TomBobBlender Forums

Got a Beta invite for RIFT Online over the weekend, and thought I'd share my initial impressions of the game (played about 2-3 hours at this point).

I'll begin by using a comparison I saw a great deal of people use: It's a WoW clone. Normally, this would be a horrible way to describe a game. For RIFT, this isn't the case. It -is- basically WoW, most of the basic systems seem like a copy. But a GREAT copy.

Now let's get down to the details...

Races/Classes: There's 6 races, broken between 2 factions. Each race has it's own distinct look, and a few nice racials. There's 4 base classes, each breaking into 8 different fields, making a total of 32 different selections, and unlike WoW, allows you to play any class as any race. Furthering the customization, each character can use abilities of 3 different classes, allowing for interesting combination.

Appearance: Little disclaimer, I'm running RIFT on a very low power system, so my quality is very low. Even so, the game looks great. environments look great, and characters/creatures design is very well done. Even on my computer, I get a pretty decent framerate, even if there is a bit of activity around me.

Gameplay: Mostly the same as WoW: Talk to quest giver, go do quest, talk to reward giver. However, there is actually more of a connected story to it all compared to WoW. I won't spoil it or anything, however. Another break from the WoW mold is it's constant global events. Constantly rifts will break open around the map, spawning numerous waves of monsters, and it's the players job to defeat the enemies and close the rift. Sadly, I've only participated in one of these so far, and it lasted about 30 seconds(about 150 people in the area of low level monsters makes stuff die fast). Additionally, on occasion, towns will come under siege from monsters, and again, players must defend the locations, or lose that town and all of its quests/stores. I've only seen one start, but I wasn't in the area for experience it.

Of course, this is still beta, and they have yet to open everything up to players, but RIFT is looking to be a great buy for MMO players. As to it becoming the new WoW, who knows.

And if anyone else is playing the beta, give me a shout, I might be nice and make a character on your server

Just managed to experience a region attack event, and all I can say: Wow. Most of the rifts I've run into normally are destroyed so quickly it's not even funny, but the attacks take them to a new level. I spent at least half an hour running around the area with a LARGE group of people, attacking small groups of elite enemies and fighting high level rifts to prevent any quest areas from being taken. I began the fight at level 10, came out at level 12, with a great deal of loot.

If I already wasn't locked in to playing Rift when it's released (and once I have money..), I'm totally secured now.

I hate to bump this, but I don't want to double post a thread about the same thing.

Last week, I tried out the Rift 7-day trial and I expected to come out of it with a similar experience to when I tried WoW (though to be honest, part of my bad experience with WoW was my not so great PC at the time, I am willing to give WoW a second chance), but I was dragged into it like way Guild Wars dragged me in originally.

This week, I received the full disk version of Rift (stuart bought me it) and today my time card came through my e-mail (stuart bought it through overclockers).

I am looking forward to getting into the full game and playing it when I am not playing Guild Wars (which to be honest, isn't that often recently due to the fact most of what I have left to do in game are elite areas, dungeons and getting 100% for titles etc) until Guild Wars 2 comes out.

So yeah, all hail rift!

For anyone playing in the europe server Quicksilver, I am Megamiichigomo (XD it was a typo.. don't ask)

Lucrece wrote:My one concern is any game from a DAoC model. That was exactly the same tune of Warhammer Online, and Rift looks just like it. A crapload of classes with distinct racial differences.

Just a quick update for anyone wanting to add me to RIFT, we've moved shard (Quicksilver has been designated a "trial" shard meaning that it will much dead in the following weeks apart from those too low to move or too dedicated to move).

We are now on Riptalon EU, add Megamiichigomo or MaiMinase (who currently is still on Quicksilver but will be transferred as soon as possible).

Also on the PTS, but that name is a secret