5punk

Grimmie wrote:Haven't tried PVP yet, but I assumed the kill 550 Guardians meant the chaps in blue that show up in public raids?

That makes more sense. I guess it'd refer to enemy players as enemy players. Would killing 550 NPC Guardians be easier? I'm more likely to kill them.

Finally got round to giving this a little poke.

I'm not sure just yet.

So far (just out of the tutorial area) the quests are very, very, very samey, possibly to a higher degree than wow these days, obviously I need to play a bit more to get a real feel for it.

For me it suffers from the same problem LOTRO did, it's close enough to wow to autopilot, but different enough to not feel right.


It seems fine, but isn't new or different enough to properly grab me.

Hasn't really grabbed me so far, I like the setting and the story, with attacks supposedly happening all the time and tentacles popping out of the sky - but I haven't gone close enough to either of those for fear of being splatted.

The quests are pretty questy, if you like questy quests, but there's not much out of the ordinary. Go here, kill these, harvest these, press button, use item. There was one bit where you followed a big construct, but that was the only bit so far that was memorable.

If I had played the same amount of time in a few other titles, I'd've travelled in vehicles or on mounts over land sea or sky, participated in huge battles or story arc events, seen vast cities or just been able to get lost exploring a huge and varied world. So far in Rift I've travelled in a pretty linear fashion between small quest hubs clustered with quests a few steps away - but the actual design of the hubs has been quite pleasing.

In short though, it's not been anything I can't get for free somewhere else.

Shall we all get together tonight and wait for a nasty fat invasion to happen?

Oh, yeah I was going to suggest we try to get a few dungeons done. We can do Iron Tomb again for those who haven't (about 17-20) - even though half of us have done it tons of times it's worth it for the spazzy zombie. "Cruuuuuuuumbly waaaaaaaaaalls!". If we can get enough people together there's Deepthing mines, which I don't think any of us have done yet despite three or four of us having out-levelled it.

I'll 5chedule it.

In contradiction to Berk and FJ's uninspiring experiences, I've been very much enjoying Rift. It's true, it does stick to the tried and tested formula and so I can see how it might fall into uncanny valley, but I've not played an MMO since Cataclysm was released so I've got reasonably fresh eyes on it. It feels to me like it takes the best bits from the failed MMOs and inserts them into a game very similar to Warcraft. It then makes it more accessible (or easier), removing limitations, financial or level, on things like respeccing and crafting.

The best ripoff in its arsenal is the WAR inspired group quests. In WAR they were brilliant, but only if there were other players in the area. In Rift they are more often than not soloable, and the large scale stuff like area-wide invasions bring in players from all over the server. I fought off three invasions last night in mid-level zones which I thoroughly expected to be empty, but ended with raid groups battling the huge elite invasion bosses. All with no lag.

It's not perfect though. The quests are, I would say, pretty much par for the course with this sort of MMONG. Some are interesting and different (the cheese quest is inspired), many are your typical 'go here, collect that'. At least in most cases every badger has an arse. My main gripe is with the quests though. In the last area I played there was a culture among the quest givers of repeatedly sending me back into an area to complete a task I'd already done by virtue of killing everything I saw in there. The worst example I saw was in the low level zone of Freemarch. A walled town is being pillaged by undead, and they send you in to kill some and retrieve some valuable things - a portrait, a keg of beer, and so on. Then when you hand them back they send you in again to kill a some lieutenants, at least two of whom you'll have killed once already because they block your path to the aforementioned valuables. Then they send you back in again to talk to a guard under siege in a cave, who you'll have already found just because you've spent so much time in the town. Add that to a fairly dense monster distribution and you really feel like you're grinding sometimes.

The bad points in no way counteract the good though, and I can only recommend it, especially to those who've tired of what's on offer at the moment (which would be mainly Warcraft again). I can't see it having the high level content to last long if you're a hardcore raider though.

im still on the fence as to whether to get the full game, i want to but i think im going to wait untill the base game goes on sale or has a price drop, £30 for a game i need to subscribe for is a bit steep for my bank balance at the moment

Yeah, I don't think the £30+subscription model is going to work much longer. Incidentally, FJ mentioned that there were free to play games out of a similar quality. Any chance of a breakdown thread for them?

Dog Pants wrote:Incidentally, FJ mentioned that there were free to play games out of a similar quality. Any chance of a breakdown thread for them?

I'd be interested in that as well.

I've been meaning to post a proper review thread detailing the various free MMOs, but want to spend a decent amount of time with each before making a final judgement - it's pretty common for games to put all the good stuff near the start and didn't want to fall into the trap of thinking the whole game was like that. I've been playing all of them in short bursts, and I think after my Rift trial has ended I'll dedicate a few days to a week on each of them and post a diary.

Three though, most of you will be familiar with: Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online and Champions Online. All have their flaws, and none combine all the good bits from other titles like World of Warcraft, and arguably Rift do - but in terms of quality I'd say they were up there.

LoTRO had the finest-looking landscapes on release, which still look impressive today, coupled with an epic story (albeit rather thinly spread out over many levels). DDO had an entertaining and immersive combat mechanic, which I was dubious of at first, but grew to enjoy. Champions of course had the most comprehensive character customisation options seen since City of Heroes.


Back to Rift - I wouldn't say I dislike the game, just that it hasn't massively grabbed me, and being a subscription-based based game costing as much as WoW I hold it to higher standards than I would a game that wouldn't cost me well over £100 for the first year. Perhaps if I had that money to spare I wouldn't care, but I haven't and I do.

I like the way you build your character very much, while (as standard) you have three talent trees just like WoW, the trees are not only selectable, but much wider ranging. My mage has afflictions, pet skills and even a bit of healing, but I could have chosen debuffs, buffs or three types of damage. I would really like to explore all the trees sometime, but I'll stick with one or two for my trial week.

I've also experienced the invasions, which are quite the game-changer. By accident or (game) design I found myself leading a party, which later grew into a raid against the water dudes who had decided to fuck everyone's shit up and needed to be dealt with. While quite an epic experience, I did feel a little coerced into doing it.

When the invasions happen, you're often prevented from following your regular quests, as the bad guys take over the quest hubs removing the healers and NPCs you have to talk to - it's like being griefed by the opposing faction. As the battle escalated to huge gangs of elites we had no chance against, we were left hanging around doing nothing until some high-level characters decided to turn up and help us out.

Quest-wise has been the least inspiring, and I'm starting to hit the dreaded 'kill 20 of these' which is usually my threshold for telling the NPC to go fuck themselves. I'm sure there are some more fun quests about, but I think they need to be sprinkled a bit more liberally. Got a bit stuck last night where the mobs are so tightly-grouped that I always pull two or three, resulting in many deaths. Also had the 'thanks for killing the badgers, now kill the King Badger' when I'd already killed him twice by mistake in pursuit of the prevoius quest - it's a common thing, so can't really fault them for it, but I wish just once a game could backdate the request, or just give it me in the first place.

Edit: Bit more enamoured after tonight's play - managed to close a couple of mini-rifts now I've started to noticed the difference between those and the major ones. Came at the bit I got stuck on from a different angle and managed to clear that one - though I still think it was an unnecessary difficulty spike they need to fix.

Glad to see that they are fixing stuff almost daily, that's always a good sign, though with the PvP element that's always a constant battle with balancing the classes. Hopefully they're able to plot where and how people die and adjust accordingly. Mostly it's about right, one mob is easy, two is touch-and-go, three is certain death/leg-it time - bosses the equivalent of two, maybe two-and-a-half regular mobs. It was just the bit I had trouble with was a bit too crowded, making it harder than most bosses.

Dear Roman,

Anyone fancy giving Deepbottom Mines a go at some point?

Yes!

oh Oglaf...

I'm becoming one of those people who get annoyed by others not being effective in the PvP arenas. And I'm not even that good or have a proper PvP build.

I spent a couple of hours in PvP yesterday, it was mostly Guardian steamroll. The main problem was the lack of healers, there seemed to be none on the Defiant side. That and the fact that most of the opposition seemed to be in the higher bracket of levels allowed in, most Def seemed lower

It is often a one-sided battle in favour of the Guardians, but not always. It took me forever to complete the "win 5 codex matches", by which point the blue reward wasn't worth using and wasn't even runebreakable.

Even so I find it more enjoyable than grinding levels solo.

Now I've played the L30+ PvP map Whitefall Steppes around 10-15 times and not won a single match. I can tell because I have a quest to win one. The best we've managed is a few no-score-draws and some very close calls. It's quite frustrating.

Although I've now put together a proper pvp build, with a pvp soul. It does make a significant improvement to survivability.

I bet you really want to play it now. I don't know why I continue but I will be. Just imagine the buzz if we actually win a match!