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Rift is expanding in a big way with Storm Legion, an addition that will bring new souls, new zones, and much more into the game. We will be discussing some of our thoughts about Storm Legion over the next couple of weeks before giving it our final and official review. See what we have to say this week and then leave us your thoughts in the comments.
When I first played Rift during open beta 2 in 2011 I was blown away. I had not expected much from the game to start with. I had never heard of Trion and at the time was looking forward to the release of Tera. Once I learned Tera was not slated to be released until 2012 I decided to give Rift a try to fill the time void. I can remember the moment Rift sunk its claws in me and would not let go. I was playing as a Dwarf Warrior. Guardians were the only faction available that test weekend. I had recently ascended and was headed north up the road in Silverwood to the Argent Glade. Along the way a fire rift opened up. I was only level 6 and this rift was level 8, and it was Elite. I didn't stand a chance of survival. On the edge of the rift next to a tree I saw a little sparkle. While I now know that what I was looking at was an artifact at the time I was completely clueless, all I knew was that I had to go and pick it up. I was killed no less than 4 times as I worked out the path of the mobs inside the level 8 elite rift. I finally picked up the sparkle and collected it, and while I collected the sparkle, Trion collected me as a fan.
Read more of Rob Lashley's Rift: Storm Legion Review in Progress Part 1.
Comments
As a former rift player i still think they need new starting areas, while the soul system is nice to change roles on the fly , to make an alt and redo all the same things all over again unless you like to instant adventure your way to cap is boring to me. Not a game breaker though depending on how you look at it.
Great game though and housing is a great improvement as well. I headed back to eq2 wich i played 5 years before i left and tried out rift .The amount of content along with 87,000 items in the game and thousands of quests and housing keeps me more than occupied for years to come.Im sure one day ill move on but for now im satisfied.
The reason i did leave eq2 was due to the hack that demolished my guild but i have since remade a new guild and am happy where im at for now..Good luck you all of you in rift and happy gaming to you all . Enjoy your stay there its a great place.
I find it kinda sad that this part 1 of the review in progress is more a review of the dungeon already available for over a week and a description of what RIFT is and what the expansion adds (just numbers though). Little content has actually been reviewed here... Other than that it's an okay read.
"We need men who can dream of things that never were." - John F. Kennedy
And for MMORPGs ever so true...
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I had discussion in other topic about the starer zones so i will repost my reply here.
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This.
You dont do it for the people that are already playing the game and making alts, you do it for the people that are new to the game.
You do it to bring in new players and keep them, which WoW has not had a problem with and Rift has.
I disagree, the soul system is of the more flexible and complex character builders of all the MMOs i've played recently. You can literally play with one character any way you like , and can switch instantly on top of that.
I assume you feel GW2s rather rigid system where you are basically locked into a playstyle from lvl 40 is a better system? GW2 give you 8 classes, forcing you to roll 8 characters, guess what, Rift gives you all 8 classes (9 with the expac) in 1 character, especially now with the expansion (spellcasting warriors and sword wielding mages etc) . So that means 9 souls per "role" , of which there are 4 . So we're sitting at 4 x 9 classes, since a single soul is probably not far from a GW2 class in terms of the amount of abilities it gets.
You just made your own argument invalid.
Read my counter arguments in green, in the quote above.
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Ok, so in the absence of any clarity, which systems are we talking about? Most of the systems in the game is straight from WoW with a few enhancements tacked on. Hell there's even fishing now, with lures and fishing trophies .
Their dynamic event "system" aka "Rift system" is imho the best one i am aware of. GuildWars 2s "dynamic group events" (more like static group quests if you've played Rift) are nowhere near the stuff going on in Rift. I'm now talking invasions, NPCs running amock all over the map, random rifts and the player's ability to interact with these rifts (including the new Rift abilities like spawning your own little NPC army to take down footholds and upgrading wardstones). This is all in the open world, not in some "instance" .
Or is this a "sandbox vs themepark" discussion?
As for the changes to souls, i was away for a year , and i'm glad they did what they did with the soul "system" . The premade builds and the ease of picking one and fine tuning from there is brilliant. I would never have gotten back if i had to redo all my souls from scratch , knowing how much they changed. Now i can literally load up my rogue and go "hmm, i need to work on a tank build, oh what do we have here, a rogue-tank premade all ready to go" . They even load your action bar up for you , and off you go.
Its a matter of personal opinion. It varies from person to person. But you cant deny that Rift is a very good game.
I admit i would like to see Terra like combat in Rift, and mabe artstyle closer to D&D standards as the one it offers is quite offen to bizzare or just plain weird. But then again half of it is conected to tastes.
We all now that one persons Heaven can be abothers Hell. Its the same thing
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Conquest is only Temporarly off till new players reach lv cap. Out of all the Rift zones i loved Ember issle the most as it was the least linear and rail based zone. Ember Isle was more of a Sandbox like zone.
Changes to souls are nothig new as they change those things almost every patch. But obviously its more drasting with new expansion and souls as they had to balance things out.
Personaly im not really interested in pvp in Rift, and rift never was primarly focused on that to begin with.
In other words if you loook for pve fun you will find more than you where barganing for, but if you want pvp you might be disipointed.
Im happy they focused on pve tho.
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I can name about 5 other games that have WAY better pve than Rift honestly starting with SWTOR GW2 TSW Tera etc , its all just an opinion of course. I can agree EI was not as linear but it was far from sandboxish as its just quest hubs you can go grab anytime you wish to do more quests. Games also do not nerf no where near as much as rift does either , every patch they NEVER can get the souls right . WOW would be a close second but no where near as close as rift . They continue to make builds completely unusable and each patch is a new op soul set . I cancelled my sub and pre order after playing 1.11 and what an atrocious patch it was to destroy rogues and warrior survivability builds. Any game that makes warriors the least desirable tanks and instead makes clerics tells you a lot about the people in charge making the desicions.
What exactly has changed in these zones?
Lets say, Gloamwood. You still do the same quests you did at launch. Oh, now you can IA. Which repeats many of the quests anyway. Oh and the generic world event rifts and invasions are there to dilute the flavor of the zone. I dont need to see 'Hammer and Flame' invasion as every other invasion no matter which zone im in.
And you even just said they have players at level 20 from the unlimited trial. Why not make 20-50 better for them instead of saying 'yeah, try and get through this as fast as you can. we dont care about this level range, neither should you'
This is actually a pro-rift thing here. Why shouldnt clerics be strong tanks? Clerics have typically been masters of divine magic and able to weild heavy armor. That sounds like a recipe for tanking to me.
In fact thats the real issue here: why cant some clerics wear plate? The fact that the callings are really: Plate, Chan, Leather and Cloth is kind of lazy IMO
From what i noticed its more of a frustration towards changing your favourite builds than anything else.
SWTOR was literaly STATIC online game with singleplayer proggression. There is very little to do if at all outside raiding or warzones. The game world feels dead.
GW2 have very vibrant and alive world with tons of content but once you reach lv 80 all that content is obsolete and pointless as there are no mechanics that will use it. Not to mention all 3 parts of the game are split apart created 3 games for the price of 1.
Game is extremly casual. There is some hope in the next patch tho as t hey plan to add new dungeons and new gear progression. In the end tho the game is very simple with very little to no configuration or depth.
TSW Very similar to swtor in regards to game progression. Singleplayer feel and dead lifeless world. Not as bad as swtor tho. Best visuals on the market, with the best performance. Only true dx11 engine right now that uses teslation in mmo games. Some of the best engame dungeons on the market (truly amazing). No levels and classes. Full freedom of creating and developing the character.
Tera Apart from best combat system and fun innovative dungeons, pretty artstyle and visuals, the game itslef was not offering anything new or innovative in pve department. All quests where made in lienar way. Instead of focusing on kill quests that would make the gameplay a lot more fun there was lots of usless runing. A lot of in game systems was unfinished, like the whole vanarchy system and very hard to operate. Only 2 endgame dungeons and 2 refubrished low lv dungeons.
Rift Rift have clasical tab targeted combat, but offers highest customizability among all the available mmo games right now. (excluding Eve online). Game offers a lot of new and unique pve systems and vibrant almost sandbox like word (tho its more of a fake sandbox, but it feels alive). rifts, zone events, pvp rifts, onslaughts, dynamic monster AI, chronicles, seasonal and main plot story events with several stages influenced by players actions for every new patch. Huge amount of high quality content for a very low price of subscribtion. Game offers only basic pvp mechanics like warfronts, or open world pvp with rewards and ranks. Only new thing for pvp players is the Conquest mode creating new 3 faction pvp system.
And all that and more was available before the expansion. I could go on for a long time trying to list it all.
Then again if someone dont like this kind of gameplay he will say this is crap, or that the game is bad.
But thats just life. Cant satisfy everyone.
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Hehe yeah give plate to clerics ^^ To much D&D on my part as well
Im trying to make Trion do Tank mage for a long time. Maybe on next xpack
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Well, actually it seems sort of silly that Part 1 is posted... and the servers aren't even up yet. So I'd think this isn't actually any sort of review of SL. At best, it's like a prologue.