Rift

Ivan

Surprised that I haven't seen any mention of this game. I don't have a lot of time to write up a review, but I think it can be safely summed up in a few lines.

It is magnificent.

First impressions give the appearance of someone taking Aion, World of Warcraft and Warhammer and distilling the best features of each and producing some flavourful MMO concoction.

The result is an extremely well polished game which offers extensive replayability within a single individual class. There are 4 basic Archetypes, Warrior, Rogue, Cleric and Mage. At first glance you could be forgiven for thinking that this is another cookie cutter Fantasy MMO, however each archetype is split into ~9 Souls.

Each soul makes up a part of your classes' talent tree. As you enter the game, you complete some quests that unlock your first, second and third Soul. Equipping this soul gives access to the talents and through the talents, the base skills, for each of these souls.

The result is a tank warrior, with magic mitigation and physical mitigation who tanks with a 2-hander and can still throw out healthy dps.

Of course, with up to 4 roles (read: Quadruple spec), a player can change role instantly to any other role they have access to with their archetype.

Considering the Rogue Archetype has the Bard and Riftblade souls, i.e. healer and tank respectively, a rogue can change from Ranged pet class, to melee stealth ganker, to healer to tank in a moments notice.

Likewise, a mage can change their role within their archetype and unlock a whole new type of gameplay without ever rerolling an alt.

All of this comes before the main theme and objective of the game. Rifts. These nasty things spawn all over the game world and hordes of monsters come spawn and start a Public Quest. If players get to the Rift in time, they can kill all the monsters and earn great rewards exactly like we saw in Warhammer. However, if the monsters should be too much for the defenders, then invasions begin to spawn.

These invasions spread out across the zone and attack camps of friendly NPCs, preventing players from questing and progressing. If an invasion defeats a quest hub, then a foothold spawns.

The result is a world constantly in flux and with dynamically generated quests, public quests and PvP (when players get high enough to Rift in enemy zones).

All of these features are enshrined in the single most polished MMO I've experienced in Beta to date and I've beta tested pretty much all of them.

http://www.riftgame.com/en/
Release is 1st of March with ~4 beta "weekends" before that.
Headstart is 24th February if you preorder.

Stev_o

Iv bought the CE. Looks amazing from what iv seen sadly the next event is in the middle of exams for me so will have to wait a bit longer for my first play through.!

Taking the Class system from Titan Quest really intrigues me. Going to be hundreds of different builds for classes.

Sarn

I was thinking about giving this a go considering I haven't played anything in a while. Thanks for the brief review.

Ivan

Some nice FAQs here:
http://www.tentonhammer.com/rift/interviews/crafting-part-2-1-6-11

Funky

this sounds freakin awesome, was told about it briefly recently but didn't really look into it... i think this might put my temptation to cata on hold :P

Ivan

It really is as good as it looks. I don't think I've been this excited about an MMO launch since World of Warcraft.

4 weeks was all it took for me to tire of Cata. A fraction of the time I lasted with WotLK. This game offers something for everyone, there are literally dozens of things for you to do when you log in.

Venom

Ivan wrote: »

It really is as good as it looks. I don't think I've been this excited about an MMO launch since World of Warcraft.

4 weeks was all it took for me to tire of Cata. A fraction of the time I lasted with WotLK. This game offers something for everyone, there are literally dozens of things for you to do when you log in.

Like what things?

Not being smart and very interested in Rift just curious about the dozens of things

Funky

How's the PvP? Is it like world pvp or instanced stuff? There alot of content to level up on or does it get grindy?

Found a character builder online to see what the classes are like, damn there's alot of options.

Kiith

Ivan wrote: »

All of this comes before the main theme and objective of the game. Rifts. These nasty things spawn all over the game world and hordes of monsters come spawn and start a Public Quest. If players get to the Rift in time, they can kill all the monsters and earn great rewards exactly like we saw in Warhammer. However, if the monsters should be too much for the defenders, then invasions begin to spawn.

These invasions spread out across the zone and attack camps of friendly NPCs, preventing players from questing and progressing. If an invasion defeats a quest hub, then a foothold spawns.

The result is a world constantly in flux and with dynamically generated quests, public quests and PvP (when players get high enough to Rift in enemy zones).

That sounds ****ing awesome. Time to read up on the game i think.

Kur4mA

Wow, this does actually look amazing. I've just pre-ordered it. This is the first time I've bee excited about a current MMO in a loooong time.

Playboy

Pre-ordered it too! Hopefully this will be the first MMO since EVE/WoW that will actually live up to expectations!

Stev_o

Next beta event is Tuesday week can't wait! Trying to decide what faction to go as, don't want to end up as Defiant if the servers are imbalanced with them.

Ivan

Venom: I may have exaggerated for effect with my "literally dozens of things to do", I actually counted the things I can do at level 16 and I came up with 6, but I think there will be more in just a few levels.

Funky: It's really hard to gauge the PvP at this stage. I'm maining a warrior at the moment and in Warfronts I feel unstoppable (with my pocket healer), but a lot of the skills that make the warrior so imba at level 16 PvP become available to the other classes at higher levels. Around 30 or so. For instance, the Champion (A warrior soul) begins with a charge that can then be talented to be used in combat and offer a root. All while picking up an AoE fear that just roots your primary target. Rogues get a charge at around 21 points into their respective tree i.e. level 23 or so (The talent points don't scale up linearly like we see in WoW, some levels you earn 2-3 points). Still, from what I've experienced in the Warfronts, it's very much akin to Warhammer. A lot of fun. The Rifting is where the real meat comes in, I feel... Open World PvP has never seen anything like this. Enter an enemy territory while spawning a friendly faction Rift that starts a Public Quest for the opposing faction and starts spitting out Invasions of friendly mobs. Expect to see gangs of rogues following Invasions waiting for the eager enemy faction who are expecting an easy farm.

It is grindy, but it doesn't feel like it in the same way that WoW didn't feel grindy when I first started it. I expect that to change at some stage but the levels are pretty fast and you can always jump into PvP for levels for a change. Then again, you can also just change your whole playstyle by changing your 3 souls for something else and come out with a totally different playstyle. Imho, it is the perfect game for altaholics like me and mine.

Stev_O: The racials certainly seem to be in the favour of Defiant, so I think I'll be playing Guardian from the outset. Was playing Guardian in the last Beta Event and had instant queues for Warfronts. I'm hoping they'll eventually see sense and balance them. Sadly though, it seems to be Horde v Alliance all over again. I think the fact that Defiant seem more like the Emo-bad guys 90% of gamers have grown to love... and Guardian are the fanatical, religious zealots everyone loves to hate will see a pretty clear population imbalance in favour of Defiant.

My friends and I have been posting on the forums about the imbalance in the last beta phase. Keleri racial is just ridiculous by comparison. That said, I'm a huge fan of the underdog so... I guess I'm committed.

I too can't wait for the next beta event. I actually took 2 days off for a beta event until it was pointed out to me that taking the time off for the early start makes WAY more sense. Still, it should give you an idea of how much I've been enjoying this game.

Ivan

Oh and Funky, http://rift-planner.com/ is probably better. That's a fairly old builder that was made from some guy who watched a video of the talent trees and made the builder based on that video. Impressive, but horribly inaccurate in places.

Tr1PoD

This game came as a bit of a shock to me, I hadn't seen it before or maybe I had and for some reason instantly dismissed it but after playing the beta weekend with Ivan I haven't been able to bring myself to log back into wow since.

I put up a video of my rogue at level 12, mostly Bard spec. Nothing overly interesting but shows a minor rift fight in the first main zone after leaving the nooby area.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zUApV9eL7Y

Got to 23 on the rogue and 18 or so on a Cleric by the end of the beta weekend. I honestly couldn't tell you what the leveling speed is like exactly because pretty much every minute of running around I was enjoying just playing so it felt very fast at least. Its a western MMO so even if it gets slow at high levels I don't think there well be any super grinding involved. Everything about it felt very polished, I only encountered one bug that I thought was worth reporting and when I got up to play the next day it was already fixed and in the patch notes from that morning. I also read lots of great stories about customer service with them ringing people to sort out technical issues without being asked, taking purchase receipts as proof for beta since some of the stores didn't sort out keys properly. I don't think anybody that was eligible for beta didn't get sorted out by the time it started. High praises for them on the forums anyway.

Rifts are like public quests in Warhammer in that they have a number of stages to complete and usually some sort of boss/elite at the end which you must defeat to close the rift. You don't need to be grouped to receive contribution and the rewards you just need to be within the rift area and participate. Where they differ is that there are far more of them and they spawn in random locations on the map. This usually starts up slowly with one or two spawning around the map with a few wandering monster invasions and ends up after a few hours in a full on super invasion with tons of rifts and quest hubs getting attacked and taken over by bands of monsters, ending in some kind of super boss.

Rewards are traded for by various tokens you receive from completing rifts, armour, buffs etc and a bunch of stuff for helping you set up camp in enemy territory by the look of it (I didn't get a chance to test them out). As far as I know you can also get certain crafting materials as reward.

For world pvp during beta you could simply purchase a teleport item for planar tokens and go gank at will, at least on the pvp server. For the live version I think the plan is that you have to tear open a rift to the other factions zone and you can then follow through and set up a base camp with monsters to aid you and go rampaging through their territory wiping out quest hubs. Same system on the pve server but you just wont be flagged automatically only if you attack the enemy or manually turn your pvp flag on. Should be good fun on either server type. I'm not sure how they will balance it so one side isn't constantly under attack but considering what I have seen so far I have no reason to not believe that they have a good system in mind.

Warfronts are the battlegrounds of Rift. There was only 2 different ones available during the beta weekend both of which are immediately familiar if you have played battlegrounds in WoW or Warhammer or any similar game. The first one was to grab and hold an object which spawns in the center of the map same as Mourkain Temple in Warhammer and the second was a simple 5 flag capture and hold like Wow's Arathi Basin. If you like battlegrounds you will like these, if not they don't really offer anything new.

PvP equipment can be bought from level 25 onward. It didn't seem particularly expensive. At least it seems you will be able to afford the level 25 set by the time you reach that level if you have been doing 50% warfronts and 50% questing/rifting.

The class system is really great especially for people who are not good at sticking to one character, like me! I played with a ton of different specs over the weekend but just to give you an idea of the main ones I tried out:

Bard/Ranger/Saboteur - Speed, Aoe heals, Aoe Snare, group buffs.

Ranger/Assassin/Riftstalker - Ranged attacks, strong pet, minor stealth, blink, snare, armour debuff.

Assassin/Ranger/Saboteur - Permanent stealth, melee, poisons, pet, blind (cool thing about this combo is I could just as easily use my bow attacks even from low points invested in ranger and pop out from stealth and just mow people down from a distance. Poisons proc from bow attacks and assassin tree also had a ton of other passive buffs and other useful things to add to a ranged class even if its original purpose is to be a melee soul.

That is just a very small sample of some options even at my low level and I'm just giving an overview not all the different abilities and passives that work together.

There are so many options and combinations within each class it could keep you entertained for a long time.

This ended up getting a bit long and I'm not sure if I'm just rambling so going to leave it at that for the moment. I'm pretty excited and suffering some withdrawal from not being able to play the beta 24/7 so my apologies.

Funky

Cheers for the posts dudes. This sounds pretty damn good, definitely gonna give it a go. Bard/Saboteur/Ranger was something I thought looked pretty sick just from playing around with the character builder. Another one I liked was Warden/Shaman/Druid.

Ivan

Loren has a crazy Druid/Shaman/Warden build he keeps raving about. I'll see if I can get him to come post about Clerics... not sure if he even has a boards account.

Kiith

I'm messing around with http://rift-planner.com/, and there are some insane amount of combinations. Obviously it's hard to tell what they'd be like without trying them, but it's still bloody impressive.

Lorenzomedici

Can't say enough good things about Rift.

This one is certainly creeping out from under the rug, no hype or massive IP this time. They almost exclusively promote the game through word of mouth and a single viral that has a funny dig at WoW.

The game has the level of polish we dream of when trying a new launch mmo, from menu and interface design to animations and stability.

Lets get one thing clear from the outset though, this is an mmorpg and as such has the same foundations of any current mmo; quests, dungeons, instanced pvp, tank/healer/dps roles, mounts, levels, crafting and of course purchase and subscription fees.
If these are things you dislike or would use to brandish a game a "<insert game> clone" then you can move on.

Rifts big selling points as indicated by the OP is Dynamic content and Personalised class building.
Dynamic event driven content is the way forward, Rifts opening to provide a break in questing is fun and random in equal parts. Leave the rift to fester is also rewarding in that is promotes more dynamic content in the way of invasions.
Losing quest hubs and entire towns to invasions is commonplace, no trainers or quest givers or vendors until you rally with the general populous and clean out that invasion because if you don't that invasion becomes a foothold.
The foothold is a base of operations, with a boss and various respawning minions. Destroying the spawn pool will only slow the spawns but the boss will just rebuild the spawn pool. Only killing the boss will allow you to remove the foothold for good.(or until another invasion decides your town is worth something)

The class system is amazing and the biggest draw for me. Four class callings; rogue, mage, cleric and warrior with 9 "souls" or talent trees each.
You pick your own talents trees from the 9 available however, leading to Rogue tanks or Mage healers as some of the less commonly seen archetypes lately.

I've personally toyed with battle clerics consisting of Shaman/druid/warden setups and a mage that combines HoTs and DoTs in the form of Chloromancer/Warlock/Necromancer.

The possibilities are endless in this game, if you play an mmorpg currently and your not 100% satisfied with it then Rift is worth a shot. It most likely has every feature your current mmo has and more. Its also likely more polished and better presented too!

morgana

Played in the last two betas. It certainly has great potential with a nice community to boot.
The combinations of souls are amazing and so is the ability to set up three specs and change on-the-fly.
Crafting seems easy and nothing much to shout about. Love it or hate it, the RNG chance of greater output like in Aion adds a certain spice to crafting.
Pre-ordered :P.

Venom

For those that have played in the beta...

Does the invasions from rifts that over run a quest hub pose a issue if there are not many players in the area as in Warhammer the public quests were great until a lack of players made them impossible to do.


Also is there a PvE and PvP server or is it all in one?

Any mounts in the game or a fast travel option of any kind?

Kiith

There's definitely mounts anyway, as the Collectors Edition on Steam offers a unique one at lvl20.

Ivan

Venom wrote: »

For those that have played in the beta...

Does the invasions from rifts that over run a quest hub pose a issue if there are not many players in the area as in Warhammer the public quests were great until a lack of players made them impossible to do.


Also is there a PvE and PvP server or is it all in one?

Any mounts in the game or a fast travel option of any kind?

Yes, if an invasion overruns an areaand there just aren't enough people to handle it then you are kinda screwed. But thankfully they seem to have considered this and have created the position of "Rift co-ordinator" a GM role who monitors player activity and increases or decreases Rift activity accordingly.

It was used to great effect in Beta-4. At off-peak times we saw maybe 3-4 Rifts active at anyone time. During peak times the rate was closer to 20 Rifts.

There are PvE and PvP servers.

Fast travel exists in the form of flight paths but you must explore the area you would like to teleport to. Flight paths travel you instantly, so while you lose out on the experience of majestically flying over everything, you also don't have to sit and fly over everything when you want to go anywhere.

And mounts are available at level 20 for 60% movement speed and again later for 100% I believe. I'm not sure at what level the second tier of mounts is available, or even if it is definitely 100% movement speed.

Lorenzomedici

To expand a bit on what Ivan said.

Venom wrote: »

Does the invasions from rifts that over run a quest hub pose a issue if there are not many players in the area as in Warhammer the public quests were great until a lack of players made them impossible to do.

While there are staff onhand to control the dynamic events should they get out of control or need to be turned up in some cases, the events have durations themselves.
Rifts and Footholds despawn naturally over time if left alone, the invasions are just the patrol from a Rift to a Foothold and considering they setup the foothold they have the same duration.
Granted its not 10 minutes duration or anything like it, but the dynamic events scale for the player base. So you won't have crazy major invasions and footholds taking over all the towns at like 4am because the server sees there isn't a big enough playerbase online to combat it.

Venom wrote: »

Any mounts in the game or a fast travel option of any kind?

Each faction gets a choice of 2 mounts at lvl20, which can be upgraded at lvl40 and again at lvl50 for speed increases.
- Guardians get a lion with 2 tails or a camel/gorilla creature
- Defiants get a mechanical horse or a giraffe/zebra creature

And as mentioned collectors edition preorder gets a 2 headed turtle

Ivan

Woah, 2-tailed lion! That's me sold on Guardian right there! Noice.

Tr1PoD

Good description here of what a full on invasion looks like on the map http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?27763-THose-that-didnt-play-Beta-This-is-what-a-massive-Zone-Invasion-looks-like-on-map&p=492759&viewfull=1#post492759

With regard to not being able to hand in or pick up certain quests due to an invasion event, yes this will happen but either there are other people who need that quest area and you band together to reclaim it or you can go do something else for a while, rifting, warfronts, other quest area, crafting whatever. During beta at least it was never really a problem since there was a ton of players around the same level. You still get some rewards as a high level for clearing out a foothold too so you can easily just ask a guildy to come help clear it out for you.

I can see a few people getting annoyed by it, they just want to go from one quest to the next and ignore everything else but those people will need to be reminded that the game is called Rift and not Questathon.

I found that you can solo some of the minor rifts pretty easily and overall rifting gives a ton of xp so you aren't really going to be losing out on leveling if you miss a few quests for a while.

Da Bounca

The more I see and read, the more I like it. Release date coincides with end of exams for me too.

Been messing around with the builder and the possibilities are endless.

Ivan

Murhahahaha. Time to get the band back together!

Kiith

Ivan wrote: »

Murhahahaha. Time to get the band back together!

Too early for a forum? :P

Stev_o

Hmm guild anyone =D

Stev_o

Got to admit stuff like this looks amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaeWG3iga1o

Also the levelling speed seems insane wonder if that will slow down during the official launch.