Sunday, July 10, 2011

Lost in RIFT!

So, how have I been doing in RIFT? Slowly but surely, I think would be the best way to describe it. I've been very casually bumbling my way through the PVE content and have reached the heady heights of L28! Please don't mistake slow for lack of interest, its just that there are so many more things that you can do.

The levelling isn't shabby either. Each zone I have been in so far has ended with quite a challenging fortress that has to be stormed. As a rogue, with stealth and sprint abilities and my elf 'jump' ability I think I'm pretty set up for this sort of stuff and I've still come a cropper some times. Challenging PVE is nice to play. I get the feeling as I am playing it that nothing is too easy and thats really making me think. And look around - its really pretty in some areas, Gloomwood especially. The designers also like their labyrinths and dying has more consequences than a simple corpse run! Its a mind test as well (especially for someone with a history of getting lost!)

The other thing which forms a major distraction are the rifts themselves. I'll underline again that this content is what makes RIFT different from its direct competition. The world fights back. At the moment there is a large storyline event happening and occassionally, all hell breaks loose.Monsters roaming everywhere, besieging towns and attacking wardstones. And YOU have to stop them. Its like a game built around the idea of world bosses on all different levels. Tonight, the Defiant players managed to release some giant crawling lobster thing in Scarlet Gorge and we, the Guardians, had to jump in and help put it down. These aren't tank-and-spank bosses either. This one was summoning adds and setting up fire to stay out of as well! Nothing a WoW veteran cannot handle...

I've also adopted a new 'Soul' too.- the Saboteur. Very interesting so far as it encompasses a snare and a ranged stacking attack (theres much more to it, but thats the basics). I'm looking forward to trying more of its tricks out in the fiuture.

I'm under no illusions about the longevity of RIFT. I can see little reason to replay the game with an alt as there is no new content to progress through, just the same thing again. I also know that my history of getting raids in is scant so the endgame might well not be visited much. However, the journey to that endgame is intriguing and I'm enjoying every minute of it.

1 comment:

DGuk said...

Saboteur is an awesome PvP Soul I found as you'll almost always be the one getting the killing blow with detonate, and particularly in the first Battleground the Black Garden it was a great "flag carrier" killing ability.

I know I've already blogged about Rift myself, but I just couldn't get past in many ways how the cartoony graphics of WoW actually look substancially better than the more realistic, and in many ways superior graphics of Rift. Now I know WoW has continously upped the graphics in every expansion so it isn't exactly like a 2004 game has better stylistic graphics than a 2011 game, but certainly I found the graphics didn't grab me.

What really killed the game for me though was the questing. I just couldn't stick with it, WoW vanilla quality is a best description, but WoW vanilla when we did it in 2004 was all new and shiney and thus we forgave it for crappy questing (kill 8 bears to get their ears, or more like 50 when you have a shitty drop rate!). The point is particularly the questing is what first draws you into a game, and this very much lacked (no pun intended) soul. The storyline elements, which should and could have felt epic, felt rather less than epic and more routine and run of the mill.

"yes, I'm an epic soul of the past re-awakened to help mankind... and *I'm* the guy to sort out your minor problems and find your lost thingy-ma-jig"

"Welcome to the Machine" quest in WoW made fun of it, but so true.

Of course, SW:TOR may be just as bad, but at least it'll have the story and lore to build into and hook you (not that I'm getting my hopes that high to be honest!).