Rift Reviews

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Written by Brother None on March 21st, 2011

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PvP, by the way, is a lot of fun in Rift. There are four warfronts that you unlock at various levels, and while they all conform to game types we've seen in other MMOs -- capture the flag, capture points etc. -- the maps are well designed and provide strategic positioning options for virtually all roles. Black Garden's trees help Fang carriers stay hidden from attacks on the ground but the adjacent walls make the carriers susceptible to attacks from above. In The Codex, each capture point has its own layout, with spikes of stone providing a good vantage point for ranged attacks and narrow bridges serving as excellent chokepoints for defenders. There are power-ups hidden around the maps, but usually away from the action, meaning you need to trade a temporary numbers loss for the potential for to seek out their bonuses. I'm usually not a fan of PvP as I tend to kind of suck at it, but Rift's warfronts kept me returning for a thorough beating over and over.

I may be terrible at PvP, but I feel completely at home with questing and dungeons, and Rift is more than accommodating on these fronts. Questing takes the same structure as WoW: Cataclysm, with a handful of quests per hub, slowly moving your character across the map. The pace is good for the most part, although you occasionally linger in a zone a little longer than is entirely necessary. The quests themselves are nothing special, unfortunately. They're almost all kill/collect quests, and while the number of objectives I need to kill (Or collect!) is usually mercifully low, the pattern at times strained my enjoyment.

Having come from Warcraft, which for years limited you to just one role unless you spent time and money respeccing something that just wasn't very convenient coming to a game where you can literally change your character within seconds depending on the situation feels phenomenally dynamic. The other night in Codex (a warfront where you have to capture and hold strategic points on a map), I quickly sized up the situation and realized we'd be better off with a DPS/control character instead of a healer to deal with an incoming group of players, and I had the time to quickly switch from Sentinel to Inquisitor before they got to me. We dealt with them, and then I saw another node being attacked, switched to healer, and headed over there to help out. It certainly adds a completely new dimension to PvP that I've never really encountered before in a game like this.

Not every moment is spent fighting extra-planar invasions, though. There's a full MMO beyond the portals, with rewarding crafting and a massive number of NPCs that need my help collecting flowers, killing boars, and breaking stuff. The quests are varied, if somewhat uninspired, and there was never a moment where my quest log wasn't completely full of missions spread out over a number of different zones, giving me plenty of options and making grinding enemies for experience completely unnecessary.

The 100-or-so hours it takes to hit the level cap (50) would be nearly indistinguishable from its contemporaries if not for the rifts, but considering there are usually at least three or four open at any given time in every zone (sometimes many more), the path to the cap was never boring unless you consider traditional (hit the buttons on the bottom of the screen a lot) MMO combat to be boring.

And speaking of quests, RIFT has a very well-crafted questing system. Quests are spread out among tiny little camps and settlements, each naturally leading to the next. I was able to finish every quest in most of the areas I visited, and once I moved on to the next area, the content was at the perfect level for me to take part in it. Many MMOs overwhelm beginner players with tons of quests, but RIFT is able to keep its content exceptionally well-balanced. You won't feel like you'll run out of things to do, yet you'll never feel like your quest log is impossibly burdened by tons of quests you'll probably never finish. I am very impressed by how smoothly this content flows together. The only complaint you could possibly make is that, for the most part, you'll need to complete every quest in each area before you move on. However, completionists who hate to over-level content before they finish will weep giant tears of joy over RIFT's exceptional quest flow.

Although there are only two main factions, 6 races, and four starting archetypes (warrior, rogue, mage, and cleric) the mechanic of acquiring (souls) (basically, skill trees) mean there are several dozen potential classes of an impressively large number of skill combinations, resulting in interesting hybrids. Unfortunately, there are only two starting zones (one for each faction), so running more than a few characters through the early levels and quests rather quickly becomes an exercise in tedium. There doesn't appear to be any race or class specific variations on the early game, either. This aspect of Rift seems uncharacteristically confining.

Rifts aren't just static, random events that pop onto your map to be savoured or ignored. Left unchecked, rifts will ultimately dispatch invasion forces that march across the land towards NPC settlements, transforming the environment in their wake and forcing your quest givers, transportation masters and town merchants into battle. Maybe even into death, serving to add a sense of urgency to the shifting landscape.

If you're the type of player determined to plough through the levelling process with only the bare minimum of social interaction, then you may find the frequency and ferocity of these invasions overwhelming to the point of frustration. Far better to embrace them and appreciate that rare forging of social bonds with strangers. Marching from one event to another in the raid group you've just bumped into makes for a breathless change of pace in the linear questing.

Predictable stuff, perhaps -- but the rifts themselves make Telara shudder with constant change. What's more, closing your first rift is an event to remember. There you are, killing your ninth of 10 goblins, and suddenly, dozens of players thunder past to some rift on the other side of the map. It's almost impossible not to get swept up in the excitement and join them, and Rift's satisfying public group system ensures that you can join up to help at any time. At the rift itself, you battle wave after wave of creatures and eventually tank-and-spank a boss. And everyone pitches in; they have to, since the rewards you get from closing a rift are based on how much you contributed to the battle. If you fail, however, elementals swarm uninhibited from the rifts and into the zone, sometimes taking over entire quest hubs. And since rifts can spawn almost anywhere at any time, Telara's sprawling zones feel different with almost every visit.

The problem? Closing rifts quickly gets boring, and this boredom quickly yields to annoyance. Thanks to Rift's unflinchingly linear quest progression, it's possible for your leveling momentum to stop completely if a major rift spawns over the spot where the dudes from the local quest hub asked you to kill those 10 goblins. Since soloing a rift isn't always an option (and since, even now, other players aren't always rushing to the rescue), you're sometimes stuck waiting for the rifts to despawn (which they eventually do) or teleporting back to your faction's capital to fiddle with the game's rich professions.

In our experience, the instanced dungeons are beautiful if a bit easy. As Guardians, we started off with the Realm of the Fae dungeon, which kicks off in a forest but surprisingly ends atop a snowy peak. In the next, the Darkening Deep, we raced through an underground goblin city and faced off against a werewolf and a gigantic spider. The problem? None of the instances seemed particularly challenging. Even with random players, we never once really talked about strategy with the groups we were in, and we usually adjusted to unexpected strategies on the fly. It doesn't look like it'll improve much at endgame aside from some spikes in challenge. Case in point: You get a chance to partake in two tiers of "expert" dungeons (read: heroic) at Level 50, but most of these are mere repeats of the same instances you played through at earlier levels.

Trion's only serious misstep so far has been refusing to allow third-party mods of any kind. One of the keys to WoW's success was the fact that Blizzard was very warm and welcoming to the modding community, encouraging all kinds of add-ons as long as they didn't break the Terms of Use. Not only does this policy allow players to tailor their interface to their liking, Blizzard's also kept an eye on the popular mods over the years and incorporated their best features into the game, taking advantage of them to improve their own product.

At this point in time, Trion does not allow mods of any kind. This might be subject to change in the future, but for the time being, you're stuck with Rift's default interface. It's not terrible, and it's a bit fuller than Blizzard's default, but it's still no substitute for readily available third-party mods. Especially considering how customizable the talents are, it's a shame the interface is so rigid.

The rifts, as the title implies, are essentially the defining feature of the game, and what in large part makes it stands out from other MMOs. Outside of your regular questing, the world of Telara is constantly under siege by other-worldly fortress, (as well as the constant struggle going on between the game's two factions: the Guardians and the Defiants, which constitutes the PvP aspects of the game), and you have always before you the option of lending a hand to help bring balance to a world that truly feels like it's on the brink of utter chaos, and in need of your assistance to save it. This makes the world of Telara truly a dynamic one, and your actions in the world, at least where dealing with Rifts and invading forces is concerned, feel as if they have some real effect upon the world, and not like your simply acting out a pre-determined script.

To give an example of this that I personally encountered (and was pleasantly surprised by), I was on my way to a quest when I saw an outpost that had been taken over by an invading enemy force. As the stronghold wasn't too heavily defended and the enemies were spread out enough for me to essentially pick them off one at a time, I proceeded to kill off all the enemy forces there and destroy their marker that they had placed in that location, effectively eliminating that stronghold. After that, I went off to complete one of my regular quests, but when I walked by that area again I saw that the spot was now inhabited by friendlies who had set up shop there, and I was able to buy and sell off items, as well as take on new quests that some of the local NPCs were offering.

So we have a new character progression system and a hugely varied skill system. So it's still the same quest and level system that you have to at least grind out once? The answer to this is both yes and no. Yes, you have the standard starting areas where you undertake basic quests, and as you get better you are lead to other quest nodes that get tougher and introduce more game elements as you move on. The quests are good, varied and woven throughout is the back-story that helps to give you a sense that you are involved in something far bigger. The problem with this game mechanic, however, has always been that it is like a board game: you advance along a predictable course, a course which is basically the same for everyone else. It never really changes, it's static. Enter then the Rifts.

For fans of PvP, Rift offers Warfronts, which are essentially the same as Battlegrounds in WoW. There are four different Warfronts available right now, and range in size between 10 and 20 players. The cool thing about Warfronts is that there are multiple ways to win them. For instance, in Port Scion, the Warfront for level 50 characters (the current level cap), players can either win by acquiring 1,000 points (by completing a number of different objectives), by killing the opposing team's high commander, or by acquiring the most points in 45 minutes. This keeps the games from lasting for several hours, like Alterac Valley did back when WoW first launched. PvP in Rift is really fun and fresh, especially because there are so many class combinations and no one really knows what they are doing yet.

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