I loved the public quests in Warhammer and love the idea of it happening randomly at random locations in a zone. Hopefully it'll take the monotony out of the boring grind that is MMO questing.I can't wait for the next installment!
I played in beta 4 the interface is a cross between WoW and Lotro, the game environment is a cross between Lotro, Age of Conan, Aion, and War. This game has alot to offer the community i just hope they work out the kinks they had but its still early. the rift system is an awesome addition, at no point do you feel the world is stagnant, there is always something happening. It is very exciting because you login and suddenly all the npc's in your area could be gone killed by a raiding party from one of the 6 elemental planes when a local rift was allowed to get too large. Great rewards system from killing raiding parties and from killing rift bosses. So you could essentially only kill rifts and still get great gear ignoring dungeons completely. Nice mount system with lots of different mounts in the game right off the bat, not the stagnant horse ones only. I do believe between this and SWTOR WoW will most likely be seeing its final days.The only things i would ever miss in the WoW system is Taming my own pets as a hunter and flying mounts. I did notice tho that i could not find the standard travel system in the game between locations. I never reached level 20 so i have no idea if this comes later in larger areas because the beginner area (post level 5 pre level 20) was smaller then the other parts of the map on the continent so i believe they did this to make it more bareable to those who already have maxed toons on other games who ride or fly around at high speeds wherever they go. I do hope that the WoWhead people get to make the DB for this game as i've a high regard for WoWheads staff and their design, item previews and such. At the very least a DB for the artifacts in RIFT would be nice since they actually are used not only for lore but for the forging of useful in game gear and items without the need for another profession.
Played in beta 4 and got to level 13.Honestly, this game is very polished and pretty amazing for a beta. I didn't notice one single bug (except for odd camera movement underwater, but that is just a flaw of design).The soul system is IMO great. It's like the next step of Blizzard's "bring the player not the class" tactic. Basically you can have three (or four) roles, which function just like dual spec, within everyone of these roles you can choose three of eight talent (soul) trees, which (as you saw) unlocks different spells at the root of the trees... It sounds really difficult and so, but once you start playing it's not hard at all. So, they intend that this system will let players have the roles they want. Some trees have very good CC, some good damage, some healing, tanking, damage/healing hybrid. This will let players have the role they want to, and they are able to switch out the roles for each encounter. Basically, when there only are four classes (callings) everyone gets to do what they want.As for the community. It looks really promising to me. (With the exception of all the people comparing it to wow in the beta chat).The devs seem to want to get close to the community, they update their facebook page several times a day (they even posted a link to this BFF report). I have also heard that they made some really big changes to the soul system earlier with feedback from the players.I kind of liked the questing in RIFT it was never really a grind to get to the next level, even though it wasn't phased. Both starting zones were pretty good too. The rift system was also great. It made you feel like you actually did something for the world. With a sense of urgency whenever you saw tentacles in the sky. It was also really fun to see different kinds of invasions fight each other. There are also different kinds of rifts/invasions, from what I saw there were:Major rifts: Rifts designed for a group of maybe 5-10 people. Elite mobs.Major invasions: Spawn from major rifts. Same difficulty.Major footholds: Foothold made by a major invasion. Think they spawn major invasions. Elite mobs here too.There are also lesser "normal" versions of each of these. The normal versions might be soloable (not sure, maybe only certain classes). But they can generally be duo'd or triple'd.So for the most interesting part: Where will this game go. I hope it will be successful, this will be my #1 choice if I decide to get back into subscription MMO's. This game hasn't really had much hype around it, and the term WoW-killer hasn't really been thrown around as much as with other MMO's. IMO it would be great if RIFT came to fight WoW, I think both games would benefit from it. Sadly though, I don't really see it going that way, even though I'd like it very much.Keep in mind that my experiences are only up to level 13, with no PvP involved.
Does anyone know what in-game font Rift uses? Tooltips and such. I really like it :O
At least it doesn't seem to be total crap.
I have two big concerns with the game. The first is how easily or difficult the extremely liberal class system will be to balance, especially in the face of hardcore min/maxers that seek to exploit whatever minor or major imbalance they can find. You don't generally learn about these sorts of imbalances during beta or testing, unless they are glaringly obvious or you just so happen to have a philanthropic numbercruncher that is concerned about the health of the game than his own progression. Instead, it takes an entire community all running that one cookie cutter spec, because it maximizes the role to the greatest extent (possibly damage, possibly some OP CC, some OP self heal, etc, especially in terms of PvP). This won't present itself until the game is being played by hundreds of thousands of people, all looking to get that one extra bit of oomph over the other guy, and it may take months after that before it gets addressed (either by nerfing the system into something more rigid, or by ignoring it and simply letting the overpowered specs trounce the underpowered specs). A side worry is also that some specs might just be entirely inferior. Maybe the groups buffs provided by the rogue archtype (bard) are entirely inferior to those provided by the warrior or mage archetypes, but there are so many other things taking up the dev's time that rebalancing them is low priority. WoW has this problem, although at least it is on a bit of a cycle and each class has their heyday every now and again, or at least perform in a range that is more affected by the player's skill than it is class mechanics.Basically, I'm worried that SWG's "New Game Enhancements" may repeat itself in the face of the impossibility of balancing such a broad range of specs.My second concern is how extensible the PvE content (rifts) really are. It's well and good to say the world isn't "stagnant" because the rifts give you something to do if one's up... but what about six months or a year into the game? Are rifts the only thing left to do? What about when the player base becomes top heavy (as all MMOs do) and everyone is responding to rifts at a moment's notice and closing it within minutes? What happens if a hardcore guild grows to such size that, at any given time of day, they can mobilize their own army to catch the rift before anyone else, as has happened in the past with non-instanced content in WoW and EQ? What about when the player base is entirely decked out in rift gear and there's nothing left to do, why bother hitting rifts anymore (just as there is no point in running heroics after you've bought everything from the vendors)? And how scalable are the rifts, will they always be as dangerous as they are now, or do they become meaningless with the next expansion, and a huge block for anyone trying to level a few months after release?I am concerned that, as awesome as rifts sound, they cannot function as true end-game. Either they are scaleable in which case they get boring (imagine running Molten Core as the end raid for the past six years), or they don't scale in which case after a year you have nothing more to do and no reason to play.Teal deer.
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Ding ding ding lolWell looks alright, not sure the multiple specs are friendly for initial players really, looks very crazy! But I'm sure the long hard work of research on these would mean players get a lot of customisation!Looks ok for me, thats considering I'm actually am comparing this to WoW lol Though I'm not very experimental on new game till I hear the reviews myself
if you play or playe WOW you can just drop right into game play for Rift.its a great game from what ive seen so far (have a Level 18, 12, 3) my level 18 is a mage on the Alliance i mean The Guardians side.the dual speccing thing (Role) cost only 5g for your second and i picked it up at level 10 but i think you can get it sooner then your next Role cost 5 platinum.Mike B will most likely tell more in the next Rift vid he dose but it will be a bring the player not the class game as in each class can do almost anything, like a mage can heal or dps or CC a rogue can tank, as far as i know the only limit is Mages cant tank and rogues cant heal.its well worth a look.CWR
Re: balancing concerns, the developers for Rift have actually said that they're not too concerned about balancing. I believe the first developer diary had a quote along the lines of "if you encounter someone with an overpowered spec, you can just find your own spec to counter it". This, however, is a while ago, so things have probably changed since then... and if they haven't, they're probably going to have to eat their own words at some point. I guess that remains to be seen, really.
first time i hear about rift tbh. how long has this been in the making?
I like how he commented about this is the first time he got ganked by not players but NPCs!My question: Does those rifts happen even in the starting zones? So can it really screw up some lvl 1 people trying to learn how to play and then bamm! Dead!