Category: Rift

Is Rift a success? Yes, I am a happy customer. The end. Print that for a box top and smoke it, Trion. Everything else from their return-on-investment to some silly “3-monther” yardstick is irrelevant. Yet, the story doesn’t fully end because this is a subscription game, and I have to determine whether it’s a success every single month. I will never say I am going to subscribe until the servers go dark. Therefore, Rift is instantly a success, and it will never be a success.

The MMO community carries a weird sense of measure for a successful game. It’s like there is some pressure for the game to be timeless that seems found nowhere else in the video game world. People are buying a new Pokemon this month, which is the exact same game every iteration. What about the $60 console games with 10 hours of gameplay before the credits roll? I own games on Steam I have never even played! Yet somehow it matters if Rift is timeless now?

It must be some weird artifact of the bygone days, you know before World of Warcraft ruined “community,” to be benchmarking the game’s life at launch. I certainly am not looking for an indefinite home, especially in a subscription-based game. I am looking for a sweet-vacation spot. When I hit sunny Acapulco, my fun is definitely not inhibited by worries that the town is going to go donkey turds in five years. It surprises me that people are viewing their MMO time that way. Hopefully they are still enjoying the game regardless of what their magic eight-ball is telling them

–Ravious
so let it be written, so it shall be done

Last night was the kickoff event for my Rift guild, Gaiscioch. We congregated at the entrance of Silverwood (from the tutorial zone), and rode through Silverwood on to Sanctum to help people pick up the porticulum warps. Along the way we ran over any extraplanar forces. Then we headed to the Defiant side, where we helped stop a water invasion, and then turned on the godless mongrels just outside of Meridian. Being that most of our 150+ person event was below level 25, the soulless guards of Meridian were able to single-handedly wade through the Defiant tombstones and stop our ascent. I had to say I don’t think I have had this much fun in an MMO since my first big RvR event a few years ago.

Continue reading [Rift] Breaking Through

As I sit waiting for the server to come back from what seems to be the daily or so Rift downtime, I really hope the latest queue-avoiding trick is being fixed. It’s a rather blatant code error that I’m not going to explain, as each time someone explains it in public chat there are even more people doing it. However, people use it to avoid the queues, going AFK for multiple hours, such as their jobs, and come home and instantly get in. It’s annoying for those of us who have to wait in the queue, although even playing on the much-maligned Faeblight, I don’t find them that bad. Last night I logged in to a proposed 90 minute queue, but I got in in just over 30 minutes. Today I logged in twice, both times with no queue, in the morning and early afternoon. I’ve seen the queues going down every day, and expect as the “Race for 50” pack finishes and logs out in boredom, and the afk exploiters get booted, it will simply be a full server.

To me, the queues are good, in that they throttle the people coming in to a (barely) reasonable level, and except for the second day, I’ve never had to wait for over an hour. I’ve waited that long at Disneyworld to go on a 37 second ride. I just login to the queue and go get other stuff done.

No, that’s not an accidental typo. The English prefix “em,” along with it’s sister “en,” means “to make into.” So, empower is to make something with power. Subsequently “emmobilized” would mean to “to get people in action for action, like war.” In Rift, every time a rift event drops, the players around mobilize. In a zone-wide invasion event, it seems sometimes that the whole zone answers the call to repel the planar intruders. Except, “emmobilize” is not a word.  “Immobilize” is. In much of my time in Rift’s Head Start, I have felt immobilized despite all internal intentions to the contrary. I have hope that soon the clouds will clear.

 

Continue reading [Rift] Emmobilized

I know who has the toughest job at Trion now. Not the poor sap who has to balance 38 souls so that one doesn’t become so far ahead/behind another that no one rolls it (see recent Rogue rebalancing). No, it’s the server admin who 30 minutes ago had to walk up to Scott Hartsman in the middle of what was a textbook launch (queues are going to happen) and tell them that the servers were having issues and that they had to bring them all down.

Think they drew straws?

Ps – They’re back up, go play!

Blogger compatriot and Rift guildie, Moxie, over at her blog Battle Priestess has posted our guild’s 22 week server event list. The great thing about these events is that they are inclusive to our whole Rift server, Faeblight. Granted the first couple of weeks are going to be a tad more Guardian oriented due to their location, but once we hit contested zones and invade the dirty-heathen Defiant zones, it will be a server wide event. All are welcome to join in the fun.

The Gaiscioch Family is not new to these community-organized events having been instrumental in keeping a Warhammer Online server alive with a very popular Battle for Badlands event. They have been doing these awesome events since Dark Age of Camelot. I am also excited to see how the automatic system and Rift GMs will respond to such a focused server event. We know that Rift GMs have the ability to call down the in-game Events themselves, and I hope they do so during the community-driven events.

Good luck to all those starting today with the Rift early access. If you are still looking for a server, Faeblight is going to be a happening place on both sides.

–Ravious
hi ho the dairy oh

As I am planning on playing when the game goes live, I have purposely avoided taking my character out of the first area, so as to have as much new as possible. As I’ve ground up a rogue, mage, cleric, and warrior to mid-20’s or higher, and done almost every tradeskill skill to at least 100, that means what I have left to sample is the PvP game in Rift. In a surprising twist, I’ve found that I am amazingly good at it, although I know I am bad at it. It’s just so many people have not realized that Rift is not the same as WoW, despite the familiar feel. In the past, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid the direct comparison, but after several days of playing, I cannot figure out a better way to do so.

I’ve played a lot of Black Garden, Rift’s “Capture the Flag” variant, and Valley of the Codex, which is Rift’s resource capture variant. These are both similar to WoW’s versions, but still distinctly different, which makes it very depressing when someone uses WoW’s tactics on them. Because you will lose. Badly. I was going to go into a detailed explanation of the zones, but that makes for a boring and possibly ranty post. Instead, I’m going to briefly talk about raiding the other side which is crazy fun.
Continue reading Rift PvP: You’re Not in…Oh You Know

Trion Worlds has a fantastic game going into early access launch this Thursday (1 EST), but they still have a lot of work cut out for them. Likely the biggest issue is going to be massaging souls (classes) to get them where they work. I am not worried about balance for each soul, but I expect that Trion will work out a strong niche for each calling. I’ve been reading balance issues all over the board, but then again even the longer-toothed World of Warcraft is still fiddling with classes.

The one challenge I hope Rift can make work is the contribution system for the dynamic content. Right now, quite frankly, it sucks.

Continue reading [Rift] A Spam Contribution

Time to eat crow.

See, I wasn’t going to play Rift. Note the past tense. Just looking at it from a distance it looked like it had nothing to offer other than its two major key points, namely the Rifts themselves and the class system. The rest was just your usual spaghetti sauce of modern MMO, adjusted for flavor here and there. Enough? For some people it was, but for me it wasn’t. I just wasn’t interested in the least bit to learn about its details.

Then, of course, I just had to go ahead and try the beta. I never learn. So, basically, FU Trion. For getting me hooked.

Recap? Briefly? Okay: This game has no right being as fun as it is. Why? Because once you take out the rifts and the class system, we’ve played this game before. Some of us for years on end. We’ve done this before. Let that sink in. So, if we did, why is it still utterly fun?

Musings about that last point: It’s still fun because you really can’t take the rifts and the class system out. Sure, you might choose never ever ever to join a PQ and do a single rift, cross your heart and hope to die. That’s fine. But it still alters your gameplay as you go along. And of course, you can’t take the class system out. It’s still fun because it works, and it works great at what it does, which is offering a condensed can of modern, post-WoW MMO, with all that people love and hate about it. It’s fun because the combat feels meaty and punchy, and at least to me, never got old with any of the soul combinations I tried. It’s fun because it’s exceptionally pretty new ground to cover and muck about in. It’s fun because it’s polished and you can tell a lot of love went into it.

So, if you’re like I was up until a few days ago, thinking that you’re gonna give it a miss because there’s nothing in it of note other than the Rifts – which you won’t care about – and the class system – which might be nice, but whatever – here’s my impressions from playing the beta for just a few days: You’re wrong.

My wife says I lack speeds between 0 and 60.

If Rift offered a lifetime subscription plan, I would most likely take it. If it used a carnival model, so I would not need to pay to revisit characters after a break, I would most likely be there. The monthly subscription model instead puts me in the unfortunate place of having repeated psychic costs every unit time, along with the feeling that I need to “get my money’s worth” (which should take all of one night, relative to other entertainment costs) and the game structures that make it difficult to meaningfully play more than one at once. MMOs tend to promote serial monogamy over polygamy, so if I have one, moving to a new one is a lot like abandoning the old. You can revisit your exes, but again, psychic costs.

I am interested, and it looks high quality, but I am not over the cost of switching and starting over. Guild Wars 2, however, seems like a gimme, what with box cost only.

: Zubon