Rift Reviews

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Written by Brother None on April 7th, 2011

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The other big feature in Rift is the actual rifts themselves. The concept of Rift's central tale is that Telara (the game world) is a focal point for dimensional rifts, which are being torn open by the big bad of the game. So when you're questing around in a certain section of the world, you'll see these little colored spiral icons on the map, which represent open rifts. These rifts unleash different monsters, and when you get close to a rift you have the option of fighting the spawned monsters. The monsters appear in waves, typically four to five waves all together. Completing waves will net you rewards, like Planarite, which acts as a type of currency for special weapons and armor in the game.

The other neat thing about the rifts is that as you get close to one, you'll see a pop up that offers to place you in a public group. This allows instant raids to be put together by the game, pairing you up with any other players that are nearby. There are some really fun events that can occur if the rifts begin to get out of control, where hordes of powerful enemies will spawn and attack local towns within a map, and you'll need to team up with other players to defend those spots and drive the invaders back. This typically ends with a world boss encounter of some kind that sees all sorts of frantic action happening on screen. These events are really a lot of fun, and even for players that typically prefer a little less MM in their MMO's, it's hard to not get caught up in the action.

Character creation has quite a wide scope. I found that the characters I made looked better in the game than they did while I was creating them. They don't have quite the extreme amount of customisation that Aion offered, but far more than WoW does. As for the character classes, the choices are huge. There are two factions, Defiant and Guardians, and within each of those you have a choice of four '˜starter' types: mage, warrior, cleric and rogue. These are known as '˜callings' and refer to the first choice you make for your character. At first, this appeared limiting until I saw the actual classes available within each calling. Mages include, for example, all manner of magic users; warlocks, necromancers and elementalists, to name but three. The rogue calling encompasses the ranged fighters, with or without pets, the archetypal dagger-wielding, stealthing rogue and also a class that can only be likened to engineering in WoW the Saboteur who uses bombs, explosives and other such devices. The warrior calling, which I've not yet tried, includes different styles of fighter as well as the more familiar tank. Clerics can be healers, or smiters (even melee), or hybrids. There are 8 different classes (or souls as they are called in the game) for each calling, and in the early stages of the game you are allowed to have 3 of them for a character, which allows for a massive amount of customisation as to how your character performs. As you level up you get points to spend in each '˜soul tree', which unlocks skills. I understand that later on, you are able to have even more classes and can change specs '˜on the fly' as it were, should you need to swap to a healer, dps or tank role for a specific situation.

Crafting: World of Warcraft set the standard for this game's crafting, and like many parts of this Frankenstein monster of a game, Rift did nothing to advance upon it. Three collection professions and six creation professions are your options. Of course most of the professions that "create" something are major money/time sinks in the game meant to eat up hours collecting flowers, nodes or butchering animals to create into items. Apothecary can make dyes and they split up the weapon and armor smiths, but it is fairly standard fare for the genre. I found the "gray" daily quests to be an annoyance and the rare drop distillates in apothecary to be particularly burdensome. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't nearly as engaging as say Vanguard or as smooth as World of Warcraft. I've seen worse and I've seen better.

Questing is central to character progression in Rift, and the game's largely derivative nature is evident here as well. You'll be tasked with the usual pesk reduction operations and deliveries, along with a sometimes tedious amount of running around right-clicking on things. The map keeps you headed in the right direction with quest objectives clearly marked, and it comes together as expected. While it emulates WoW's questing quite closely, it falls short on variety and it doesn't have any of the area phasing introduced introduced in the last two expansions, so it feels a bit old.

This is one of the strangest elements within Rift, in other MMO's you rarely see the opposing factions working together for a common good, because really there isn't anything for them to fight for, it seems to all be fueled by war, hate, domination, whereas Rift, it's survival. But these moments are some of the most exhilarating feelings I have ever had, it's pure survival instinct, work together or die together it is your choice. And when that first Rift closed, the adrenaline still pumping through my system began to ease, we were safe for the time being, it was over. However, these Rifts are no simple matter, they can spawn armies of foes which can easily overrun the cities if there is no co-ordination but they look spectacular when there are countless people fighting to defend their city.

It's all a little complicated, for sure, but ultimately Rift is geared at the MMO veteran and isn't afraid to compromise here and there on accessibility to achieve that. This will make the game somewhat intimidating to new players, especially since so much of the game comes to the player in the early stages, but Trion has done a good job with tutorials, help features and the like to try to balance this.

With its areas of extreme derivativeness contrasted with its very individual features, Rift is an unusual proposition of a MMO, but one that works excellently and will certainly appeal to veterans of the genre. While a little more imagination here and there wouldn't have gone amiss, Trion has crafted a game that is able to change its feel and rhythm through large scale events that bring players together, and in doing so they've set their own blueprint for other MMOs to follow.

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