OOC: A Brief Review of the RIFT Beta

Last week, I participated in the RIFT open beta and wanted to share my thoughts. My character was Lithatal, a Kelari ranger on the Faeblight shard. She reached level 16 during the week-long beta event.  Don't worry - there's a new story coming soon!  (TM?)

RIFT is a new fantasy MMORPG from Trion Worlds, scheduled for release March 1.  The open beta ran from Monday, Feb. 14 to Monday, Feb. 21.  RIFT has gained notice (notoriety?) lately for their ads on WoW-related sites and their associated tagline, "We're not in Azeroth anymore."

Regulos, the dragon god of extinction, has harnessed the powers of the elemental planes - fire, water, earth, air, death and life - and now wages war for the destruction of Telara.  As he prepares the final crushing blow, the Telaran scientists perfect the technologies to raise Ascended heroes and send them back through time to the beginning of the war against Regulos in an effort to turn the tide.

As an Ascended, you arrive in a distant past that has not yet seen the utter ravages of war.  In fact, the response of the local population is somewhat mixed.  However, Regulos is also active in this time, as rifts spawn with little warning and pour invaders across the land.  As you work to gain the trust of the local population and battle against the opposing faction for supremacy, you must also work together with your fellow adventurers to seal these rifts and destroy the invaders.

The Good

• If you're at all familiar with WoW or other MMO titles, this game should be pretty easy to pick up the basics.
• For the most part* the graphics are very good.
• The class system is both unique and interesting:
• To start out, you pick from one of four meta-classes, or "callings" - warrior, rogue, cleric or mage.
• As you adventure, you are able to learn various "souls".  At any time you can have up to three active souls.  Each soul has a talent tree that allows you to customize the talents and abilities of your character.
• Through a trainer, you can change your souls or redistribute skill points.
• This class system pretty much guarantees that no two characters will be exactly the same
• There is a wide variety of character customization available - everything from eye color and body size (height) to a variety of tattoos, hair styles, etc.
• Once an hour, you can use an ability called "Soul walk" when you die.  Rather than doing a spirit run and resurrect at the location of your body, this actually allows you to do two things:
• Move away from whatever killed you
• Resurrect immediately, without a run halfway across the zone
• Death also introduces another interesting mechanic, called "Vitality."  Rather than taking damage to your equipment, your life itself is affected.  Each time you die, your vitality drops by a certain percent.  When you reach 0, you get a stacking debuff with each death that reduces your character stats.  You can visit a healer at any time to restore this to 100%.
• On the one hand, for general questing it might be useful for this to start having an immediate effect, to encourage people to a) not die and b) stay healed up.  There's no immediate penalty for dying (equipment durability) so people can get in over their heads and get out with no penalty.
• On the other hand, there is a built-in grace period in scenarios like a dungeon where you don't have immediate access to a soul healer.  You can wipe a few times before you're in danger of losing stats.
• Quest rewards offer a good range of items.  If they're itemized for specific classes, there will normally be at least one item for each class.  However, the drawback of this (see "The Ugly" below...) is that at first everybody around you will be wearing and using the same equipment as you.
• Rifts and invasions can be an epic, spontaneous experience.
• I kited more mobs in one week than I did in the previous 3 months of WoW.

The Bad

• Other than purely as a game mechanic, there's little obvious point to the faction warfare.  Yes, it's "us vs. them", but there's no real explanation for why we hate them so much and why they hate us.  In fact, the factions seem to be a fairly recent development, lore-wise.
• Racially, there's not much diversity.  Elves, humans and dwarves are pretty much your choices.  (Yes, the Bahmi are descendants of the elementals, but...  they're really just tattooed humans, more or less.)  This will be covered further in a bit, but I frequently had to hover over people to even tell what race they were.
• There is very little guidance given for early decisions in the game.  You're asked to pick a "shard" - server or realm - and a faction.  You then pick your character's race, sex, calling, etc. and finally are able to customize them.  Other than some generic information for the calling choice, there's little information provided.
• Not sure if this has a significant impact on gameplay, but the shards didn't seem to indicate a timezone.  I ended up on a PST shard even though I'm in EST.
• They also need to provide an introduction to some of the unique features and terminology of the game.  "You have died.  Do you want to Soul Walk or Regenerate?"  Umm...  HI2K?  Is "Soul Walk" the same thing as "corpse run"?  Heh, guess not.
• Get ready to do a lot of running.  You can't train a mount until level 20 (unless you get the collector's edition - then you get a mount at level 1...) and there are no flight paths or teleports to move around the zones.  There is some kind of portal system that can apparently be used to move between capital cities, but I only ever found one.
• If there's not a reasonable-sized group around (5-10 people is ideal) to help close a rift, you're going to get swarmed and your face melted.  Some of the rifts are on a spawn timer, where if you don't take them down quick enough, even more mobs will spawn - probably right where you're standing.
• Some of the elites are just over the top crazy difficult.  In a "starter" zone of characters ranging from level 8 to 12, a level 20 elite spawned during one of the invasions.  And he wasn't even one of the invasion "bosses".  It took a group of 30 of us at least 5 minutes to whittle him down, and he was able to one- or two-shot pretty much anybody who had aggro.  Then we had to go find the actual "boss" for the invasion.  There were 60 or 70 of us in the area and it still took a few minutes to bring him down.  90% of the time this was just "pew-pew", unless you drew aggro from a patrolling mob.
• In at least one case, I encountered a rift that continually respawned.  We'd seal it and it would return within moments.  In general, the rift spawn rate felt too high - at times it was hard to get anything done, particularly if the rift spawned right over the area that contained the quest objectives you needed.  I realize that the rifts are a core game mechanic.  However, it feels like a solution looking for a problem.  You have to take down rifts to play the game, but they steal time away from character advancement to be able to take on more challenging content.
• In a lot of ways, they seemed to be trying to emulate WoW.  While that's not necessarily a bad thing, I noted one bug that has also amused me in WoW:  If you have a quest where the objective is to go talk to an NPC, this is marked as "Complete" in your quest log.
• Many actions seemed to take effect immediately, rather than waiting for the on-screen events to complete.  (I've actually seen something like this in WoW too, where some mobs aggro as soon as I fire the bow rather than when they are hit, even when I can still see the arrow flying toward them.)  For example, my pet had a "charge" ability that would daze the mob.  The mob would aggro on me, my pet would wander off to the left a few steps, the mob would stop and be dazed for a second, and then my pet would launch himself toward the mob.
• Following from the previous, my pet almost never took the direct route toward a mob.  He'd jump several feet forward and to the left, pause, THEN go for the mob.  I saw this rather consistently.
• There was some kind of bug related to the camera and movement.  If the camera was not directly behind my character when she started moving, the "swing" of the camera back into line behind her would sometimes cause her to wander to one side or the other and I'd have to turn slightly in the opposite direction to keep her going straight.  This was mainly an issue when using mouse-look and keyboard movement; moving with the mouse alone seemed to work fine, though of course the camera swing was not in play in that scenario.

The Ugly

• Character visuals are rather bland.  Everybody pretty much looks the same.  To some extent this is due to the extensively "blue" color palette of the game.  The cool lighting, etc. prevents brighter colors from showing very well.  Combine this with the relatively limited gear choices early on, and you can pretty much pick out every character's class just with a glance.
• At least on the Defiant side, all three races are average-sized humanoids with roughly similar features, coloration, etc.  It really doesn't impact gameplay, but it definitely contributes to the blandness.
• Certain character animations are rather odd.  Some characters are completely stiff.  For others, their running animation doesn't match the distance each step is covering.  Some of them actually look quite cartoony in that regard - running like mad with wide, exaggerated steps but really not going anywhere.
• I realize that this was mostly because of it being a beta, but it seemed like every time I logged in, there'd be a 5-minute restart warning shortly thereafter.

Conclusion

For the most part the beta was fun and interesting, but I'm not planning to switch from WoW to RIFT anytime soon.  I'd like to see some things mature first, and I'm still not sure that Trion were wise to set themselves up as the "WoW Alternative."  Time will tell, I suppose.