As any of the people reading this will likely already know, I quite enjoy playing World of Warcraft and a bit of other MMO on the side when something catches my interest. The latest side-quest has been Rift: Planes of Telara.
Originally I wasn't all that keen on picking up another MMO as I'm at the stage in WoW where I play it when I want to have some fun. I can easily put it down to go do something else, and I don't want a massive time sink on my hands right now in the form of another online game. That being said, a friend of mine picked it up and provided some very useful early feedback on the game, which led me to pick up a digital download copy to try myself.
It's been a few weeks since that happened and I feel I've played enough of the game to provide some insight and criticism rather than mindlessly praise or bash it.
When I first started playing Rift, one of the biggest appeals was how similar it was to World of Warcraft. A lot of other recent MMOs have really tried to differentiate themselves from WoW rather than borrow from its strengths and improve on its weaknesses. Take Final Fantasy XIV for example - the game looks great but it doesn't have the constant move and progression that WoW does. You spend a lot of time grinding "guildleves" (essentially daily quests) in a location for a few days, before graduating to the next area. This method doesn't explore the story and it didn't really inspire me to move forward with the game.
The initial difference that WoW players are likely to pick up on is the way the factions are separated. WoW has a very good versus evil vibe going on, but Rift has a religion versus technology separator. The Guardians believe that the Defiants' eldritch machinery will bring about the end of the world, but they believe that their technology will save it. I ended up playing Defiant, principally because two people from Meatwall had already rolled on that faction, but also because I felt their back story was much better and more interesting.
Rift plays very similarly to WoW in that you choose a class, then you specialise that class, and then later on you get to pick up a second speciality (and then a third and fourth, too) using a system that is basically a clone of the WoW talent trees. There are many more choices (you select 3 trees out of a possible 8/9 per class to use in your build) although I did feel there was perhaps a rather overwhelming number of choices for a new player. The game does recommend certain combinations but I later felt that these were just combinations of like specialities and not necessarily those which provided the greatest synergy.
Impressively, or at least for the builds I experimented with, all of the specialities seem to be very distinct (at least within a class). For example, the cleric class (which I tried out) had three different healing souls (the name given to the talent trees) which focused on heal over time spells (warden), direct healing (purifier) and shielding (sentinel). My tree also had two spell DPS souls, two melee DPS souls, a tanking soul and a dedicated PVP soul (which I never picked up, given my distaste for PVP!)
The levelling progression is very much like WoW - you move through areas each of which has a number of story threads which are loosely tied to the main story. There is also a larger arc which plays through all of the areas (at least as far as I played) which generally involves some group quests. There is very little encouragement or reason to group at lower levels as most quest items are not party loot (i.e. each person who needs something needs to collect it separately) and most quests are relatively straightforward.
One thing that is different from WoW in the levelling process is that you frequently have to return to a sub-area you have already visited to perform another leg of the same quest chain. Sometimes you even have to kill the same mobs which strikes me as a ridiculous idea ("Thanks for the wolf fur, but I need some wolf teeth too!") that only served to prolong my time in an area. Whether this is intended as a pacing mechanic or is simply lazy design I am not sure.
As always, Meatwall colleagues were on hand to enable the completion of some of the group content. This is the area that I feel the game most improves on WoW for several reasons.
Firstly - and this is probably due to the fact that the game generally looks better than WoW - the dungeons all feel very impressive and grand. The first one for the Defiant side is called the Iron Tomb and ties directly into the storyline of the first zone (deliberately avoiding spoilers!). Unlike most underground areas in WoW the dungeon feels very vast and very dark. Despite the lighting though, an obvious effort has gone into the detailing on the stonework floors and walls as well as the various furnishings and decoration which make it feel like less of a generic hole in the ground.
A later instance is inside an old mine, which is actually sufficiently high inside to kill your character by dropping from an upper platform to the floor. The main area just feels gigantic (although admittedly this dungeon was just a hole in the ground, but it was a mine!)
There are also some interesting mechanics between boss fights and not just during them. In the Iron Tomb, one section has you running between beacons which essentially explode some nearby aggressive shades which continuously re-pop when you are in the room. We did have a rather valiant attempt at killing them traditionally, before we worked out what to do though!
Another strength of the instanced group play is that there are more roles to fill. WoW has tank, healer and DPS. Rift has the same, but many classes can easily switch to fill the role of an off-tank or backup healer. Even when healing, I found time to shoot waterbolts at things to contribute a smidge of DPS which certainly helped break the monotony that usually comes from healing in an MMO (as I joyfully recollect my memories of white mage in Final Fantasy XI). Other classes have this crossover too (e.g. bard does some DPS and some healing, justicar heals while tanking).
The unique selling point of the game though, is definitely the highly interactive world. This is facilitated by the constant opening of "Rifts" (it's in the name, see!) which spawn waves of monsters to defeat. By clearing (or helping clear) a rift you earn tokens which you can use to buy gear which is a little nicer than average. Periodically, invasions will occur which involve the opening of many rifts of the same elemental type (either death, life, earth, wind, fire or water) and culminate with a larger boss encounter the difficulty of which depends on the scale of the invasion.
Unfortunately, being that I ended up playing on the North American realms, I often missed the larger scale events and those which did trigger frequently locked down zones and made questing very frustrating. This is because the invasions can take over the outposts which serve as quest hubs and later in the game you simply cannot solo them to re-activate the friendly NPCs.
My main irk with the game was the lack of diversity in the design of items. There seemed to be only a handful of models per armour class and although you could dye them different colours the differences between the few models left the larger towns feeling very uniform. This is a rather small criticism of the game as a whole though.
I have however stopped playing now, mostly due to a slowly dwindling interest in the game. Where I comment that the greatest strength of Rift is possibly its similarity to WoW it is also a great weakness. Genuinely, the allure of a familiar game works to start with but it really doesn't keep you hooked as it feels like you've done it all before. The game simply doesn't have something that constantly makes me feel "wow, I'm so glad I picked this up".
So, if you're looking for something new, but sort of the same, Rift might be what you're after. It looks good, small-group play is enjoyable and the world does feel different and new. Unfortunately the systems and progression methods are all too similar to WoW for my liking and I would imagine many other people too. I'd suggest giving it a go for the free trial, except there isn't one which is possibly the greatest hurdle in picking up something new these days.
