TL;DR: This is seriously 5100 words. I tried to keep organised so you can skip shit you don’t care about.
Today, I come back from the grave to talk about Rift.

Sadly, no.
For a game I’d never heard of before a few weeks ago, by a development company with no previous titles, this game has a suspiciously large budget. And that money all seems to be going towards one thing: taking World of Warcraft’s subscribers. I’d hesitate to say it’s set itself up as a WoW-killer, because you’d have to be painfully stupid to even try to make a WoW-killer, but the advertising slogan “We’re not in Azeroth anymore” leaves me in an uncomfortable spot. Which is pretty hilarious, seeing as they’re the same damn game. Rift’s main selling point is that while it does very few new things, no game necessarily does it better.
Before people get their panties too tightly knotted, yes, there are two major things that Rift has provided in terms of innovation: the titular rifts, and the class system. However, in an effort to at least try to be organised for once, I’m not going to talk about that yet. I’m going to go in something resembling an order and fuck you if you don’t like it. I’m also going to offer my extremely helpful, expert advice on how to make this game less generic, because that’s how I roll.
Also, please keep in mind that this is all my take on the game since open beta. I was in part of beta 5, all of beta 6, and the open beta (7). I haven’t played since release. I’ve tried to keep abreast (heh, heh, breast) of changes to the game but there’s only so much I can do while doing other things, like not giving a fuck. So if some of the information is a bit dated I apologise. The game’s only been out for like, what, two weeks? So it isn’t too horribly out of date, I’m hoping.
Character Creation
The first thing you probably notice upon loading up Rift is that this crazy “innovation” everyone’s been talking about really isn’t present in character creation. You get three generic fantasy races split into red faction and blue faction, and your class choices are the horribly generic warrior, cleric, mage, or rogue. The character creation isn’t on par with recent games like Aion or All Points Bulletin, but to say those games didn’t do so great would be putting it mildly, so maybe devs think there’s some voodoo magic link between the two. Whatever, it’s better than WoW’s, which is about all they seem to care about.
An interesting side note: in beta, there was some controversy on the forums over the race selection. Basically, the blue team is called the “Guardians” this time and are all lily-white humans, elves, and dwarves. The red team are the “Defiant”, being brown humans, purple elves, and purple human hybrids. Seems pretty bad, but their thoughts were along the lines of “lol geography”, which is at least a respectable reason, right?

I picked a purple elf, primarily because the racials sucked for my class.
Oh, did I mention that the Guardians are hand-picked by the gods and the Defiants are named that because they turned their backs on them?
Queue over 9000 posts about how all the white races are “godly” and all the dark races are “heretics”, and you have a shitstorm that I’m frankly surprised hasn’t spilled outside of the forums and a couple reviews here and there. It’s especially noteworthy because most of the people complaining are looking at it from a Guardian-positive side; if you look at it the other way, you’ve got religious fanatics vs. a secular society. Which would be a lot worse if the Guardians were the brown ones.
However, I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of racial equality, and hope Trion makes good on its promise to add more colour options to Mathosian (i.e. Guardian) humans. I just hope they don’t add it and never talk about it again, like the black humans in WoW. WHERE DID THEY COME FROM? All the human kingdoms are basically European! Shit pisses me off. Doing something half-assed, in this case, is better than not at all, but doing it whole-assed is truly the way to my heart.
How to make this better: How the fuck can you make a game in 2011 and not have any body sliders other than height? More skin tones, more hair styles, more everything. A couple races that haven’t been in every game ever created would be nice, too. You know, innovation.
Callings and Souls
After you’ve done a few stupidly boring starter quests, you’ll get a choice for your first soul, based on your calling. Think of your calling as your class (such as cleric), and your souls as sub-classes. The soul system is Rift’s equivalent of both talents and skill-selection. The more points you dump into a soul, the more abilities you unlock, and since you can have three souls active at any given time, that’s a lot of potential abilities. Most skills overlap or cancel each other out; for example, a friend of mine was annoyed that with his cleric, he was advised to take healing souls (which use only ranged spell attacks for DPS) with his melee-focused druid soul. While this can be annoying if you have no clue what you’re doing, it lets you make some pretty interesting combinations (for example, he could have been a melee healer, completely ignoring his ranged spells but using the heals he picked up from those souls).
I spent most of my beta-time on a Kelari mage: main soul chloromancer, others whatever I needed (generally archon/dominator or warlock/dominator). Chloromancer is an incredibly interesting class. It’s a healer that heals through damage. I know, not exactly unique — lots of classes have done this before, from Warhammer’s warpriest to World of Warcraft’s shadow priest. However, this is the first one I’ve seen really do it properly. Warpriests eventually got such good not-mana regen that they no longer needed to hit people for the extra regen, turning them into back-of-the-line spambots at max level, and shadow priests are primarily DPS with some support healing capability. Chloromancers are a true main healer that works as intended, at least as far as I could tell from my own experience and the million threads about it on the forums. However, it sucked at PvP, which I’ll get more into in a moment.
Another note: I had basically infinite mana regen. If WoW taught us anything, it’s that Wrath of the Lich King was fucking terrible and healer mana regen was one of the core problems. If I have infinite mana, raids will have to be balanced around that, and that may cause problems. However, chloromancers are fairly spammy as-is, being that they’re DPS-healers. So whether this will actually be a problem remains to be seen.
How to make this better: Why do callings exist if classes are completely customisable? Is it just to give altoholics something to do, since having 1 character with the capacity to do literally anything would be bad? If they want to be innovative, I think doing away with the traditional class system entirely would be a good way to start. Also, giving me my skills for free with my talent points is cool, yet I still have to purchase new ranks. What is this, 2004? WTB scalable skills.
PvP
This is going to be a short one because my PvP experience was limited to one class in one warfront (Rift’s name for battlegrounds). The warfront system is functionally identical to WoW’s, though it includes the level upgrade thing WAR had; namely, if you enter a warfront below a level ending in 7, your stats are bumped up to that of an x7 character (so 17, 27, etc) so you don’t get instantly one-shot by every 19 twink around.
The only warfront available to me was Black Garden, which you can start grinding at level 10 if that’s your thing. For those of you familiar with WAR, it’s a muderball map. Those of you who’ve only played WoW might not know what that is, because Blizzard is retarded and after six years has decided re-making the old maps is more important than adding new game types.
Basically, you hold an item — the murderball — and the longer you hold it the more points your team gets. You take damage though, and when you die, you drop it. In Black Garden, the closer you are the centre of the map, the more points you get, but the harder you are to defend.
Unsurprisingly I played the fuck out of this. Sadly, chloromancers suck balls at PvP. We require enemies to damage in order to heal, which isn’t always the case when you’re defending a ball-carrier in some out of the way location. We can also only heal one person for significant amounts at a time; which works pretty well in murderball (just put your Synthesis buff on the ball-carrier, durr), but won’t work so great on, say, point capture maps. There’s also the fact that mages sucked, at least as recently as open beta.
With all the classes flying around, balance issues are going to happen, but right now mages really get the short end of the stick. Our survivability sucks, our damage output sucks, we’re comparatively easy to lock down… blah blah. Maybe Trion has fixed some of those issues since open beta a couple weeks ago, I can’t say, but I know I sure wouldn’t play a mage on a PvP server if they haven’t. If the forums are any indication, balance issues are still running rampant.
One interesting thing is that Trion has been extremely good about listening to people’s concerns with open world PvP. First they made it harder to grief people in questing towns, then they reversed the changes — but only for PvP servers. Their commitment to making open world part of the endgame for PvPers is very promising. If they keep this up, Rift may be a viable location for all the PvP MMO refugees who have no where else to go. However, major problems still exist; complaints that the ancient wardstones – one of the main open PvP objectives/games/things to do – are completely useless, and favour gain from open PvP is a fraction of that from warfronts. When warfronts provide better rewards more quickly, why would anyone do anything else? The same thing happened with WoW and arenas in BC. Blizzard added a bunch of incentives to world PvP – almost every zone had some sort of PvP objective – and a new battleground, and then negated it all by making arenas the end-game.
Speaking of arenas, they could fuck it up completely by adding rated warfronts. Basically, Trion has simultaneously said they will not add arenas while also saying they want to add things like leaderboards. Sigh.
How they can fix this: Look more into balance issues, stay the fuck away from e-sports.
Questing
All right, let’s get this out of the way: yes, questing in Rift is linear. Maybe it’s just me, but I never really saw this as a problem. I mean, questing in Aion – in levels quests existed, anyway – was linear. Questing in Cataclysm is extremely linear as well. The only real problem I have with it is when there’s no options to go to different zones, which Rift seemed to have, but then, I never got super high. I can’t say if the world opens up a bit more later.

There hasn’t been a picture in a while, so have one of this sorta-bugged NPC.
Anyway, linear questing is good because it’s the easiest way to tell a story. However, the quests in Rift don’t seem to tell much of a story, or if they do, it’s a pretty bad one. The starting zone for Defiants is especially bad in this respect, since you’re told as you load in that the world’s about to end and you need to go back in time (yes, seriously), but you have to get to level 6 before you can actually do this. Level 6! I mean, it makes some sense when the quests say that shit is broken and you have to fix it, but six levels worth just feels like padding. Fortunately, leveling to six isn’t all that time-consuming, even reading all the quest text, so you should be back in the past within a couple hours, tops.
I might have let it slip earlier, but questing in Rift if boring. Now, you could probably point out that it’s basically the same thing every other MMO’s been doing for years, but that’s exactly the problem. If this is your first MMO, you might think it’s amazing, but after playing them for a while, it’s hard to be impressed by dreary collect quests. Especially after playing Cataclysm! The goblin starting zone comes to mind as an example of a well-done, fun zone. One of the main things that it did right was the plethora of quests that break up the monotony; the dance party quest and the footbomb ones come to mind especially. Even as someone who hates vehicle quests, if they’d had a well-done, small vehicle quest once in a while – like the shark-killing in the Lost Isles – I would have been much more engaged.
Another thing Warcraft’s goblins have that Rift lacks is humour. If they did everything the same as they were now, but took the piss out of the whole thing instead of taking themselves so damn seriously, it’d have been a much more enjoyable experience. I mean, we’re already half-way there: it’s impossible to take most of the NPC’s dialogue seriously, they might as well go all the way.

Zing!
How they can fix this: As I already said, more humour, more non-combat/roleplaying quests, anything to break up the monotony without resorting to “do some rifts for a change or pace!” Sometimes I don’t want to do rifts, or other people don’t so there aren’t enough of us to take it on. Rifts and invasions are not an excuse for bland, samey questing content.
Rifts and Invasions
Of course, no one really cares about quests, they care about this much-touted dynamic content. So you probably want to know how it is, eh?
Well, rifts are definitely the best improvement of WAR’s public quest system I’ve seen so far, I’ll give them that. Public quests that can pop up anywhere enough people are gathered is a pretty good idea, and it’s been implemented fairly well. And they really did pop up everywhere – I did dozens in the Freemarch alone, the first zone you get to in the present of the Defiant storyline. My main criticism is that they were all basically the same, i.e. mobs pour out and you kill them until the next wave comes along. It was the Killing Floor of MMO quests. Apparently they get more complicated as levels increase, which is to be expected and beneficial to noobs, but it was pretty damn annoying to me as a veteran MMO player. Whatever, though, I guess they want to ease you into them slowly.
Invasions, however, were just not fun at all. Mobs running around ganking quest givers sounds good on paper until you realise that you will inevitably be in a part of the zone where no one else is, standing just outside the aggro radius of a foothold that’s completely taken over a quest hub, with no way to proceed. Because the quests are so linear you can’t just go quest somewhere else, and you can’t take the invasion on by yourself. It’s like being on a PvP server without the satisfaction of making the enemy ragequit after spawncamping him for fifteen minutes. Plus invasion forces have less potential for interesting mechanics: unlike how rifts can evolve at high levels, invasions will always basically be just elite mobs running around. Except, perhaps, the zone-wide invasions, which are kind of hit-or-miss.
If you like regular invasions and rifts, you’re in for a treat with zone-wides. If you don’t, prepare to log out for about twenty minutes every time the zone is full so that you can avoid it, because there is truly no other way around them. Basically every quest hub will be overrun, leading you to have to drop everything to either deal with the invasion force or go find some rifts to close – and they’re extremely easy to find during an invasion. If nothing else, they bring people together, but they do so in the most annoying way possible, since you have no choice in the matter. I mean, you could go to another zone… Oh wait, no you can’t, because there’s only one place to quest in each level range! My bad.
One thing that I find strange is that it’s possible to fail zone-wides, yet there didn’t seem to be any penalty for doing so. For that matter, there didn’t seem to be any penalties for not closing a rift before it “collapses”, closing itself. I’m all for not punishing people, but if you won’t, shouldn’t you provide more incentive to get it done, like a reward? There didn’t appear to be any sort of zone-wide buff after completing a zone-wide invasion, like you’d think there would be. Perhaps I just didn’t notice it, but you’d think something like that would stand out.
How they could fix this: I’m not really sure, to be honest. Perhaps make players in certain areas not count towards zone totals for figuring out where and when rifts should spawn – like people who are in hubs or somesuch. Other than completely removing zone-wide invasions I can’t think of how to make them better either. They’re also an extremely popular part of the game, so I doubt they’d want to remove them, anyway.
Story, Lore, and Writing
First things first: the story is pretty shitty. Red team and blue team have to learn how to put aside their mutual hatred to deal with a black dragon who wants to destroy the world.

That sounds familiar…
Okay, okay, maybe that’s not fair. Red team and blue team are content to ignore the real threat to their lives while fighting a war using god-chosen, magic-infused warriors. However, neither side can win as long as the dragons still exist to eye up the large quantity of magical unobtanium that the world is made of.

It really doesn’t help that the blue team’s city is named “Sanctum”, either.
In case you hadn’t figured it out, this story has been told before, numerous times, and unlike with the mechanics related ripoffs, this is one place Trion hasn’t done it better. The characters are as two-dimensional and boring as you’d expect from an MMO, the dialogue and voice acting is so over-the-top terrible you almost think they might be joking around after all, and not one thing is original. The most interesting parts of the story are the dragon gods (who aren’t really dragons) and their cults. I don’t know about you, but finding the bad guys to be the most interesting people in a story is usually a bad sign to me.
There are interesting elements amongst the mundane, don’t get me entirely wrong. The elves being religious zealots has good roleplaying potential, even if the game itself seemed to be going down a lighter, less zealous path with people like their faction leader. The technomagic of the Eth and the other Defiant races had a definite Final Fantasy feel that I wish had been built on a bit more. A train would have been cool, for one, but I guess if you can build teleporters you have no need for anything else.
As I mentioned, the dragons are pretty cool. They’re less dragon-like and more like the Chaos Gods from Warhammer and 40k. So, of course, they’re not entirely original, but at least it’s something of a spin on dragons. One of the dragons is basically the Borg Queen, too.
Now one place a lot of people think the lore is the worst is with the Defiant starting zone, which I only partially agree with. Yes, you start in the future, and yes, this future sucks, basically saying “Guardians lose, thanks for playing”. However, this may be a timeline where the Guardian player character was never sent forward in time – it’s very possible that the Defiant time travel is what convinced the angel things you send you forward. Who knows? Time travel as a plot device in MMOs is something I’ve thought about in the past, and something I think could be implemented to very fun and good effect. This isn’t the best implementation, though, but perhaps it isn’t the worst. I can’t think of any games that did it worse, but I’m in a generous sort of mood.
While I’m going to go over it more in the roleplaying section, I actually don’t think the Ascended soul system is stupid. Coming back to life and collecting the souls of fallen warriors like some sort of Valkyrie/Pokémon trainer hybrid is pretty sweet, bro.
How they could fix this: Hiring good writers, for starts? I’m sure that’s not the only problem, however – it feels like they wrote themselves into a corner from the things that they needed to do for gameplay purposes, which is basically always the case with video games. Two player factions who somehow can’t get along, an evil NPC dragon, the whole derivative fantasy setting… Perhaps if the creative team was given more leeway with such things, the lore would be better off. I don’t know exactly how they could salvage it, at this point. As long as they avoid doing what Blizzard’s done by going “Lore? We don’t need lore!” while lighting a giant bonfire fueled by copies of Warcraft 3, they’ll at least keep enough coherence to keep their fans satisfied. Everyone else, though, will continue to look on and shake their heads every time someone defends this shitty story on the official forums. Especially when their only praise is “At least it’s not WoW”.
Roleplaying Potential
Now, this section is called roleplaying “potential” because I didn’t bother doing any actual roleplaying during beta. I mean, why would I? I needed to test the game to see how buggy it was and secondarily to see if it was worth buying. However, there are a few things I noticed. This also assumes you can RP within the painfully awful story of the world, but 90% of you either RPed in WoW and are already pros at this, or will ignore the lore anyway to make yourself a vampire, so whatever.
The soul system has interesting potential for RP. The idea of playing a character that has multiple personalities isn’t new, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Perhaps the other souls are simply background noise, giving opinions but having no actual impact on anything. Perhaps it’s an intangible connection; they know they’re changed, but they couldn’t really tell you how. A character might realise they’re more religious than they were before, but not that it was the Purifier soul they picked up that made the change. Maybe they know they’re losing themselves to the forceful personality of the Necromancer, but they don’t care. Or they do, and have to struggle constantly for control over their own actions. It has potential, but I get the feeling most people will just use it to RP crazies. I don’t know, I have little faith in roleplayers these days.
Unfortunately, the soul system is really the only positive thing I can say here. It isn’t possible to enter most buildings; even shops tend to be just merchants chilling out in the open. While this might make sense if it was pointed out in-game, say, with merchants saying they’ll have to pack up and leave the second a rift opens up above them anyway, this is never mentioned. Also, it would ring false since buildings exist, you just can’t go in. They’re nothing but decorations. Even in the Defiant capital, Meridian, there were only a couple main areas you could go into; it felt less like a city, and more like a fortress. While this makes some sense, having it be a fortress around a city would make the most sense, especially since all the NPCs refer to it as a city. I have to wonder if any of them have ever seen a city in their lives.

None of these buildings actually serve a purpose.
Once in a while, though, you will find a nice place to RP outside of Meridian. But remember that invasion problem I mentioned earlier? If you have a large enough event going on, rifts will spawn over you, the NPCs will die, and you will have to drop everything to go deal with it. While many people who hate tavern RP probably don’t mind, a lot of people like just relaxing for a few hours at a bar, and having to throw on your real gear to deal with marauding NPCs can get very annoying very quickly. I’d probably not mind and react perfectly in character the first one or two times it happens, but invasions happen all the damn time. At some point you’re going to have people ragequitting and saying “Fuck it, back to Meridian” because they don’t want to stop RPing every 20 minutes to deal with mobs.
Aion had better RP support than this, and they didn’t even have any RP servers! What the fuck, Trion.
How they can fix this: The quickest, simplest fix (other than completely changing the lore, trolololol) would be to make instanced player and/or guild housing. The main downside to this is that it keeps roleplay out of the open and can make the community very insular – or at least, more insular than it already is. It’s my experience that most RP communities aren’t that open as it is. Making open buildings is a lot more effort than I’d bet they’re willing to put into an already released game for such a small fraction of the population, so I won’t even bother asking for it. A way to flag yourself for RP, as you could in EQ2, could go to great lengths to addressing rifting and invasion concerns; if you’re not counted toward zone populations, you’re less likely to have to deal with either of those. Of course, this could cause too many people to do this and thus make them never spawn, so there’d have to some way around this. I’m just spit balling, here, I’m sure they could think of something if they wanted to.
Other Shit
Uh, what about instances? Raiding?
I didn’t do any. Gasp, shock, I know. I had intended to do the first Defiant instance, but never really got around to it because my play hours were weird (the middle of the night, mostly, because my old PC couldn’t really run it and I had to use Josh’s) and I didn’t have the time to search for groups. In order to fix this predicament for myself and many others, Trion plans to add a dungeon finder.
Now, I could write another 5000+ word post saying why random dungeon finders are fucking awful, so I’ll just say this:
Trion, if you have to add a dungeon finder, do not make it cross-realm. You would kill the barely established server communities in your still new game. People will bitch, people will moan, but how will people find guilds or friends otherwise? You have to assume the majority of your players didn’t come over with guilds. Sure, the more proactive ones will apply on websites and do premades with potential recruits, but what about the noobs you want to help with this measure? This does the exact opposite of helping anyone, least of all them. Impatient people have plenty of options other than instancing.
Oh, and all the instanced raids will be 20-mans, while the 10-mans will be raid rifts in the open world. Potentially interesting? I don’t know if that’ll be cool or epically horrible, we’ll probably see in a couple months.
UI/Mods
The UI is pretty fucking hideous. My friends told me it’s the same as WoW’s, but at least WoW allows addons. Rift is supposed to allow addons eventually, unlike certain other addon-free games. I’m looking at you, Aion. Healing is hurt the most by the shitty UI; at least in open beta, there was no way to filter buffs and debuffs and no way to show health deficits. Those are kind of important. At least mouseover macros were present.
Really, the whole thing would be improved by just allowing addons, even if only cosmetic UI improvements were allowed. I understand the people against DPS metres and boss warnings, though I don’t agree.
Crafting
Rift’s crafting has got to be it’s biggest selling point, after the souls and rifts. It’s a very innovative way of making the player involved with the crafting process, that’s both easy to pick up and still engaging after hours of pumping out burlap bolts.
HAHAHA just kidding, it’s exactly the same as WoW’s. Go take a piss while your shit is being automagically generated.
Last Thoughts
Is SOE seriously the only company who will make MMOs with appearance gear tabs? For fuck’s sake.
I was quite impressed with Trion’s turnaround time on fixing things the community didn’t like during beta, but they seem to have slowed down a bit since release. Either way, still very quick relative to most other developers, though it’d be a bigger accomplishment if Blizzard hadn’t finally gotten their act together with Cataclysm just recently.
Should I buy it?
I don’t know. In case you hadn’t noticed, I didn’t. However, I think it has potential. Perhaps I only think that because nothing else has come out in a while that wasn’t bogged down by either so many bugs it was unplayable, or so little content you didn’t want to play it. It’s stable and has lots to do, it’s just not particularly unique. The only other drawback is the class balance problem that will probably plague its entire life cycle, though I doubt it’ll be as bad as EQ2. If innovation doesn’t really matter to you, and you just want to play a fairly good-looking, polished MMO, go for it. Rift is nothing if not safe. If you want to play something different, something that takes risks that may or may not pan out, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
Me, I’m going to check out the community and such 3-6 months from now. If the game’s still going, I might see what’s changed and if it’s started to actually make a name for itself as something different. If it’s still the same bland regurgitated MMO, I’ll just keep waiting for Dark Millennium.
Provided THQ doesn’t fuck it up, that is.