshitty MMOs along with the recent Aion and FF14. If anything All Points Bulletin might be fun when it gets released FTP.

I dunno, I do find RIFT does bring a few nice Ideas to the table. Multiple specs isn't new, but I believe you get either 4-5 in this game, and the fact that you can take 3 classes and mix them any way you want certainly does open up for a lot of player customization on how you want to play - however it will succumb to the number crunchers like all games do that will result in: <insert ideal damage spec here>.

The game does have great graphics though, and the monsters look amazing. The player models are .... bleh, but after playing WoW I can live with that (since WoW is a fucking ugly game, I've thought that since BETA WoW, I think that now, nothing will change my mind of that).

» Click image for larger version

I do also like the idea that the game will be ever constantly changing with random rifts opening up over the world, so it gives me motivation to go to multiple zones rather than "Im going to go to this one spot and farm skeletons for their undead essence for hours on end!"

Also beta 5 it appeared TONS of people were doing dungeons which had me interested. Aion at level 25-30 there was what, 1 dungeon?

I dont think anything will kill WoW except blizzard itself. IMHO, Cataclysm was probably one of the worst things to happen to WoW. The expansion was terrible (as an end game player), however is quite good as a new player. I don't care about the challenge, that didn't bother me, but everything felt extremely recycled and boring.

Also I don't know if SWTOR will succeed soley on its IP, I mean look at LOTRO, it was a great game but it bombed pretty hard.

edit: btw I'm not actually defending RIFT, I did pre-order it because even if it keeps my attention for 3 months thats better than most games I buy hah

[Vagabond142]

So, my thoughts... and I will not once refer to WoW in this gut-take review. Other MMOs, sure, but this is ignoring WoW:

All in all, I find RIFT to be a familiar, and fun, MMO very reminiscent of, of all things, Runes of Magic (a free to play MMO). It's much more polished and has much better content, but the base feeling of having more than one class and being able to mix and match skills is there.

I'll touch on the four major items that I enjoyed this beta weekend, and my thoughts:

-Rifts:

Quite fun, actually. There are tangible rewards for doing them, including high level gear, as well as some "grindfest" type of vanity items for people that want them (a pet fire squirrel for 5000 planar shards, for example). There is also the fact that the enemies at the rifts dynamically scale, meaning that if you're the only one there, the enemies will be a challenge but not impossible (as long as you're level appropriate to the rift, a level 9 toon taking on a level 20 rift will get squashed in one hit), and if there is a full 20 man raid there, it's scaled so that the enemies are a challenge for that raid. So if a rift invasion happens when you're the only one around, you can still do it and earn planar rewards.

I also like the fact that every couple of hours a major invasion happens, where a huge amount of rifts open and a zonewide quest starts, where you have to defend areas, kill specific mobs, carry items between places, and take down a major boss. These events give the best currency for planar rewards (I got an epic set of greaves from the planar rewards of my first major invasion).

-Classes and Roles:

How this works is a little complicated to grasp, but once you get the hang of it, it's awesome. You start off at character creation chosing your "focus," that being what type of character you will be: Warrior (mostly DPS and tank), Cleric (armored healers and casters), Mage (pure caster), Rogue (dps and offtanks). The basic idea of the focus is all about the armor... warriors = plate, clerics = chain, rogues = leather, mages = cloth. Within those four focus roles are seven basic classes and a couple of specialized ones (mainly for pvp).

You start off classless, and the first quest you get determines your first class. I chose to be a dps warrior, so I chose the paragon (dual wielding maces/axes/swords). I then synergized with a riftblade (elemental additions to the dual wield) and champion (big attacks after getting attack points). It ended up being a monster of a dps combination, but I had no blocking at all so I took damage.

My second toon was a Rogue focus with marksman (ranged weapons, ie guns and bows), ranger (pet), and saboteur (weapons skills for in close as well as explosives). Much more survivability and can run like the clappers if it needs to escape.

It sounds confusing and does take some playing around, but I found that no two people had the exact same class build, which is the entire point of the system, I think. Everyone can play as they like, and it does have a nice feel of actually MAKING a character instead of just doing the standard "you chose this, you ARE this."

And, to top it off, you can have 4 roles, that being that you can have 4 sets of 3 classes. So, for example, you're a dps warrior and the tank suddenly has to go and there are tons of dps but no tanks lfg? You switch to tank warrior, pick up a dps, continue going. Very versatile, dynamic, and lets you choose the right role for the right fight. You can also do a PVP build heavy on control and damage but not so much survivability, and be able to switch to a pve build with loads of resistances but not as much damage or control. I personally think it's a breath of fresh air on class design, and I really like it.

-Dungeons:

This beta I focused on getting up to and into dungeons (the first one for both teh Guardians ("good guys") and Defiants ("bad guys that are actually good guys but the Guardians think they're bad guys") is ~15-20 depending on group makeup), and did both the Iron Tombs (Defiants, paragon dps/paladin tank) and the Terrace of the Faes (blademaster dps/marksman dps) over the weekend.

Iron tombs: for a level 15-20 dungeon, GAWD it was hard XD. First boss is a right bitch, and a good gear check for the tank and ability check for the healer. Second boss is all about prioritizing and focusing down one mob of three in sequence, and last boss, while not a pushover, is a tank and spank with having to move into a safe zone every 30 seconds or so. Overall, a really impressive first blush at the instances of RIFT. A good group will clear in about 30-45 minutes depending on group build.

Terrace of the Faes: Very nice looking instance, but incredibly long. I think it took our (very well put together) group about 1.5 hours to clear, including two wipes on the final boss. Lots of (decently hard) bosses, lots of (decently easy) trash, balances out, and a few jokes in there for fun (although I think it was just for the beta). You fight your way up a mountainside in a zig-zag hedge maze, and kill stuff along the way. Yeah, it does deal with elves and faeries, but it didn't feel... what's the word... quaint? It felt like a serious, challenging instance. I liked it.


-PVP:

Okay, this is where RIFT, having mostly sold me, sealed the deal. I will say it straight out, I hate pvp. I go out of my way to AVOID pvp (and yet I play EvE, masochist I am...) in most games. Yet, in RIFT, it feels INCREDIBLY balanced, and this is the beta o_O. Ranged aren't overpowered, melee has some stuns but can't lock you, healers actually have armor so they aren't paper thin, and tanks can be useful (void knights especially because they can distract people from attacking a focused target).

The real clincher though is that it's FUN. Yes, Mr Anti-PvP, namely me, would actually QUEUE UP to fight in PVP for ENJOYMENT. I think I need to get my head checked, something must be wrong with me if I'm enjoying player vs player content o_O.

And, thankfully, there ARE dedicated PVP servers for those crazy enough to pvp all the time, and PVE servers for us normal folk


-Overall impressions:

Trion Worlds has done the impossible. They promised, on paper, and you can read this pretty much anywhere on the net, that they would release the game when ready and polished, not in a half done state and patch it up later. This last beta, in the words of MANY that were playing it, felt better than the release of many current MMOs.

We had players from (can't say name of game), DCUO, EvE (quite a few of us, actually), LotRO, Runes of Magic, Allods, Vanguard, Age of Conan, et al so on. The guild I was in for Guardian side, about 70 players strong, also had a guy that is (still) playing EverQuest (1, not 2). While there were many end-of-beta arguments of which game would be the most worthwhile to go back to (EvE ftw >_>), there was a general consensus that RIFT felt like a release product, and had an interstellar amount of polish on the beta product. Not ONCE was I disconnected, nor did the server crash during the insane stress test (the devs opened THREE planar invasions at once to try to crash the servers), or, realistically, at any other time. It was smooth, well supported, low ping (my ping hovered at 60-80 the entire time, even in massive rift battles and large scale battlegrounds), and was an absolute gem of a beta to play in. Best beta ever? Methinks yes.


HOWEVER...


Not all was golden

-Pacing: In a word... while you level up at a decent rate, there are times that the world feels slow. Be it that you get some of the dreaded "do this bunch of quests in this area, come back, and get another bunch in the exact same area" quest lines, or the fact that there are some "cult quests" which direct you to do things but don't really tell you WHERE (caveat: I later found out that the cult story quests are actually "metaquests" that gain completion as you do the quests that feed into them, such as kill a specific rift mob during an invasion).

Also, until you get your mount (~15, because it's money limited, not skill limited), running between quests takes a good chunk of time. The devs said for Beta 7 they'll probably bump up the run speed about 5%, and that will make the entire WORLD of difference. It's just slow enough to be aggravating.

-Footholds:

This is a tricky subject. The rifts, themselves, are a gloriously fun thing to do solo. However, it is nearly impossible to do a foothold solo, unless you catch it RIGHT as it's forming. This is because a foothold keeps spawning combat groups, three or four mobs with a boss mob that takes a few people to take down. A couple of times, it got to the point that there were 20+ combat groups at a foothold and only three people there trying to fight it. To say we got our shit pushed in would be the understatement of the century.


-Graphics:

Are stunning. It's a beautiful, beautiful game... and it nearly made my graphics card explode. I started off playing it at high settings, like I do with games such as RoM and EvE... and I was getting 5 fps. I have a Core 2 Duo E8400, an HD4850 1 GB (my 4870 died a glorious death of artifacts and crushed dreams), and 4 GB DDR2-800 RAM. All in all, a very middle of the road enthusiast system. And RIFT, on high settings, made it beg for mercy.

Which is sad, because on high settings, it's gorgeous. Stunning vistas, very nice textures, great effects. On low, it's playable (I averaged 40-50 fps on the low setting), but doesn't look nearly as good (still much better than most offerings, but I digress). This is a game that can challenge performance and enthusiast level systems. This isn't so much a complaint, just an observation that you need to be aware that you might need to turn down some settings to get playable FPS levels.




In sum, I think that the best phrase I heard during the beta touches on everything I like about the game: "More of the same, but different." It's a familiar world of hotkeys, tab targetting, moving out of effects (or into beneficial ones), voluntary pvp, etc. It's fresh and new, however, in that it has a dynamic challenge system (rifts), multiple reward avenues (footholds, pvp, rifts, crafting, etc), and it's just hard enough that when you earn something, you really feel that you've earned that reward.

If I had to recommend the game, I would say that it's for the fantasy MMO player that enjoys a variety of quest types, likes a challenge, and enjoys both solo and group play.

My score for Beta 6 is:

7.5/10 (and I will be buying it)

[BigMass]

I personally don’t care if people like rift or not. If you like it, great. It’s about having fun after all. If you have fun, play it. I just find people aren’t critical enough anymore. Take movies for example. Last year Inception was a good movie, but it got way blow out of proportion because movies now a days are so shit that anything average or good is considered the best thing ever. People no longer have perspective. If inception came out in 1999 it would be considered just another decent flick. MMOs take so long to develop, are so few and far between and are mostly dog shit, that anything remotely playable is hailed as the new successor to World of Warcraft. Face it, the genre is stale and formulaic. No investor wants to take a risk making something new and innovative. What they want to do is re-create WoW, and that in itself is a concept destined to fail over and over again.

[Vagabond142]

Originally posted by BigMass
I personally don’t care if people like rift or not. If you like it, great. It’s about having fun after all. If you have fun, play it. I just find people aren’t critical enough anymore. Take movies for example. Last year Inception was a good movie, but it got way blow out of proportion because movies now a days are so shit that anything average or good is considered the best thing ever. People no longer have perspective. If inception came out in 1999 it would be considered just another decent flick. MMOs take so long to develop, are so few and far between and are mostly dog shit, that anything remotely playable is hailed as the new successor to World of Warcraft. Face it, the genre is stale and formulaic. No investor wants to take a risk making something new and innovative. What they want to do is re-create WoW, and that in itself is a concept destined to fail over and over again.

I'm going to, in a mature and sane way, argue against you here.

I think that there isn't much you can do to get away from WoW. It is the giant 800 lbs gorilla in the room. Runes of Magic was labelled a WoW clone. Allods Online was labelled a WoW clone. RIFT is labelled a WoW clone. However, if WoW did not exist, RIFT would be the game I would choose to play. You touched on the reason in your argument, namely that it is, to me, insanely fun to play. Hell, I even did pvp for fun in the beta, and I hate pvp, absolutely despise it. Blizzard pvp = bleeeeh. Trion Worlds pvp = this is actually enjoyable, yes I'd like to play some more.

I can't really put my finger on any one magic moment in RIFT that makes it or breaks it on the vs WoW front. I've left WoW for good, hence why I'm trying to look at games from a "if WoW didn't exist" angle. It's why I enjoy EvE so much (it's about as far from WoW as possible), and why I'm looking forward to TERA when it releases.

On another point, boiling it down to economics, it's that age old formula of time = money. If you feel you get good value for money while subscribed, then you keep subscribing. If the game turns out crap after a couple of months (cough Aion cough), then you cancel your sub and be done with it. I paid $50+$15 for Aion and I feel I only wasted about $5, because until I hit the 40's, I was having a great time.

[403Gemini]

I do agree BigMass that not a lot of developers are taking any big jumps or leaps into something new, but honestly, would you?

If a game comes out with a better class design (Amen to Necromancers finally being brought back into a game and done RIGHT) , looks graphically beautiful and is stable, it will get my attention.

Also I'd like to point out, we all know EQ1 came before WoW right...? It had health and mana bars, classes/races, and spells too... (In fact I still think its a better game than WoW ever will be lol).

Though, I do still enjoy EvE quite a bit, especially when the beyonders let me fly with them and shoot my missiles at shit lol

[snoop101]

Played Beta over the weekend. All I got to say is that its been a long time since I have been really addicted to a MMO. I had to force myself to go to bed every morning. Im going to pre order the CE today.

On a side note I was told that some of the people that helped create Warhammer online and WOW worked on this game. Thats why you see a lot of different things that remind you of both games.

[Wraith]

I played "beta" 5 and 6 (it's pretty polished for a beta).

- Class customization in this game is amazing.

- Rifts are fun but I can see them becoming repetitive, there isn't a whole lot of variaton. A rift is a rift is a rift...

- Animations seem really stiff (especially after playing WoW for so long)

- Sanctum and Meridian are underwhelming

- Appears to be poorly optimized

- Didn't like PVP as much as Vagabond... It almost always ended up with one team camping the other

- Dungeons are a refreshing challenge

I'm done with MMOs for now, they are all much of the same. If anything, GW2 looks promising.

(If anyone wants a 20% off code for direct2drive.com PM me, you get 20% off and I get some credit. Win win)

[Skyline_Addict]

Can I create a hot asian chick with big boobs? This will be the determining factor in trying this game.

[Vagabond142]

Originally posted by Skyline_Addict
Can I create a hot asian chick with big boobs? This will be the determining factor in trying this game.

Ummm... not sure XD

I do know that I played an Eth and a Methosian (both human types) and made them tan, but dunno if that'd count as "asian."


Wraith: To each their own. I'm looking for a game to fill in the time when I get a bit burned out on EvE (like this past week, I got a LOT of writing for my website done and also got the RIFT beta in), and RIFT fits in nicely. Granted, I'll also have Dragon Age 2 to play, but that, I can take my time with as it's not a subscription game XD

[snoop101]

Originally posted by Skyline_Addict
Can I create a hot asian chick with big boobs? This will be the determining factor in trying this game.

You want Aion then.

[Vagabond142]

Originally posted by snoop101


You want Aion then.

I would rather blowtorch my testicles off than play Aion again, just so people understand how much I regret buying that game (now. At the time, it was fun! (the game, not torching testicles))

[snoop101]

Originally posted by Vagabond142


I would rather blowtorch my testicles off than play Aion again, just so people understand how much I regret buying that game (now. At the time, it was fun! (the game, not torching testicles))

I played it again last month. Its not that bad, just not my cup of tea. But wow the chicks are hot.

(I also played the day it was released.)

[Vagabond142]

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/02...owhammer-myth/

great article for those that are constantly bitching about the WoWWarhammer similarities XD

[403Gemini]

I think what blew my mind between beta 5 and beta 6 were the small subtle changes that the COMMUNITY suggested. Ie. Party organizer for Rifts wasn't in Beta 5 so everybody tried zerging the mobs , well it was tough when the elite mobs would crush a tank without healing - HOWEVER in Beta 6 they came out with the party organizer.

If they keep this up and listening to the community, the game will be amazing. I actually like the idea of puzzles throughout the world as well. Its funny with WoW i was flying aroudn in the new zones and looking at some of the old zones i used to level in back in vanilla at level 20-30... and man did I miss the exploration of going into ogre caves with a group of friends... I cant wait to explore this game.