Worth the Price of Admission

Yep, it's time for another round of Postcards from Telara, with some commentary on how I spent RIFT beta #4.

Folks will tell you that RIFT is a quest-based grinder similar to all standard MMOs out there, on rails, yadda yadda. But y'know, it does support a little bit of wandering off the beaten path all the same.

At the time I remade my cleric using my pre-order account, there was some kind of server lag / general being twitchy going on. Quests were stalling and getting stuck and necessitating GM resets, mobs were not spawning quickly after being killed and even Rifts weren't closing properly or moving on to the next stage as supposed to. I'd manage to escape out of the tutorial into Freemarch, but the first linear quest chain had gotten stuck. Deciding not to queue with the rest of the lowbies, I headed out into the wilderness to hunt for rifts and kill some mobs. To my surprise, I ran into a quest-giver along the road, with a quest for me, directing me to the second quest hub Kelari Refuge. By picking that quest up, I was able to start the Kelari Refuge quest chains without needing to finish the first quest hub that was stuck. That was pretty elegant, I thought, and just a little bit sandbox-y.

Some time later, while wandering around, doing quests, closing Rifts, I spied a lonely pair of islands out to the northeast of shore. Well, hey, time to attempt breaking the game and swimming for some time way out there. It would probably be barren dirt, but it would be fun to go someplace no one went.

I am in love with the ground textures. The dirt and soil, the grey rock, the grass, oh my.

To my immense surprise, I found this statue. Reminiscient of the Argonath, and not even visible from my position on the shoreline until I swam up to the two lonely little islands and got closer. No mobs, no kitschy little achievement popup, but a warm rewarding Explorer buzz all the same. Very peaceful, no players at all wandered here while I was there. And the detail in the textures is unbelievable.

Here's the proper scale of the statue. Its feet, pretty much. Mainland behind me, and a wonderful water rift provides some interest in the background.

The art team in RIFT is fantastic. Here's another one of those attention-to-detail set pieces. Out in the ocean, a quest to pick up some items from a sunken wreck. I come across some strange dirty bone-like projections in the water. Now one is normally focused on avoiding nasty threshjaw crocodiles and sharks, so what was underneath isn't too obvious when you're swimming as fast as you can away from the glaring red UI'ed threats.

Only the tip of the iceberg.

That is, until you actually dive DOWN underwater and see the thing take up your entire monitor.

Bones of a Unnamed Leviathan

Some comic relief now. The servers came down briefly because they were adding two new servers to cope with the crazy influx of mad new RIFTing beta players. While waiting for Wolfsbane to come up, I made a Guardian-side dwarf warrior on the new server to kill a little time. Deciding to go Champion to play with two-handed weapons, I was exceedingly tickled by the second tutorial newbie weapon, which was a claymore... likely bigger than the dwarf himself. When he held it at ease in one hand, it practically dragged the ground, but not quite (just a few inches off, because RIFT is polished that way and will not allow clipping to occur.)

Could he be compensating for something?

Anybody can farm mobs. Question is, can you farm SEEDS!

Back on the Defiant cleric side of things, this was an amusing side quest. Not quite up to the calibre of WoW's irreverent jibes, but a cute attempt on RIFT's part. We went FARMING, my faerie and me.

Click on the soil mound to plant a seed, click on my quest item to water the seed, wait a split second and see a little green sprout poke out of the soil. Wait 5-10 seconds longer, and the sprout grew up into a bigger plant, which could be clicked on to be harvested. Once, a rabbit came out of nowhere and ate the sprout, necessitating me to do another round of replanting. I dunno if I could have prevented it, I did try to meteor the rabbit, but it did its dirty work a little too fast.

This was the utter climatic highlight of beta #4 for me. So far, at any rate, haven't logged back in yet. Player numbers had apparently peaked to the point that one of these rare zone events could trigger (or the GM/devs triggered it to test it).

The big bad boss NPC honchos started roaring insults back and forth at each other, which every player in the zone could see, splashed in the centre of our screens, resulting in our Defiant side getting a call to arms against the Tidelord (water abyssal). There was also a bunch of Death rifts around the place too.

Up popped a quest tracking counter for the Big Zone Event quest, and players started spontaneously milling, dropping all thought of continuing their boring FedEx quests, looking for rift trouble.

Death rift. It was amusing to note that people gather on the edges, scared of aggroing the elites en masse until sturdy enough tanks or heals or healtanks or tankpets showed up in enough number to dissipate aggro.

Somehow, when you get to groups of this size, the aggro just naturally breaks up enough into handle-able amounts. This is admittedly overkill. Normally 6-8 are more than enough for a rift.

A Death invasion x 2, or 3. The forces create 'footholds' - ground objects that can be destroyed. Invasion forces of 4-5 mobs also spawn from these footholds (I think.)

Nothing like quest trackers to egg players on into rabidly chasing anything that looked like it could maybe be an abyssal.

The travelling Zerg forms spontaneously. After the gathered group has cleared everything in its vicinity, it starts playing follow the leader. (Which are the level 20+ guys on mounts who probably have a better idea of where they are going than us.) Traveling in a vast buffalo herd also has the advantages of the weak stragglers getting picked off by loose aggro'ing mob predators along the sides, while the savvy hug the centre of the group. :)

This is what the water invasion event looked like on the map. All the blue crossed swords are water invasion forces. The arrows show the path where they are going. The blue swirly whirlpools are water rifts. The squares with blue in them are footholds. It's an incredibly dense amount of info to take in at once, the realization that there are SO many mobs in our zone. We eventually figured out that the Mark of the Tidelord objects we had on our goal objective were the things out at sea (to the north of the shoreline.)

More rifting. Water rift this time. There's some variety between lots of small mobs to kill at once, and a few big bads with sacks of hp to pound on.

It's good energy there. It reminds me a bit of Warhammer in the early launch days. Somehow Warhammer died down because there weren't enough people to complete the public quests successfully, and people ended up queueing for scenarios because they gave the best rewards, leaving world PvP notoriously bereft of people. Zergs also ended up avoiding each other and just doing PvE against zone keeps, again beccause of min-maxing reward.

I heard that WoW's Tol Barad has run afoul of this recently. It is apparently imbalanced to the point that the defender has it much easier defending, by a factor of 10x or so. To offset this, the WoW devs in their infinite 'wisdom' decided to change the attackers' reward to 10x that of defending. So naturally, faced with such a prisoner's dilemma, some servers have come up with the cooperative defection solution of "don't defend, we'll trade wins every 2 hours" yielding maxed rewards on both sides. Clever clever players. Silly devs.

The real question is, will RIFT fall into these traps? The rewards so far avoid the Warhammer public quest trap of having rewards as gear tied to certain level ranges. (Making it useless for higher levels to go back and do lower level pq's.) RIFT also does a fairly good job in making the rifts very very hard to ignore. By god, these things will overrun your roads, your quest hubs, your crafters, your everything if you ignore them. I hear they eventually expire too. They don't just stay around statically unchanging like Warhammer pq's.

I think the key is whether players feel it is possible to defeat the rifts by themselves or in a small group. If it's impossible, if one keeps wiping on the attempt, one learns helplessness and to avoid it like the plague. On the other hand, I did see a planar goods reward for a stone that summons up Defiant NPC elites in certain places, which means that a soloist might eventually be able to use them to help out, even if the rest of the zone is deserted. I did also see small minor soloable footholds. Presumably RIFT devs were smart enough to tie in the spawning of certain types based on the number of players around.

A certain role flexibility also helps here. In Warhammer, if you were missing heals, you were screwed. No tank? Screwed. Got one but not the other? Still screwed. Hell, if you didn't have enough dps, it was possible you'd be overrun because the heals ran out of mana.

In RIFT, I have melee cleric tank'ed a decent amount of rift mobs, allowing watching rogues and mages to start participating. Hell, I've seen mage pets and rogue pets tank more sturdily than certain warriors. I know, because I only have two targetable ally heals, and I can keep the pet going indefinitely while a certain warrior (certainly they were effective at stealing aggro and taunting) melted most alarmingly and didn't stay up long enough for my heals to recharge. (I have a third self-heal triggered off meleeing with a mace, a fourth raid/party AoE heal that eats mana but can be fired to heal myself in a pinch and a faerie pet that heals me - that's how I can healtank.)

Having the infomation that there's -something- going on is also helpful. With the map, one can see at a glance where the hotspots are. WAR did this with areas where RvR was going on, but forgot to indicate PQs as well. With RIFT, hell, you can even see where the invasions are headed to. (And you get regular announcements that such-and-such Death invasion is attacking Quest Hub to spur you toward the town if you're anywhere in the area.)