My Take on Rift

Quick and Dirty

Rating: Teen
Developer: Trion
Release Date: March 1st (US), March 4th for Europe

The Good:  A beautiful MMO that offers a vast set of customization options for the character creation as well as character advancement. Easy to pick up and learn for first-time MMO-ers. Allows the option of changing your character's party role (DPS, Healing, Tank, Support, CC) throughout the game and almost dynamically. A truly immersing story line driven by quests that make sense.

The Bad:  Public grouping system as it stands is a bit annoying. Gear could be a little more epic-looking. Not enough starting locations.

Final Verdict:  I have about 30 hours in on this game and I am still itching to play it every day. The graphics are great, the storyline is fun and enjoyable and the wide array of character options make it loads of fun to think about when I'm not playing. If you are an MMO fan or want to be, buy this game.

The Long Story

Rift has been talked about for a while now and after giving the game a month to iron out any bugs and wrapping up some other great games myself (*cough, cough* Portal 2), I decided to buy this game with my brother. So far, it certainly has not disappointed.

The graphics of Rift are stunning. Characters look more alive than ever on a landscape that truly is life-like. Each weapon, piece of armor and trinket seems to have it's own look. Some characters will hold a sword out in front of them while others will hold it "ninja-style". It really is a graphically impressive game.

An example of three trees a character may have.

I also love the classing system. Rift offers four major roles (mage, warrior, rogue and cleric) and eight sub-jobs, or souls, for each role. Every player can have three souls "active" at a time. The player can also change which souls they have active after resetting points in the soul tree. This allows a wide array of hybrid and focused characters and with this system players aren't forced to start from level one to get a feel for a different class type. Players can purchase "alt spec" slots so that a configuration and the talent points can be saved and switched to at a later point. Thus, a player can have a variety of different setups (tank, dps, healer) for a variety of different situations.

New spells are learned through spending talent points. These spells can then be upgraded at trainers in cities around the world. Talents are spread out across three different talent tres. Each representing one of your three active souls. If you enjoy tweaking your spec tree in WOW then you will be in heaven.
The quests in Rift are fun and interesting so far. Let me qualify that I haven't been playing for a real long time. I have three characters: two at lvl 15 and one at level 11. With that being said, I haven't found any of the quests boring or repetitive. There are always world events that seem to be going on which can be good or bad depending on how you view world events. Quests (and experience) are given for standard questing, defeating invasions or closing rifts as well as pvp-ing (in pvp realms). Thus far the game has kept me from feeling like I am grinding my way to 50.

Starting loctions could definately be added to improve re-playability. Currently there is only 1 starting location per faction. This makes leveling alts seem a bit more repetitive than most games.

I have not attempted PVP or anything to do with guilds so I will not discuss these things.

The professions of the game are fun and seem to have a few perks over professions in other games that I have played. As a weapon smith for instance you can disassemble weapons that you pick up for parts. You can also have three professions rather than the typical two.

One of many mounts in Rift.  This mount is obtained by the refer-a-friend program.

The gear so far doesn't seem over-the-top as seen in games like WOW. It almost seems a little too mundane though. The mounts are probably my favorite piece of eye-candy in the game. Two-headed turtles, dinosaurs, cats with two tails and traditional horses are all in here and with a stunning graphics engine they look better than ever.

The combat system is pretty much the same as other MMOs. For those who are interested, the support role seems to have made a big comeback in this game.

Joining groups is quick and easy. Group leaders (and individual players) can set their group to public or private. Public groups can be joined by anyone who is in a set radius of the group by clicking on a big "Join Group" button in the top center of the screen. This allows for the quick merging of two or more groups into a raid and joining of groups by individuals who are seeking to accomplish the same thing that a group is doing (dropping a boss mob, closing a rift, etc). This is great but can also be bothersome. For example, my friends and I typically play together as a group but we sometimes get in on a little rift-defense action. To do this we make our group public and merge with the other groups in the area. After we destroy the rift there is no good way to get back to the original group we had before. As you can see this functionality could go both ways.

There are a variety of other things Rift has to offer - artifacts, planar essences, alternate currencies - to name a few. I think these things, while being important to those who play the game, are not fundamental to a general game review.

All in all, I feel like Rift could be the next big MMO on the market. There seems to be a considerable amount of hard work and dedication by Trion and it should pay off with many positive reviews like this one.