Category: Rift

RIFT on a Short Sale

Small public service announcement: RIFT is on sale at GoGamer.com for $40 + $3 shipping until about the end of 1/19/11 in the states (~40 hours from the time of this post). Once you take into account taxes at the local Gamestop, it still should come out to nearly $10 in savings. I have to say that $40 for a game I will be paying $15/month for after that first injection feels like a much more comfortable price point than $50, but buyers will have to rely on shipping lag (as opposed to the instantaneous digital delivery at Trion, Steam, etc.).

–Ravious

RIFT: Cthulhu Toolkit

I was listening to Massively Speaking yesterday where they interviewed Scott Hartsman, head honcho at Trion Worlds. It’s a great MMO podcast to even begin with, but it was also a great interview. One of my big concerns with Rift, coming off of a lot of play time during Beta 4, was the mushiness of the invasion system. Players need focus and sense, and the middle portion of the dynamic content system seemed to lose both. Hartsman eased my fears in the interview because he talked about how we were seeing the early use of tools in their dynamic content system, and there was a lot more to come.

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Rift Overrun

As I go in to this fourth open beta weekend for RIFT, I have a overbearring question in my head. So many people are upset with languished tutorial zone and the themepark feel of the plethora of kill ten rats quests. What if those didn’t exist? What if I was just playing for the dungeon content, which I’ve heard decent things about so far, and especially the dynamic open world content?

That’s how I intend to play this weekend. I am going to roll a Defiant mage because I can roll through that tutorial really quickly. Then I am going to try and level and play with as much focus on the dynamic content as possible.

This dynamic war comes so close to the MMO I have designed in my head, I just wish it was not so tarnished by the lackluster quest system set in place, and I wish it was a tad more scalable, especially in early areas where small rifts open and are vanquished in less than a minute.

–Ravious
the dance of angry feet

Oh, the Controversy!

Pundits across the board must have had some soul-bearing New Year’s resolutions. No longer will they toe the line. They will say what they have to, goddammit! It seems that this was also the week to strike. The surprising thing is that most MMO blogs around the ‘sphere have been pretty tame when it came to 2011 predictions and 2011 posts. It has been the big gamesites that are deciding to no longer be kept down by The Man.  In no particular order:

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2011 – Hopes, Dreams, Fears

I am too antsy to work. Most community managers on the West Coast aren’t even awake, but it is the first business day of 2011. The 2011. The Year of the MMO. It feels like something should be coming any second, but I have to tell myself that things were not so different a week ago. All morning I have been trying to write this post. What are my baseless speculations on the MMO genre this year?

Continue reading 2011 – Hopes, Dreams, Fears

Alt Souls

I have nothing useful to add to existing reviews of Rift as it stands in beta. It seems to be an evolutionary improvement on existing MMOs, but nothing grabs me by the lapels and says I must play. In the first few rifts I have encountered, I am not seeing the “2.0” part of “PQ 2.0”; the first Defiant rift parallels the first Chaos PQ nicely, down to the boss that dies in less than 10 seconds because every character will see that PQ/rift. If you like the current crop of MMOs and want a better one, Rift is for you. The downside is trying to get all your friends to quit WoW to go play it. I could not even get my friends to play WoW on the same server.

One encouraging thing is how the soul system affects altoholics. I have long been asking for the ability to play multiple classes on the same character. Now I can. If I level-cap four characters, I have access to every possible class and class combination in the game, and I would be able to swap between at least a dozen of them in less than a minute. That is really handy. Most have been referring to souls as talent trees, which they are, but they are also how you cram the usual 8-16 classes into 4 base classes. You even get overlap within those 4, such every base class can fill multiple roles, rather than just having minor varieties on how you deal damage.

: Zubon

Looting

Are we past the point of clicking on bodies? Just put the loot in my inventory. Give me some sort of message, great, but most games do not benefit from the extra step of having me click on a body, bag, etc. Experience goes directly on to my character, cash sometimes goes directly onto my character; just put the loot in my inventory.

City of Heroes does this. Global Agenda does this. Team Fortress 2 does this. Rift does this with rift loot. LotRO skirmishes are half-way there with most rewards appearing in your barter wallet as a quest reward mechanic.

The downside is the question of limited inventory space. What do we do when inventory is full? When we click on bodies, the loot is just there, waiting for us to open some inventory slots. Do we just miss out on loot if we are full? My immediate notions would be:

  • Yes, so watch for the big red FULL alert and the continued red text on your screen.
  • Stop limiting inventory space. That might be a really bad idea in a game with lots of trash loot, which leads to the next step of stop with the trash loot. Alternately, have some sort of genericized system that takes less (server) storage space rather than having dozens of things to remember per item.
  • Have a loot overflow holding area. It would be a buffer that lasts for as long as you are logged on, kind of like buyback at the NPC merchants. As long as you stay online (plus time x, to deal with connection isseus?), your bag is infinitely large, but make sure you decide which items you are keeping/selling before logging off. If your connection is lousy, you will want to check that more often, but then you would have the same issue about corpses de-spawning with your loot still inside, and you would still be checking your inventory just as often with the question, “Which of these am I keeping or trashing?” Be sure to move the epic loot to permanent storage after the boss fight.

Any version would be purely a gameplay abstraction that makes no sense even after the best stories I concocted justifying it in-world, but we already accept inventory mechanics in which 100 metal ingots take up as much space as a ring, bears sometimes carry swords and multiple hides but have only a 50% chance to have one leg or tooth on each corpse, gold bars are worth less than gold coins, and gold coins take up no space. Of course, I usually use ranged attacks. I can already imagine sniping one target in a dangerous group and running, where now I would need to go in if I want the loot from that kill.

: Zubon

Play To Type or Against?

I tend to play ranged support and damage classes, with a fondness for pets and turrets. I will be dabbling in Rift’s beta this week.

I could play to type and try to combine souls into a mage with ranged damage, a pet, healing, and buffs. I would have a large amount of experience to which to compare this character and how it plays. I would not add the unfamiliarity of a different role to a different game, mechanics, etc.

I could play against type and make a tank. I would have something relatively new to look forward to. I would not start with the “been there, done that” burnout of a character I have played in various versions for ten years.

I may not get much use out of healing, buffing, tanking, or taunting abilities unless I also become more social than usual and dive into grouping with unknown people who will disappear soon.

Recommendations?

: Zubon