The 2 Day Rift Review

So on Tuesday I gave in to peer pressure and bought Rift. I even sprung for the collector's edition, since it was only $10 more and I like my CE pets and stuff. I really hadn't planned to do this. After Aion, Star Trek, Champions, Conan, and Warhammer, we've been on such a losing streak. I just have had no desire to play any of those. Rift came out of nowhere though, an obscure company I'd never heard of and people seemed to like it a lot. And it has a secret weapon, Scott Hartsman, who IMHO was responsible for EQ2s middle years of glory when it was clearly the best MMO on the market.

I can no longer play quite as much as I once did because we have the Nora-Monster, who is time consuming in and of herself, but also means that the Kathy-Monster needs more sleep than her normal rather excessive needs. But I think I at least have a sense.

Rift is, like most games today, drawing heavily on WoW. It's quest driven, there are two factions though interestingly they are divided into Guardian/religious and Defiant/technology. Like EQ2 and not WoW, it's ARAC: All races, all classes. Thank you very much! I'll determine what I want to play thanks. There are no gnomes. The closest is dwarf--no thanks. I'm playing a techno-evil-elf. It will have an end game of dungeon instances, raids, and tiered equipment bought with points and all that stuff. It also steals Warhammers one great innovation, the public quest. An irregular happening with waves of monsters and a boss that anyone can join in on. It's something I really liked until there were too few people left playing Warhammer to do them, but I think it will work even better in a PVE focused game. I suspect it will work best in Guild Wars 2, where most grouping will be of the zerg variety. Scaling encounters works better if you don't have so much cross-class reliance.

The class system is the gem of the game. There are four classes which match EQ2s four original archetypes: warriors, clerics, mages, and rogues. That's it. Everything else comes from your spec. You have three spec trees called souls and you can select from 9 different spec trees and mix and match as you like. You get not only your spec abilities, but your primary abilities from your spec. If you take a tree and don't put points in it, you won't get any abilities from that tree. Most people seem to go deep into two and take only a few abilities from a third. It seems to be designed with diminishing rather than increasing returns to promote diversity rather than specialization.

What if you chose poorly? Respeccing is oriented to be extremely cheap. At low levels free. And it not only resets the trees, but allows you to change to a different tree. And you get not only dual spec, but up to 4 different spec options. These are also cheap. I'm level 10 and just from normal questing I can already afford to buy my second. And many of the specs seem, at least this early in the game, to allow things one doesn't necessarily expect. Clerics tanking. Mages healing. And so on. The result is in some ways closer to a skill system than a class one. It really is elegant.

The other place Rift shines is one that I'm kind of jaded to. It has some great and very complete lore. The NPCs will drone on forever if you want to do the click throughs. But it doesn't force it on you or anything.

Will it have legs? Honestly after the last few years that's what most people want to know. There have been so many disasters over the last few years that people have gotten more than a bit gun shy.

It's really hard to say yet because I'm not at the end game, but I don't think the post-WoW gloom and doom is as bad as people think. There has only been one really competent release since EQ2 and WoW. That was LOTRO which has done well enough. All the others had one or another real true failing. They didn't fail because WoW was out there. They failed because they very deeply deserved to fail. Warhammer was the best of the lot and had some great points, but it couldn't deliver on the big battles that people expected. DAOC battles might have been a lagfest, but the War server just crashed. Plus, Mythic lapsed into their old bad habits of collecting metrics instead of fixing things and their first class in last class out nerf and buff cycles. Aion had too much grind, but the Korean devs had no intention of changing that because for their Korean players, the grind was just fine. The rest? Conan was an incomplete train wreck. Champions and STO were just jokes. 

But we have a set of games: Eve, LOTRO, and maybe still EQ2 that are doing just fine thanks and I think, at least based on what I've seen, that if the Trion devs are nimble, that Rift could join them. Their timing is good. WoW is showing it's age and Cataclysm has alienated some gamers and the LFD tool alienated others. 

I'll update in a week or two.

The 2 Day Rift Review

So on Tuesday I gave in to peer pressure and bought Rift. I even sprung for the collector's edition, since it was only $10 more and I like my CE pets and stuff. I really hadn't planned to do this. After Aion, Star Trek, Champions, Conan, and Warhammer, we've been on such a losing streak. I just have had no desire to play any of those. Rift came out of nowhere though, an obscure company I'd never heard of and people seemed to like it a lot. And it has a secret weapon, Scott Hartsman, who IMHO was responsible for EQ2s middle years of glory when it was clearly the best MMO on the market.

I can no longer play quite as much as I once did because we have the Nora-Monster, who is time consuming in and of herself, but also means that the Kathy-Monster needs more sleep than her normal rather excessive needs. But I think I at least have a sense.

Rift is, like most games today, drawing heavily on WoW. It's quest driven, there are two factions though interestingly they are divided into Guardian/religious and Defiant/technology. Like EQ2 and not WoW, it's ARAC: All races, all classes. Thank you very much! I'll determine what I want to play thanks. There are no gnomes. The closest is dwarf--no thanks. I'm playing a techno-evil-elf. It will have an end game of dungeon instances, raids, and tiered equipment bought with points and all that stuff. It also steals Warhammers one great innovation, the public quest. An irregular happening with waves of monsters and a boss that anyone can join in on. It's something I really liked until there were too few people left playing Warhammer to do them, but I think it will work even better in a PVE focused game. I suspect it will work best in Guild Wars 2, where most grouping will be of the zerg variety. Scaling encounters works better if you don't have so much cross-class reliance.

The class system is the gem of the game. There are four classes which match EQ2s four original archetypes: warriors, clerics, mages, and rogues. That's it. Everything else comes from your spec. You have three spec trees called souls and you can select from 9 different spec trees and mix and match as you like. You get not only your spec abilities, but your primary abilities from your spec. If you take a tree and don't put points in it, you won't get any abilities from that tree. Most people seem to go deep into two and take only a few abilities from a third. It seems to be designed with diminishing rather than increasing returns to promote diversity rather than specialization.

What if you chose poorly? Respeccing is oriented to be extremely cheap. At low levels free. And it not only resets the trees, but allows you to change to a different tree. And you get not only dual spec, but up to 4 different spec options. These are also cheap. I'm level 10 and just from normal questing I can already afford to buy my second. And many of the specs seem, at least this early in the game, to allow things one doesn't necessarily expect. Clerics tanking. Mages healing. And so on. The result is in some ways closer to a skill system than a class one. It really is elegant.

The other place Rift shines is one that I'm kind of jaded to. It has some great and very complete lore. The NPCs will drone on forever if you want to do the click throughs. But it doesn't force it on you or anything.

Will it have legs? Honestly after the last few years that's what most people want to know. There have been so many disasters over the last few years that people have gotten more than a bit gun shy.

It's really hard to say yet because I'm not at the end game, but I don't think the post-WoW gloom and doom is as bad as people think. There has only been one really competent release since EQ2 and WoW. That was LOTRO which has done well enough. All the others had one or another real true failing. They didn't fail because WoW was out there. They failed because they very deeply deserved to fail. Warhammer was the best of the lot and had some great points, but it couldn't deliver on the big battles that people expected. DAOC battles might have been a lagfest, but the War server just crashed. Plus, Mythic lapsed into their old bad habits of collecting metrics instead of fixing things and their first class in last class out nerf and buff cycles. Aion had too much grind, but the Korean devs had no intention of changing that because for their Korean players, the grind was just fine. The rest? Conan was an incomplete train wreck. Champions and STO were just jokes. 

But we have a set of games: Eve, LOTRO, and maybe still EQ2 that are doing just fine thanks and I think, at least based on what I've seen, that if the Trion devs are nimble, that Rift could join them. Their timing is good. WoW is showing it's age and Cataclysm has alienated some gamers and the LFD tool alienated others. 

I'll update in a week or two.