Now here's an MMO that has slipped under my radar. Possibly because I don't actually need anymore between City of Heroes, WoW, ATITD, LOTRO and messing with free to play DDO. Oh, and Guild Wars. And anticipating Guild Wars 2.
But since the Beta NDA dropped and people have been talking about it and there seem to be beta invite events akin to the original Guild Wars (invitation basis, for both hype and focused testing purposes) and more importantly, in idly checking my spam email I noticed Wegame.com had sent me a beta key invite, so I thought I'd try my luck scoring beta access into RIFT and signed up.
The process is a little confusing, since it's almost like a minigame. Having a beta invite key does not guarantee you an invite into the beta. You have to collect a bunch of beta invite keys from various sites in order to raise your chances of maybe getting a beta invite. Unless of course, you pre-order or are speshul, then you get a VIP beta key that does indeed guarantee you full-on access to everything.
I ran around all the linked sites and dumped about 3-4 keys into my account. I have to admit I didn't bother writing a long story in my survey form. For games that I really really want to beta, I type long paragraphs assuring them I'm not press, play a ton of MMO games and have beta'ed and written bug reports for various MMOs before. In this case, I couldn't really be arsed and gave one sentence answers - wanted to try the rift system and the most I said was that my greatest fear would be that it would be like Aion.
Perhaps because Beta #3 was about their rift system, or because I had 3-4 beta key invites, or maybe I just got lucky, I did indeed get a proper Beta Invitation to their exceedingly short 2-3 day event, set at the extremely inconvenient start time of 2am and ending at, oh somewhere in the middle of my work day.
Still, I figured there's a night or two in between that I could do some sampling with.
First impressions?
Hmmmmm....
Yeah, let me explain that. I don't have much preconceptions or expectations for or of RIFT at all. I don't know what it's about, why I should care, or paid any attention to the hype. I was mostly skipping past all the preview articles, having had the vague impression from the graphics that it was probably some sort of Korean port (I was wrong on that count) and that Vindictus was the more interestingly named title with more innovative action mechanics, if region-locked. (I could be wrong on this one too. Who knows, haven't tried Vindictus either.)
The little I gathered from before I decided to beta preview it was that it was... nothing different, yet polished. More of the same MMO tropes, but what is there is well-put together with slightly different flavor. And that the devs were fairly on the ball responding to player concerns.
This leaves players in an altogether mixed camp with mixed feelings, and doesn't do very much to say whether I personally enjoy it. So without further ado, some plot points in my beta experience:
Pre-entering the game, I was VERY pleased by the client's updater performance. This is the first MMO patcher that has allowed me to download at the blazing fast speeds of 1-2 megabytes / sec. Yes, MB. Per second. For someone who normally averages 100-200kb/sec on MMO patchers, and falls to the soulcrushing knife-sharpening dev-murder-considering pace of 5-10kb/sec on Bittorrent-utilizing patchers this is phenomenal. Normally, I get the 1-2 mb/sec downloads only when I get lucky on Steam. +1 for RIFT.
Starting up the client, I was greeted with a slightly over-the-top narrated dramatic movie introducing the whole Heroes of Telara and Rift aspects, which was amusing to look at once, and blessedly skippable the rest of the time. Following which, the game inexplicably FROZE at the little circle that said Loading: 1%.
Whuh? At the time, I'd simply assumed it was because it wasn't time for the Beta event yet, and attempted to turn it off. Only to find my whole computer pretty much locked, and needed to reboot. A day later, when the Beta event -was- running, I started it up and ran into the same issue. Grrr. WTF? -1 for RIFT.
After some forums searching, where some other poor git had a Loading: 89% problem, and someone mentioned that their own problem had been with a firewall, my suspicion grew that it was my Zonealarm client being a nuisance. Sometimes it happens in games that go to full screen mode (half-life 2 variants are extremely guilty of this) and try to access the internet, Zonealarm blocks them (throwing up a prompt to ask if I want to allow or deny) but since it is on full-screen, I can't see or click on the prompt. Leaving the computer jammed in limbo. Sometimes ending the process helps. Sometimes it forces a reboot. I set all the permissions for internet access for all RIFT-related exe files, and voila, client loaded fine. Alright. Not a RIFT problem per se then, but still annoying.
There were a range of Beta servers up. About 8-10 of them, all medium populated. Some were PvP, some were PvE, some were RP-PvE, and some were RP-PvP. Sound familiar?
Choosing a fun sounding PvE server at random, I got into character creation. There are two factions to choose from, Guardians and Defiants. Not strictly good or evil-aligned per se, Guardians are the ostensibly more heroic-looking faction with some destiny-schtick and god-faithful overtones, and Defiants are the more villainous-looking faction with freedom-to-control-one's-own-destiny, outcast and techno-magic flavors.
You know me, I gotta play the bad guys and the monsters first, and a little bit of techno-magic just sweetened the deal. Defiant, it was.
Each faction has three races to choose from. The Guardians get dwarves, high elves and humans (though the humans are named something to do with their city/realm). The Defiants get an elemental djinn-like race called the Bahmi with dark blue skin, humans that have Muslim/nomad overtones with darker skin (also named for their city/realm), and weird magic-loving, soul-selling not-quite-dark not-quite-blood elves called Kelari.
To be frank, none of the races immediately screamed "play me." Race choice seemed limited. The male dwarf, an option I was considering, was ugly. The humans were ok, but humans are kinda boring and last resort. Both elf races have ears that stick out horizontally like WoW night elves, which immediately strike them off my alt-rolling list. Yeeech.
If you're counting, that leaves the last race of Bahmi, whose males were at least pleasingly big and bulky in the manner of the huge, tank-like males I like to make characters of, but they really just looked like big boring blue humans (or half-giants) with tattoos. -1 for RIFT in terms of racial selection.
At least I could give my big burly guy a mohawk and a decent beard fuzz. Or in other words, the character customisation was just fine. Some suggested it as being more limiting than Aion, possibly because you can't make extremely short or tall characters, but I found it fine, especially if it prevents ugly eyesores. Skin and eye colors and so on are limited to a racially appropriate palette, akin to LOTRO, but I was able to get multiple looks to my liking. +1 for RIFT.
On entering the world and the tutorial zone, the overwhelming impression was: WoW interface and polish in terms of UI and tutorial tips, a strong acrylic dark fantasy atmospheric color palette akin to Warhammer in the Chaos and Dark Elf zones, and the high graphical detail and models reminiscient of Aion. It was familiar, and it was pretty, and it was still not recognizably one of the old games, especially with all the techno-magic machines breaking up the expectations of the genre.
The only thing that felt a bit odd was that the edges of the graphics were a little aliased and jagged, and that the scrolled-out camera perspective while great for situational awareness, didn't really do justice to the quality of the high-def textures you could see while zoomed in nearer to a lower, near-first person angle.
The tutorial zone itself was not bad. While the quests themselves consisted of the standard generic kill X number of this, click onY number of that, there was a decent attempt at binding it into a narrative of sorts. One or two cutscene movies turned up on crucial points - which sounded well done in theory - except that on my particular computer, the movies were stuttering REALLY badly on playback, flickerflickerblackbarsflicker. I wasn't about to turn down my graphics to see if it helped the computer to cope any, because the rest of the time while playing the actual game, it was handling Ultra mode graphics just perfectly well with no stutter-lag, no nothing, the smoothness was pretty much like WoW. So I lived with crappy movies.
There was quite a lot of story text in the quests. Of which, I am ashamed to admit, is eminently skippable. Presumably if I bothered to read it, I might get more out of it. But I was in a hurry to experience as much of the world as possible in 2 tiny days. The basic problem was that I had no context for it, and it is very hard to decipher and derive meaning out of generic high fantasy textual jargon.
Fer example, "Our world is ending. Regulos, the Destroyer of Worlds has opened multiple rifts and spawned many demons to invade our land. Quickly, Ascended, we must stop him. First, we must clear away the scouts of his army harassing our headquarters. Kill 6 Soul Tormentors and 2 Deathtouched in the nearby village of Rock Ridge."
I've paraphrased here, I don't actually remember the proper name of the village, nor the village after that (though it either ended or started with Light.) I wasn't killing boars or rats, but strange black silhouette shades and chaos cultist-styled humans with funny names. I do remember the name of the big bad in this world as Regulos, but that's about it.
I could call it Takhisis, Horus, The Great Devourer, Deathwing, Ouroboros, Emperor Palpatine, Cthulhu, Zul, the Four Horsemen or any other random mishmash of syllables like Yardach, Hurllosos and maybe stick a Lord or a Death reference in there somewhere too. (Generic Worldending Badguy) is still just that. A trope. Dare I say it, yes, a Tv Trope:
see "BigBad."
The village could be called Stonedown, Brownwood, Firelight, Earthdawn, whatever. I could be a Chosen, Ascended, Champion, Hero, Selected, a Daeva, or yes, another mishmash of random letters.
In World of Warcraft, the core hump of belief in the lore was already past, thanks to plenty of Blizzard fans who found the setting comfortingly familiar to the lore they knew in the RTSes. In Warhammer, fans know orcs speak like dis and dat da red wunz go fasta. In RIFT, that's a mighty story hurdle to cross, especially when there is very little anchor for a player.
Aion had the idea of essentially angels and demons with a twist. Same stock, cataclysm happened, they separated and now hate each others' guts because their gods/leaders decided to take a massive dislike to each other and blame each other for the cataclysm. In your various quests, you find out that the demons really aren't that bad (if you're a demon), and that the angels are no shining paragons (especially if you're a demon), but because they were from the same root stock, you now have the tragedy of immortal friends fighting each other and the hope of individual reconciliations, if only for a little while.
RIFT takes some of this idea and goes one step further into confusion territory. No good, no bad. No angels, no demons. You have the faithful (Guardians), and the refuses-to-be-labeled-as-fallen (Defiants).
But you're also Ascended. That is, you're dead. Then were reborn. I
think the Guardian faction get to be revived by their gods as a champion. For the Defiants, you get brought back to life by a techno-machine, surrounded by bio-magic technicians, a little like a vat grown corpse out of Warhammer 40k territory.
Best of all, for the Defiants, they only figure out how to do this at the very end of the story. That's right. You are brought back on the cusp of the world ending. Regulos is about to claim the land as his own. It's a perfectly good excuse for a very dynamic NPCs fighting NPCs warzone, but it's bloody confusing to be essentially an amnesiac corpse around people chattering about Souls and Ascended and Regulos and You Are Our Last Hope, You Must Be Sent Back in Time in Our Portal To Stop Regulos - except that as a test that all your bodily systems are functioning properly, we want you to do some really humble killing and FedEx'ing quests first.
Yeah.
And frankly, when I went through the time portal, there didn't seem to be that great a change because we still seemed to be at war and fighting demonic things, except that the quest hubs got bigger.
So the story in RIFT takes some getting used to. On the Defiant side level 1-8 experience at least. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that it's there. Someone has spent quite a long time writing quite a bunch of extradaneous background and cococting a long epic saga of race histories and world/zone lore. It's just, kinda generic fantasy, and you're not really given a great reason why you should care yet.
RIFT mechanics are significantly more crunchy and innovative.
The core allure is the class system. (You'd think it would be the rifts, from the name of the game, but no...) Specifically the ability to dual and multi-class, and swap out specs and roles and experiment with talent tree builds for minmax goodness.
Y'see, you start off by picking a Calling. Or what others might call a base class. Warrior. Rogue. Cleric. Mage. This is baked in, can't change it.
But in each Calling, you have to option to pick and choose from 6-8 Souls (with the potential for more to be added later, included prestige ones.) This would be the essential class, or powerset or talent tree build of other games.
Fer example, the Cleric Calling allows you to pick from an offensive Druid who has a pet, some nature-based spells and some heals... or you could be a Sentinel with the ability to heal others, with mass heal the raid group as a specialisation, or you could be a Warden with initially slow but eventually powerful heals over time, or you could be a Justiciar which is kinda like a melee cleric tank with some self heals and buffs, and yet other Souls have a mix of life and death magic (Inquisitor) or single-target ally heal based (Purifier, I think,) etc.
Now this would be pretty mind blowing enough, that you had all these different roles, and that a cleric isn't locked into a 'heal' function. On paper at least, you can tank. You can do damage. Or you can heal. And you can have a pet. Or buffs, etc. Ditto for the other Callings, there is a mage that heals, fer example.
Even more freeing is that you can switch them by talking to a trainer. (Whether you'd have to eventually pay in-game money for this, we don't know, but yeah.) So yes, a little bit of the skill swapping Guild Wars flavor.
The ultimate in RIFT mindblowing is that you get the option of having 1-3 Souls in your arsenal. All the time. This is tremendous build flexibility. I assume that if you wanted to be teh uberhealer, you'd go something like Purifier/Sentinel/Warden and be able to heal in three different ways. Min-max is possible, as there are quite a number of different combinations and the devs are supposedly not quite concerned about ultimate balance between Souls (since you can swap 'em in and out like Guild Wars builds).
To make the talent build choices even more interesting, yes, there is a talent tree. But there are talent roots as well. The more points you invest into a Soul, you automatically unlock the root abilities. So you have to consider the stuff you want on the branches, as well as the stuff you want on the roots.
Now I could have automatically gone warrior as I do in many other games I sample, but the cleric starter chainmail looked gorgeous on my character. And it occurred to me to see if I could min-max my way into one of the roles barely touched on in standard MMOs, the melee buffer / warrior-priest. (That, and my memory of Aion suggested that clerics were fucking invincible because they worn chain and could self heal like nobody's business.)
Enter the Druid/Justiciar/Sentinel. The druid Soul seemed a bit like a mistake. I wanted to see the pet and see if I got any cool beast or nature related spells. And it was ostensibly an offensive type of Soul. I basically got a fairy pet that sits around plinking for a small amount of damage and a small amount of continual heals on me. Also a magic shield spell that absorbed a certain amount of hitpoints. But the idea of the continual heal gave me the idea for the melee cleric as tank, and I went deep into the Justiciar tree, giving me a melee skill, a light damage spell, additional sturdiness and a self-heal when hitting in melee with a mace or hammer. The Sentinel provided another heal (both on ally and on me possible) and a raid group mini-heal.
It's a bit of a monster in the lowbie zones since mana regen is very quick, only ever ran out once when fighting a massive elite at level 2, and the amount of hp returned by the heal spells is a sizeable portion of my health bar at present. But wow, it's my kind of tank/heal monster. Who cares if I do a little slower damage than the straight up dps focused people?
I had a chance to test out his survivability in a quest to close a portal continually spawning demons of one name or another. You had to get close enough to click on an item there, and the irritating thing was that about the respawn was exceedingly quick, 1-2 demons would pop up and engage you in combat, and before you know it, five seconds later, another 2 demons have joined them and another 10-15 seconds later, you have a total of 5 or 6 demons on you.
I noticed a number of mages and rogues were dying to this quest. They'd handle 1-2 fine, the third some might handle with a pet (yes, they get pets too), but the moment three or four demons swamped them, they got in trouble, started backpedalling, and with no way to heal back the damage, they died. (Or I kindly cast on them my one ally heal to be neighborly.)
I ran in and got four demons on me. It was a bit of an adrenaline rush, having to remember to hit the self-heal in between melee strikes, and the ally heal if the demons got a bit far ahead, but I was surviving fine. Fifth demon joining in was a bit of a struggle, and I may have been sunk on six, but there were other players running about and they got drawn off. I felt utterly effing awesome as I methodically clubbed all 4-5 demons systematically into the dust, and ended with a barely scratched health or mana bar.
There is a global cooldown on skills. So it's not just a matter of spamming stuff. You do have to choose which skill would be most appropriate at that particular time. Within a couple seconds of the GCD wearing off, you can queue the skill, which makes combat pretty smooth, approaching WoW-levels of smoothness, instant feedback and active combat, imo.
I'm not sure if things will eventually devolve to the point of mathematically computed 'best' builds. But for now, the system is rather innovative.
And then there are the rifts.
Narrative-wise, there are supposed to be six types of rifts, based on the elements - fire, water, air, earth, death and life, I think. These are planar tears that appear in the fabric of reality, (thanks to the efforts of the BigBad, I presume) and can be ripped open by the Ascended in order to destroy them.
Gameplay-wise, these are public quests. Supposedly of a better quality than Warhammer's. I wouldn't know, I've only done two, and public quests in newbie zones are always the best place to do them since there's so many people about. Supposedly, the first stage is always soloable, and the last stage will always strongly require a bunch of people around. When the rift is over, you get a reward based on your participation and stages completed.
One of the biggest issues with Warhammer's public quests were the reward rolls for gold and silver and bronze rewards. It was never really clear how these were calculated, and led to some crazy battles for top dps, top healing and top aggro, and a lot of whiny complaints on the forums about how some other guy got the gold prize for just walking past the area, whereas they spent AGES doing the whole quest and got zilch. (But some xp and gold, but those are very forgettable.)
It's not clear in RIFT how they calculate rewards either, but a sneaky thing they've done is to not leave the scoreboard accessible to players. (Or at least, I haven't found it yet.) At the end, a little icon in the rift quest-tracking UI indicator lights up, you click on it, and ta da, pops out your individualized reward. I've gotten a green consumable item for just walking by once (maybe my pet hit something), and on the two issues I participated by getting some hits in on the mobs I could reach, I got some kind of blue consumable - do 200 damage to something and heal 200 damage in return. There's a little less jealousy since you don't know what others got.
The other problem with Warhammer's public quests were that they were heavily reliant on having the minimum number of players, preferably of the right holy trinity roles, in order to succeed at it. And level-based at a very narrow range. So once the initial launch crowd moved off, the PQs were abandoned.
I think RIFT rifts are still level-based, which may not be great. But since people can switch roles, the holy trinity problem may be less of an issue. The rarity of the rift may also have an effect. Warhammer's PQ's were always on. This led to desensitization. RIFT rifts may only go off at certain random times, who knows?
Linked with rifts is the concept of a dynamic zone. That is, always changing. I think this has significant promise. Even through my beginner questing experience, I felt a certain dynamism in the zones I was in. Stuff was always going on. Similar to Cataclysm, there are border guards around the town quest hubs, and NPC enemies are charging in a constant stream at them. The war atmosphere is there. Stuff that didn't originate from me is happening.
Imagine my surprise when I returned to one of the quest hubs and found it quiet. Peaceful. Not under attack. The silence was startling, and I noticed it. I'm still not sure what happened, was it a rift, or was it phasing technology after I completed a quest, or just a lull in the scripted battle, I dunno.
On paper, it is said that rifts that are left alone will not do nothing. They will grow bigger. They will affect the landscape. Certainly when the rifts I saw opened, it was this gigantic purple deathblight on the landscape and rather un-ignorable. I heard people calling over the faction chat for level 17s to fight off some kind of invasion. (And complaints that the quest NPCs they wanted to turn in their stuff to had died.) I'm not sure what that was about either - was it a PvP invasion by the other faction? a rift? what? But it was certainly dynamic.
I've sung quite a number of praises for the innovative systems in RIFT. Other things, RIFT does with polished applomb. It has crafting and the standard nodes to harvest, profession bars to level up. UI is customizable and keybindable.
All the same, I'm not convinced yet that I want to play this.
Given a buy the box, no subscription deal, I would buy and recommend this without remorse. It is worth trying. If only to see the interesting class system, the rifts and the graphics.
A subscription sets the bar higher. Endgame is...what? It's confused, that's what. There will be dungeon instances and raids. There will be PvP. RIFT is basically trying to be a mini-WoW, a little something for everyone, except we're not sure yet if hardcore raid progression will be the path to the best gear ever in RIFT's case.
If one has no interest in the endgame, then it is essential one enjoys the journey. Except the narrative journey is at best a little confused and takes some dedication to read through to understand, and at worst, making up 1001 generic soulless excuses for FedExKillAll quests.
The core gameplay of combat, character building and wandering about dynamically changing zones with rift-fuls of enemies and loot in them is fine. It's there. But what else is there on top of it? Is that enough?
