Being an avid MMO fan and having played virtually every big MMO in the last 5 years, most recently hitting level cap on DC Universe Online, RIFT peaked my interest. Having taken part in the beta I was pleasantly surprised and can see this game as a genuine alternative to WoW. I'm not going to throw around statements like "WoW Killer" or other ludacris statements made by gamers who seem to think a playerbase of 12million will suddenly defect to their favourite MMO. However most recent MMORPG games I've played, I've played in conjunction with WoW.
Whilst fun, the RIFT beta was not bug free. It doesn't have Cataclysm's quality of questing (at least early on from what I've played) and sticks to the old tried and tested MMO formulas. The graphics are good in my opinion but that is to be expected with the Warhammer engine. It's a good engine graphically that compliments the game especially when it comes to lighting. The PvP has plenty of issues and the PvE content wasn't particularly inspiring.
A group of players partaking in a RIFT event.
However, I did enjoy RIFT thoroughly. I loved the class system which involves you choosing a "Calling" of either Warrior, Rogue, Mage or Cleric. Each calling has a soul tree which works very much like World of Warcraft's talent trees do. Where it differentiates is that rather than having a choice of three styles, each of the three trees can be populated by one of the 9 "Souls" which are essentially subclasses. 8 of which are full length trees and the 9th being a PvP oriented tree such as Archmage for mages, designed to compliment your main two souls. This class system allows for experimentation. You can have a tanking Cleric with a pet soul (druid) supplimenting you with heals in solo play. You can have a rogue with typical WoW-like rogue abilities with a pet soul thrown in. There's even a pet soul in the Warrior archtype, Beastmaster. During the beta I played as a Mage with Pyromancy, Necromancy, Chloromancy, Elementalist and Dominator and each one brought something different to the table. On launch I look forward to trying all four class types and experimenting with them.
The other main draw to RIFT is the public quest system. Whilst questing around your zone, minding your own business, anomalies known as Tears (as in rips, not eye droplets) will pop up on your map, they'll eventually open Rifts which have to be delt with. A rift will taint the land and affect the terrain in that area. If left to it's own devices a rift can even expand and swallow up more lush greenery. Rifts spawn enemies in stages. Stages get progressively harder and should you and a group of passers by decide to take it to the bad guys and you're not only successful in defeating the enemies but you do it quickly, you'll unlock bonus stages that essentially just boost your loot. If you don't touch the rifts, they'll spawn mobs who have paths to quest hubs and will have to be dealt with. Rifts also scale to the population of the zone so you won't have to worry about early zones if you come to the game 2 years after launch. There's also zone wide events with multitudes of rifts, invasion forces and even mini-bosses situated around the zone. These will not only taint large portions of land but will even affect the sky in the zone. Once you meet the objectives of the zone wide quest, a boss will appear with plenty of health and I assume some tactics to it. This was not apparent to me in the beta though as we had about 500 players hitting the boss to the point where the NPC never even loaded in my client.
One of the many mini-bosses in a zone wide event.
The quests are fairly dynamic and give you plenty of satisfying rewards that will keep you closing rifts again and again. The public quests are engaging and well done, especially when it comes to actually finding groups for them as anyone in the area will recieve a "join public group" button towards the top of their screen which allows for easy matching up and raid organisation.
The fairly unique class system and the dynamic and well designed zones have lead me in to pre-ordering the game. Whether it will stand the test of time remains to be seen but I am very excited and with the launch for pre-orders being 18:00 GMT later today, expect to see more posts and possibly some video content coming from me. Though no promises on the video content as I'm running a 3GHz Wolfdale and a GTX 460 which barely holds 30fps on Ultra.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 5:33AM ;)
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