RIFT MMO

[dragon]

looks interesting going to interesting to see how the dynamic portion is going to work.

Every player experiences a different adventure in the living, breathing world of Telara. RIFT™ has all of the traditional quests and deep story arcs you expect from a fantasy MMO role-playing game, but there is unpredictability to life in Telara that guarantees even familiar terrain can offer new dangers and opportunities.

Whether it’s a previously peaceful farm being ravaged by demons, a tranquil forest glen suddenly ripped apart by a violent rift, or merely an unassuming traveling merchant with astounding wares, spontaneous events are taking place all across Telara for you to discover and take part in.

The ebb and flow of activity in Telara is always changing. Thousands of unexpected encounters are occurring at any moment, making every adventure unique — with more being added all the time. And just like in real life, you can revisit favorite haunts to see what's different, adding a novel sense of exploration to even well-trodden ground.

link

[Mr Bean]

I beta tested it, 15 hours and I can't say I'm looking forward to it or intend to buy it. It's a worse WOW knockoff with a few gimmicks which are fun at first but kind of limited.

[Highlord Laan]

For one stunned moment I thought Palladium hand gone insane enough to try getting into the MMO market. Yikes.

Having read up on the factions a bit, I forsee such one-sided player favoritism to the Defiant that it goes beyond absurd. All in all though, it strikes me a a pretty basic high-fantasy MMO with a bit of of Final Fantasy magitech tossed in. Not all that impressed, but I may give it a try at some point. Who knows, it could end up being a diamond in the rough. Doubtful, but possible.

[Sarevok]

I beta tested it, 15 hours and I can't say I'm looking forward to it or intend to buy it. It's a worse WOW knockoff with a few gimmicks which are fun at first but kind of limited.

Can you describe the "dynamic story-telling" they keep prattling about ?

[Mr Bean]

I beta tested it, 15 hours and I can't say I'm looking forward to it or intend to buy it. It's a worse WOW knockoff with a few gimmicks which are fun at first but kind of limited.

Can you describe the "dynamic story-telling" they keep prattling about ?

Excuse me PC could you mind beating up 15 molerats for their wallets?
Sure thing NPC
Here I am beating up Molerat number 7 and he's got a nice wallet... wait what's that? Oh noes a hell portal open up I must stop it
Here I am the PC stopping the hell portal, oh noes a portal from happy funtime land opened up and they are now fighting each other! I must aid happyfuntime land to stop evil hell land then close happy funtime land because we are not allowed to be fun here.

In essence the "story" is that the world is dynamic due to rifts(TM) but the quests are the same standard go here kill X that might be interrupted by a forming rift which you will have to deal with or bad shit happens(TM) like rarely you fail your quest because your quest giver dies from the invasion from hell.

I'd compare the rifts gimic to just playing good old Ultimate Online except all the NPC's are killable and random NPC spawn in to kill other NPC's.

[Mr Bean]

Ok 2nd to final closed Beta is winding down, time for a more in depth review.

Story/Factions, Mechanics, and Recommendation

Story/Factions
The story is double sided, just like WoW (I'll be using that phrase lots there are two vying factions the Guardians and the Defiant. Said sides can PVP against each other in the open world once they put on a PVP tag or all the time on the pure PVP servers. As far as the factions it's white European humans plus stereotypical evils and dwarfs. The Defiant are Arabic Humans, Blue Elves and Bigger blue/green Humans. The races to say the least are unimaginative. No cow people, undead or werewolves, devils or the like here.

As for story the Guardians are dead fighters who fought in their gods various names and were brought back from the dead and given super powers to fight evil. You start as a Guardian 20 years before "Present Day" fighting off a hell invasion by the Big Bad who thanks to an evil King and those nasty non-believes the Defiant letting him in wants to come to the world and destroy said world. Good thing your awesome because you stop that shit dead in it's tracks. You dispatch the evil King and his avatar and save the day, que explosion and end of the war and you vanishing. But it's okay you just got stuck in a slow teleporter as you pop back in the present day (At Level 7 roughly after one to two hours). Now that your in the present day there's bad news galore, the land was at peace but the shit has just gotten real as the evil big bad is back despite the fact his way in was closed twenty years ago by you. So now your off to kick his ass back to the curb and shut him up for good. The only thing standing in your way are the hordes of minions between you and the big bad, the rifts that open up, oh and those damn Defiant's who let him back in those bastards.

The story of the Defiant is far more interesting if I do say so myself. The Defiant's don't trust the gods and they are proven right! The Defiant story starts you twenty years in the future and the shit has hit the fan. The Guardians in this time line it seems did not like the fact the Defiants were on the side of the king who turned out to be a demon loving bastards so they good and purged them. The Defiants are fans of magic technology and the temporary breaking of the veil between worlds was blamed on them. So the Guardians purged them. You poof back into existence because via the power of SCIENCE! in one the last remaining strongholds in existence. Turns out the Guardians screwed the pooch and while they got 90% of the Defiants they failed to stop the big bad who killed them off then killed off the rest of humanity. And according to the Scientist/Wizard who brings you back to life they had dick to do with breaking the veil to begin with. And were in fact working to fix it (Nasty cultists broke it) when the Guardians blamed them and went Genocidal on them. So end of the world short game right? Well no because it turns out that Mr Wizard/Scientist also built himself a time machine. It can't go forward in time but it can go back, to be exact it can go back to the day he first built it twenty years ago (Present day) a year before the Guardians started the great purge and subsequently spent the next nineteen years losing the war.

Over-all I like the story because hey it's Faith VS Science and the Science guys are portrayed as being 100% in the right. Even the Pro Guardian opening says "Well we THINK it was those defiants but we don't really know, best to purge them all anyway"

Mechanics
This is WoW but twisted, there's more classes and less classes
Four base classes the Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, Cleric

However each base class has eight sub-classes. Your base class gives you NOTHING, but it does determine what sub classes you can get as well as your starting stats.

For example the Warrior has a Pet Class, a Rogue-ish Class, a Tank Class, a Tank class that tanks via weakening his current target to shit and and an Off-Healer, a Raid buffer and a Leader type

The Cleric on the other hand has a Tank Class, A Mass Healer Class, a Single Target healer Class, a WoW style Shadow-Cleric Heal VIA Damage, a Pet Class (Healer pets!) and a DPS Wizard type.

You take those eight classes and you get enough points by level 50 to build two full classes and sample a third class. You get all three classes by questing at the end of the tutorial. You can buy a 4th class but does not look like it's worth it (And it's the equivalent of 30,000 WoW Gold, IE expensive as hell). Lots of things feel WoW-ish from the breadcrumb mission chains that take you all over zones while you beat up various things. One thing is no drop rate issues, if you need to beat up 10 Cows to get 10 cow hides then every cow you drop will have a Cow Hide. None of this drop business. Quests are cookie cutter fair, Go here Kill ten, Go talk to someone, with the attention of unique quests (Cause a stamped, summon big thing and fight it and the fact that quests can be interrupted by Rifts). Oh yes and you have to wait twenty levels (About six hours) to get a Mount, it's responsibly priced by level 15 I had enough to buy one and then some. However mounts are slower than WoW, you need to wait till 40 to get a WoW speed mount which makes no damn sense.


Recommendation
If you like WoW you will like this game. The class combination are different since I was quite able to make a front line Cleric who was an off-tank with raid healing and pets. I could act as a DPS boost, take the AOE's and laugh them off and heal everyone. However more than one enemy and down I would go. Burst damage I was set thanks to shields, over-heals and my healing pet who kept everyone topped off. If it grabbed agro I could simply throw another out there in six seconds, since damage does not break summons again I could simply throw down another one whenever my old one got killed off since it was nice enough to heal everyone for me. I never got a chance to play Dungeon combat (To little time spent with the game) but the areas I saw were semi-interesting and I did run into a few unique quests that peaked my interest

(One involved a race against time as I had to take damage and was healed and had to balance taking damage achieving the goal with not dying running as close to zero HP as possible without actually going under and dying )

Quick throw out to the death mechanic, which is interesting because you get 1 freebie per hour, you can "soul walk" invisible for about twenty seconds then you pop back into the world at 50% heath with a ten second death penalty. Then your back to normal and good to go. However it's again once per hour. After that it's back to the nearest healer encampment and either a soul walk back to rez at your body with a greatly reduced 1 minute penalty and 10% soul damage (10% off all damage dealt/healing done) until you pay to repair said damage which is pricey but not expensive or wait an hour for it to go away. Or you can rez at the camp for 50% soul damage and 5 minute of death penalty doing 50% damage/healing and wait the hour for it to go away. Or course you can pay an inflated gold price to make both go away and be back to fighting shape instantly but expensively.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I'm a whore for MMOs, so in a moment of temporary insanity I pre-ordered. I almost immediately regretted it, and kept wincing every time I looked at info on the game. So since I had pre-order beta access, I figured I might as well see what I'd gotten myself into.

After playing it for a few hours, I felt relieved.

After playing it for a couple days, I find myself constantly being surprised and impressed with the game.

There isn't anything really or truly new here, or "innovative". But what it is is one solid piece of game design after another. Everything that's gone into this that I've seen so far is not only polished, but very well thought-out and implemented. The classes themselves are just talent trees, which I'm a little tired of personally, but they're good talent trees. And since you can heavily customize them and mix-and-match, in a lot of ways it doesn't feel like a typical MMO-style restrictive, pigeon-holed talent tree system. I liken the class system to "SW Galaxies meets talent trees".

My paladin, a Paladin/Void Knight/Warlord, has most of his points spent in the Paladin tree with a little dabbling in the other two for a little extra anti-mage and group support, respectively. My cleric, an Inquisitor/Justicar/Sentinel, is a Real Ultimate D&D-style cleric, complete with holy wrath, solid melee, and respectable healing: No healbot bullshit need apply (although one is certainly free to make a cleric like that, thanks to the class system). In contrast with my paladin, my cleric has a more balanced array of skill points in all three classes... which I'm pleased to note is equally viable. Ability power is tied to level (you train upgraded skills every few levels) and is completely independent of your talent tree spending. Talent tree spending does effect which abilities you have (the more you spend in a class, the more basic abilities become unlocked for it), as well as (of course) the specific benefits of the talents themselves (passive +2% block chance, +1% critical heal power, etc etc).

While I don't really give a shit about the lore and I'm indifferent to much of the art style, a lot of the visual aesthetic is actually pretty good. The game looks pretty, environments are well-designed, and a lot of the animations surprised me - one in particular that struck me was the animation of a staff-user after finishing combat. There is a lot of attention to detail in the visuals, and the game clearly benefits from a very competent art lead. Shit, design lead too, and by the technical quality of the beta, probably some pretty good technical/programming direction too.

I'm looking forward to release.

[SAMAS]

I was really hoping for an "S" in the title.

[Civil War Man]

Since I haven't seen much of the gameplay, I can't really comment as to how good it is as a game. I did, however, find the original trailer to be hilarious.

Here is a summary of what you see:
A mage
An eldritch horror with tentacles
A two-headed ogre
A dragon
"WE AREN'T IN AZEROTH ANYMORE!" scrolls across the screen
Another eldritch horror with tentacles

FYI: WoW has identical creatures running around all over the place

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

WoW has eldritch horrors? I thought it had a bunch of over-saturated low-resolution cartoon blobs.

[SirNitram]

WoW has eldritch horrors? I thought it had a bunch of over-saturated low-resolution cartoon blobs.

Eh, we've got Cthuloids and tentacles from what one can presume is hell. That's.. Basically what RIFT is advertising in that ad. Tentacles from hell.