Rift

Ivan

@Stev_o: Alpha server is still under NDA, so I can't really comment on things there.
@Drakar: Yes, Alpha comes before Beta. The Alpha server is where they apply stuff before moving it to Beta servers for the Beta events. The result is alot more content available on the Alpha server and a first look at new changes.
@Everyone: We have a guild called Boardsies on Cloudborne. It's an EN PvP server so might get a bit crowded. In any case, everyone in the guild has rights to invite, so just do a /who boardsies to see who is currently online and send em a whisper. The sekrit code word is: "Can I haz invite", or any variation thereof... we're honestly not that picky.

Columc

Oh guess i'll be missing this beta event, gona for the weekend and wont be back home till monday when the server closes. enjoy the time on it guys

Ivan

Oh, Stev_o and Morgana were the two I selected for Alpha invites. Hard luck to everyone else, though I'm sure once they get their invites...

Dcully

Having not played Rift in any form ill spend what time i get to play messing around with different classes.
I literally know nothing about the game so it should be fun seeing whats in store.

Lone Stone

Yea same here, looking forward to trying out a warlock/necromancer type mage, Now if only i knew what time 10:00 Am pst was in gmt

Lorenzomedici

10am PST is 6pm GMT, same start time for every beta event and it ends Monday 6pm GMT also.

I'll be online most of the evening/night on Khrux/Khruxx/Truxx or some variation and can invite anyone who is interested to the Boardsies guild.

Da Bounca

10 mins left in the cloudborn queue.
Gonna roll a pyro to start with.

Dcully

Played for about 90 mins there , meh its a cross between warhammer and aion, not overly impressed at all.
Ill try it some moreover the weekend.

Kur4mA

Dcully wrote: »

Played for about 90 mins there , meh its a cross between warhammer and aion, not overly impressed at all.
Ill try it some moreover the weekend.

90 minutes? Did you even get out of the starter area and do some Rifting?

Dcully

Yeah got out of starter area, no rifting as of yet.
Its ok but feels like im playing war or aion allover again.
Ofcourse its too early to judge but initial impressions arenet great

Lone Stone

Dcully wrote: »

Yeah got out of starter area, no rifting as of yet.
Its ok but feels like im playing war or aion allover again.
Ofcourse its too early to judge but initial impressions arenet great

Yea i feel the same, did some rifting got to lvl 11, on the guardian side, i do like the controles they feel very solid and like some of the casting animations but i dunno reminds me of aion where all you do is follow the path to the tiny quest hub quest txt's so far (yes i read the quest txt) has been very bland. Just feels like im running around bashing on mobs for no reason.

Il see il play it a bit more if i get the chance. Feels a lot like war/aion with some lotr elf crap chucked in.

Davaeo09

Hey folks, any more beta keys going? :P
Mad to give this game a try after playing wow on and off the last 4 years.

Lorenzomedici

9XXD-PFTC-9R32-W27Z-MGCY

Da Bounca

Level 15 now. Played a good bit of battleground, finished lots of boring quests and took part in a few rifts and fended off some footholds.
I feel no personal attachmanet to my character, I have a bag full of useless junk, I couldn't be arsed with crafting and I can't see any light at the end of the tunnel.

All in all, I feel it is a very uninspired game.

I've found all the same old niggly faults that I've found with 90% of other mmos.

This game is nothing new.

It is basically a polished WAR. From what I can see, the only thing that is different from most other main stream mmos is the multiple class system(which is not enough of a reason to play any game).


I feel sorry for the model and environment designers that their excellent work has gone into such a basic and boring game.

Dcully

I tried to play some more yesterday, forced myself to play to about lvl 16 on my rogue type dude and lvl 12 or so an a cleric and mage but i was bored to hell.
As others have said there is nothing new here and what is there doesnt float my boat.
If your going to bring out a new MMO atleast make it look and feel different to other MMOs that were not exactly successfull.
The general chat on the server i was on was full of people saying similar and very few saying they planned to buy the game, i predict yet another flop.
I really hope im wrong, i really want more good MMOs but sadly i seriously doubt Rift is one of them.
Having said all that maybe i needed to play further and lvl up more to appreciate it but i really cba,there was nothing there to inspire me to keep playing.

Psychosis

Dcully wrote: »

I tried to play some more yesterday, forced myself to play to about lvl 16 on my rogue type dude and lvl 12 or so an a cleric and mage but i was bored to hell.
As others have said there is nothing new here and what is there doesnt float my boat.
If your going to bring out a new MMO atleast make it look and feel different to other MMOs that were not exactly successfull.
The general chat on the server i was on was full of people saying similar and very few saying they planned to buy the game, i predict yet another flop.
I really hope im wrong, i really want more good MMOs but sadly i seriously doubt Rift is one of them.
Having said all that maybe i needed to play further and lvl up more to appreciate it but i really cba,there was nothing there to inspire me to keep playing.

I agree with this 100%.

The game is not bad, its a decent mmo but it offers nothing new

Lone Stone

I leveled my mage up to 19, Went with a necromancer/warlock/dominator but was mostly just necro/warlock.

I found it fun to play this class but i never felt the urge to play the game, Like other games i would feel like i gotta get to so and so a lvl and i can get xx skill/spell or what not , It's hard to say why because on paper this game has every thing i like from other games and works and it works well.

Its got small things like the collection's you randomly find on the ground from eq2, lots of pets to collect, some cool mounts, etc.

Never tried the crafting side of it i didnt see the point since i could only a day or two so im not sure how that works out, but i did see a lot of different crafting professions and gathering one's.

The warfront thing was ok, apparently the mage classes suck in pvp at the moment but i found them ok in the 10-19 bracket anyway.

Has a nice UI, auction house & the banking system is the same as in wow.

The animations are nice from what i saw, the had some weight to them (apart from jumping ) i havent run into any invisible walls which is good, I havent come up to a hill that looked like i could walk up it and couldnt which i like , its an open world which i always look for.

The zones i played were guardian side starter zone, silverwood and gloomwood i think it was called gloomwood. The starter zone was ok dragged on a bit, But not so much that i would not want to repeat it two or more time's. But one starter zone is a bad idea for any mmo. Ow the zones are very big this is good but silver wood is a lot ! of of running back and forth to tiny quest hubs which i found really annoying.

Silverwood i didnt like it, i thought it was very generic, well it was nice it was more the quests that put me off they were all just kill this collect some weeds, kill 10 more and more weeds go back to where you just were and kill more more , This obviously the same in most games but i dunno it felt kind of grindy and pointless wasnt very enjoyable.

Gloomwood was cool, really nice looking dark theme, done a few kill quests was nice iw as starting to enjoy it more when i got here.

Some times when a rift opens or some thing happens and some txt flash's on my screen and gives me a quest i really didnt like found it distracting.Also i think the way the text flash's up on the screen in general is bloody anoying its like kablamo you accept a quest !!! yea i know i just clicked accept no need to try induce a epileptic fit thank you very much.

Il put it this way in wow or eq2 for example your questing and you get that ah il do one more quest before i log off feeling Rift does not give me this feeling.

Another thing about the game was i didnt feel attached to my character at all, like in other games you tend to want to get the best out of your char, maybe was just me but i think its probably down to the way every character/race looks very simaler in form. (exception to dwarfs/big purple guys)

I liked the whole rift thing, was fun in silverwood got old fast tho, its good for getting some fast xp, no one speaks tho just join public group /leave at the end feels wierd. Was the same in warhammer altho its not as bad as war was.

I might try it at launch, they sure do patch it up quickly thats for sure it could get better and be great but it feels all to generic and the lore and story to the game which is needed to push to the endgame im not feeling it, its not believable enough here am a resurrected guy from the past chosen by the gods now go talk to that guy over there in the woods by that lamp and kill me 10 spider's, why because that 6 lines of text in his quest says some thing really un interesting.

if this game was out when say war hammer came out id have stuck with it seems too been there done that to come out now. Anyway i felt the game was picking up around the later 18+ lvls il probaly try it out when i finish up college. I think it could get a lot better with some patch's.

Lorenzomedici

For those of you saying its nothing new, you realise every other mmo that tried something new has failed?

There is millions of gamers in the mmorpg market that enjoy the mainstream mmo genre and don't need eccentric features to make a game enjoyable, maybe you guys should accept that mmorpgs don't do it for you anymore?

1. It seems you haven't done any dungeons, they are excellently designed, bosses have interesting mechanics even at the low levels and some fights are truely hard as nails.

2. World pvp; fighting over Rifts, shared questing zones and raid bosses summonable by control of zone points. You've not experienced this either.

3. Crafting allows for augmenting your crafts to suit your desires, so you don't have to make the exact carbon copy of some other crafter. You can also have upto 3 total tradeskills, 3 gathering/2gather 1craft/2craft 1 gather etc.

4. Raid rifts and Raid dungeons, dungeons are standard fare from any game but Raid rifts offer the same level of pve end game complexity but in the open world with dynamic events and the opportunity to fight with the opposite faction for these.


The game is very similar to Warhammer and WoW in alot of ways, that doesn't make it a bad game. Sure its not for people who are looking for something completely new, but you won't find an mmorpg that doesn't have quests/dungeons/crafting/leveling that is to the quality of Rift.

Guild Wars dynamic content is the exact same concept as Rifts/Invasions.
Star Wars is standard mmorpg stuff with voice over and cutscenes.

Watch this space, the same complaints about Rift will be said about these two games also.

Da Bounca

What's the point in playing a game that's almost exactly the same as the one before it? There's millions of gamers that enjoy mainstream titles because it ticks all the boxes of the blueprint standard of what they have been lead to believe an MMO has to be. In other words it has to be boring quests, weak story, the same old pvp, basic crafting system, zergs and a bag full of meaningless junk that has no point in the game whatsoever. Then, after spending 200 hours of your life doing the above, you get to the end of the game where it actually might get interesting and competitive.
Why sit through all that just for a chance of it being interesting at the end? Why is it not interesting all the way through?


Like someone else said though. It's not a bad game. Or maybe, they're all bad. Not sure.

Ivan

To be fair, I had similar reactions to the game as DCully and Da Bounca had when I first started playing. However, this situation was quite quickly rectified when I reached 16 and completed the quests to unlock every class available to me.

If you are finding the game uninspired, then I genuinely believe you haven't found the class combination for you yet.

As for being excited about new skills, you get 1 point every level. 2 every 3rd level, which means every second level you unlock a new root class ability and at 11-21-31 you unlock new talent based skills (and sometimes more frequently).

I too agree that it is a polished Warhammer, but it is a polished version of the beta form that was never released. Where character progression was in the hands of the player and not ticked off as you reached a level based milestone as in World of Warcraft. You can pick up any 3 souls you want and progress in them in whatever order you like. Even resetting the class to a completely different playstyle at any point through your leveling experience. If that isn't new, then I don't know what is.

Rifts are a bit more common place now and the gigantic influx of players has made the Rifting system a bit more mundane, ala the release candidate of Warhammer; but honestly, they get more spectacular and challenging as you progress through the level ranges.

With all that said, I think it is unfair to slate a game because it imitates previous incarnations of some of the highest grossing games of all time, while completely overlooking the unique features it does offer. World of Warcraft holds the lofty status of producing 90% of the bread and butter features of modern MMOs while having stolen them, oh so quietly, from a multitude of doomed ones. Rift has copied WoWs basic UI, built on the PvP in ways that Blizzard would never dare; introduced dynamic PvE content (as well as high-end PvE content that all MMOs must have since WoW) all while producing a new core element that is so polished and so intricately implemented that you just gloss over it as "If your going to bring out a new MMO atleast make it look and feel different to other MMOs that were not exactly successfull."

TL;DR: If Rift is nothing new, you are doing it wrong. Or you are just a jaded MMO player. In which case I'd highly recommend taking some time out of the genre so that you can come back and appreciate the joys of MMOs once more, unburdened by the crud you've accumulated from previous failed MMOs. Until the next incarnation of Dark Fall, this game is still the next best thing to mana from heaven for me.

Da Bounca

What is new?
Rifts are public quests the same as WAR aren't they?
I think the model design and environment are excellent, and at first I was really awed by the Rift events. Very Cthuluesque. It was the same every time though, and it got boring.

The class system is a breath of fresh air I agree, but it's not the be all and end all. I mean, if thats a major selling point for a game, do you not think that there's big issues with the genre? "YES! I can be three classes at once. I'm so getting this game". I mean, really, that should be a minor thing that is promoted.

Level 1 you should be finding yourself in a dungeon thrown together with a bunch of randomers fighting for a way out. Not picking up sticks and helping a guy watch squirrels mate.

Ivan

It's not identical to War, because the 'public quests' aren't static. They are fluid and come to you if you don't go to them. That is huge difference in my mind. And yes they can be repetitive from level 10 to level 20, but after that you see new variations. And at level 30+ you start seeing healers and complex fight mechanics in Rifts. At 40-50 you can fight full 25 man raid Rift content.

Then there are Expert Dungeons of every Dungeon you've ever visited between level 17-50. Think Heroics only more brutal. It also has the bolstering from Warhammer in battlegrounds and open world PvP with raiding with your friendly Rift invasion. They are continuing to add more PvP content.

It is through this that the class system becomes more than a breathe of fresh air. It becomes a requirement. You need a PvP spec through certain level ranges and there is a reason you are given up to 4 roles. It's not just a "Oh yay I can have up to 4 alts", it's more like "This is for dungeons. This is my leveling spec. And THIS is my PvP stick. There are many like it but this one is mine." Changing from an off-healer, to a tank, to a ranged dps and still having the option to fit in stealth into your class is more unique than I feel a lot of players will be capable of handling.

Ultimately though, I agree, there is definitely something wrong with the MMO genre. Unfortunately, if you want to be completely unique, at worst you will flop and at best you will be a niché contender. Some publishers want to be successful, and until the average paying player is interested in unique rather than cut & paste content like we see in WoW, I'm afraid this is as huge a leap as we can take in an MMO. I'd give them time to pick up a bit of friction with the WoW community and then expect them to snowball into a successful and distinct game of its own. Or not, I've eaten my words before.

Canis Lupus

Anyone got a beta key going?

Venom

While the graphics and class combining is pretty cool the lore and questing in Rift really sucks. EQ2, Lotro, WoW and TOR all have really awesome lore to draw from and this translates into fun and interesting questlines.

Rift suffers hugely from dull and uninteresting lore and even reading all the quest givers text doesn't make me feel involved in any way and so far up to level 23 on both factions the quests still feel exactly the same as the kill X amount of Y nooby zone quests that EQ1 did all those years ago.

Kur4mA

I'm having great fun with Rift tbh. I do think the lore is kinda crappy so far but I have just been powering through beta with any of my free time to spare. The character and class differentiations need to be worked on. The only main differences I've spotted is when people use dyes.

Davaeo09

AM I right in saying that beta testing is on a break or is it just mine thats broke? :P

wayne040576

Davaeo09 wrote: »

AM I right in saying that beta testing is on a break or is it just mine thats broke? :P

It was just for the weekend. They're not running the betas constantly.

Kur4mA

The 6th Beta ended yesterday at 6pm. The Open Beta is starting on the 15th.... hope the queues don't go mental

Dcully

Ill definitely give the next beta some time.
Apart from the warhammer and aion similarities which are striking similarities i found while playing the mages different archytpes that most skills were too similar, for example the pyromancer skills were very similar to the stormcaller the difference being fire effects as opposed to lightning.
It felt like the same class with a different paint job.
However the game has potential, if the end game raiding etc is top class i will buy and subscribe for sure, it can have all the similarities in the world to other MMOs once end game is top class.

Lorenzomedici

Dcully wrote: »

for example the pyromancer skills were very similar to the stormcaller the difference being fire effects as opposed to lightning.
It felt like the same class with a different paint job.

Wow these two are not very similar at all, the pyromancer is the most basic of all mage souls. Just a standard glass cannon, high damage nukes and aoe.

The Stormcaller is an aoe specialist, they use lightning spells to build static and frost spells to build hypothemia and each works off the other to provide varying effects. Its actually a really interesting build.

The devil is in the details