The Rift raid content, which appears to be the only divulged end-game content, appears to be well designed. The “10-man raids” are a more like harder rifts/public quests that are opened up on demand that give loot to the raid that opened them and tokens/currency to others who jump in and participate (more people = harder). The “20-man” raid, Greenscale’s Blight (only one in-game currently), looks like a classic dragon fight which I love. My only gripe right now is that it looks like you need 20 people to do what I consider to be the funner stuff.
Some questions I have:
1) Do 10-man rift raids give loot that is just as good as 20-man?
2) Does this gear make you competitive in PvP?
3) How focused on raid progression is the future end-game?
I’m more interested in the things that will set Rift apart. Raiding is cool, and I love killing dragons, but it’s raiding and that has now been done to death. I’d like to hear more about the “town claiming” and “city sieges” that people in general chat claim are in the game. Those things will keep me playing much longer than a raid and those are far more dynamic than any PvE content.
Looking good so far. I’m kinda surprised you are playing it though Keen. Also, and don’t take this the wrong way, but it seems your blog is becoming more and more about dissecting, over analyzing and trying to find faults with mmorpg’s rather than just enjoying them. I think WAR, AoC and some others may have made you a bit jaded but I miss the old Keen 🙁 I like it when you are excited about games i.e. like back in DF when we all voted on guild names, etc. Now it feels like you are just picking things apart and a few months down the road you are off to the next victim.
Keen became the disgruntled and cynic MMO veteran after being burned by Allods. 😛
The dragons in Rift look really awesome and I like how they explained the raids. But i am confident that they will hvae other things to do in the endgame and the raids are just the traditional part of it.
But it’s nice to see some more traditional raiding with open world raids instead of everything being instanced.
I’m sure they will introduce their unique twist in endgame.
I will be playing more for the PVP than the raiding, so I am not too worried about how the raids turn out.
“I’d like to hear more about the “town claiming†and “city sieges†that people in general chat claim are in the game. Those things will keep me playing much longer than a raid and those are far more dynamic than any PvE content.”
This will be the difference between sub’ing for 3 months vs a year or longer.
I thought they got rid of 10 man raids?
http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?57063-Raids-will-no-longer-have-10-man-versions
@Bubba: Yeah, instanced raids, not raid rifts. Which annoys me no end but meh, I can deal with it.
@Keen: I really don’t see how the features you mentioned will be that dynamic, especially considering nothing really leads me to believe they’ll have something remotely as good as those features sound. Perhaps when someone makes a damn good Song of Ice and Fire MMO with Mount and Blade’s combat, but I just don’t see it happening in Rift. Even if there is something like that, methinks it’ll just be:
“Yay, we’ve claimed town X!”
-You log off, and come back later.-
“Damn, the enemy have taken X, let’s go take it!”
-Battle ensues.-
“Yay, we’ve claimed town X!”
Etc etc.
That sounds about as dynamic as a PQ that resets over and over.
Greenscale’s Blight doesn’t even look that interesting, it seems to just be a maze in a big cavern. As I said on Massively, I was hoping for a much darker, more twisted version of the Conservatory of Life in Ulduar, not just a big cavern.
@Russel Gusto: Since the blog began it has been about dissecting MMO’s. Nothing has changed.
Why are you surprised I’m playing Rift? That makes you think you haven’t really read a word I’ve said about the game.
As for the “old Keen”, you’re choosing to attach a persona to a tone. It doesn’t work like that.
@Pedro: Any angst I have from allods is directed right at free to play and not gaming in general. Warhammer Online did more to piss me off and jade me than any other game.
@Dril: PvP where players fight is always more dynamic than scripted PvE. Depending on how PvP is set up, it can be like PQ (which is not dynamic) or like a DAOC keep, which is very dynamic.
@Keen: Oh just was surprised because I know you have been on the fence about it for awhile and are not too excited for it. In anycasae just my two cents…just seems your “tone” is pretty much always meh for any mmorpg and I miss your “tone” that was more optimistic, that’s all. It does suck though when you get burned, certainly see that point.
It’s tough getting excited about more of the same. Does that make sense? If DAOC 2 or a new sandbox (that didn’t suck) were to come out, you’d all think I was a frothing at the mouth fanboy. 😉
Keen, you play a lot more MMOs than me but it’s funny that the same MMOs that jaded you were the ones that jaded me. WAR first and foremost and then Allods.
However, I didn’t go back to WoW. hehe
I am now waiting for an MMO that interests me and Rift seems to fit that role since it is more or less traditional with some innovations and a new world.
Hope it does well but if it doesn’t there’s still SW:TOR and GW2 to hope for.
lol @ Keen I hear ya man.
I believe they removed the 10man version of raids so there will only be 20man and those silly 10man rift events that are not real raids.
As for the one raid they have it does not even look finished 🙁
I was curious about that too, Keen.
So I went out to a PvP area. Found an enemy camp. Killed the wardstone. (DoT wardstone, run away from aggro NPCs, DoT Wardstone, run away from aggro NPCs.)
Wardstone died. I got Loot, sorta. (1 item that when used granted 52 Favor.)
30 seconds later, Wardstone respawned.
Even if there were enemies there, i’m not sure what the point of “Taking” a wardstone really is. Especially since with enemies it would just be a constant respawn of them from 5 seconds away.
Unless I’m missing something I really don’t see a way to “win”.
I haven’t heard anything about town sieges and city claiming…at least not within the game mechanics. I am kind of afraid that this is just a imaginery mechanic from the “PvP just for fun” group of people…which seem to be the ones that like to roll over some town with a large group – pretend to own it for an hour and then go back to their warfronts and dungeons…but I may be wrong…I dont think wardstones are developed enough to allow for city claiming or sieges…
That’s my fear as well. The “PvP just for fun” people are spreading a lot of bad, bad information.
I’m surprised no one is worried about the open raid structure on PvP servers. As I read it, people can join the instance to help out, although only the creating people will get loot. I can easily see joining one to gank the participants.
I don’t think you can have open raiding with open world PvP. I bet they will enable people to close rifts on those servers.
To be honest I’m not THAT worried about end-game right now; out of so many MMOs I’ve played I only managed to reach max level in 2 games: Ragnarok Online (when I was still in college)and World of WarCraft (duh).
With that said, I tried Rift this weekend. I was hoping it would be good enough as an alternative to WoW. I didn’t expect it to be BETTER. I mean, I wasn’t expect much at all.
What I found though, I wasn’t thrilled. Here we got a game where everything is so familiar. You roll a (ugly only, but that’s another topic for another day) character, get in, do blah quests for blah loots with blah skills and same ole combat mechanics. THAT’S IT.
Sure there is Rift event, but after a while it feels like a grind to me. There’s no pressure that you should run to close rifts other than “you might get good loots/tokens”. There’s no other benefits (is there?), no real impact.
Even the big rift event (where a quest pops for you) doesn’t really mean much; you can try but unless enough people do it, it would fail and you’d be back to questing. If you ignore it you’d still be questing ANYWAY so there’s really no point, as far as I can see.
Then there’s this soul system. I don’t know… it feels more like an elaborate class/build system where you end up choosing a build to use ANYWAY than anything else. You just get more choices to choose from. I mean I don’t really feel like this is something I’d play the game for.
Don’t get me wrong by the tone of my post. I’m sick of playing the same old game for so many years (WoW). I’m willing to try anything new which is why I’m trying Rift out right now. I did play LotRO and WAR and Allods and whathaveyou.
What am I missing here in Rift? Is it really THAT fun? Because I’m not feeling it and all the while I feel like “This is like playing WoW… it’s fun..because it’s just like WoW…which is why I feel so bored” and then it occurs to me “Why shouldn’t I just go play WoW instead? Maybe I’d make some progress out of those grind tasks I want to do for my characters”. I didn’t feel this way when I tried Aion/WAR/LotRO, which is why I paid for them.
So tell me, what am I missing?
@Dblade: I brought this up on my guild’s forums, and I don’t think it’s just limited to PvP servers. He mentioned these raid rifts will have unique mechanics, so what if some random arse jumps in and ruins your attempt because they don’t know the special mechanic?
I did some more digging and found this:
Objective Based Open World PvP occurs in RIFT as follows. Major towns in a province provide services such as crafting stations, quest givers, general goods merchants, rare planar goods merchants, trainers, etc … One side can contest a town in an opposing province which in turn denies the use of any of that towns services as long as the town remains contested. As this is a significant impact on play for those currently playing in the province, it becomes the focal point for larger scale battles as the defender must respond to bring those services back on line.
There are currently no additional objectives in the game such as keeps, castles, or guild halls to fight over.
Ancient wardstone system is a mechanic implemented into the game, that rewards Open World PvP. There will be Ancient wardstones popping out of nowhere, that look extremely different from standard wardstones. They have a floating faction symbol and if a player attacks it, he/she gets flagged for PvP. This happens on both PvP and PvE servers. If then player proceeds to eliminate wardstones and turn them in, they will get bonuses for their teams.[1]
and I believe claiming towns is done via destroying or claiming thw wardstone in the city…
it is at least something!
Cacheelma what you are missing is that you are not tired of WoW.
I am completely tired of WoW but love fantasy MMORPGs.
So i love Rift.
If you don’t feel a sense of urgency in attacking rifts then something is wrong with you, especially with big invasions since they can make questing a pain in the ass.
As for PvP, I hope they introduce in the future more things to fight for in the open world.
I played some Rift yesterday and took part in one of these large scale invasions, the entire zone was under attack. It definitely adds some variety in the way you experience content. The size of this invasion was very large but we did have a lot of people in the raid as well maybe 40 – 50, and one question I’m not sure of, Is the size of the invasions scaled to the number of people in the zone?
Simply ignoring this invasion was not a realistic option, mobs were everywhere and headed for the camps. Very different from the quests that send you to kill mobs that have been waiting a million hours for you to come kill them. These enemies have been sent to kill you.
@Cacheelma
Also, Rift has the worst first 6 – 8 levels of any MMO I can think of. It gets much, much better after that. I stopped levelling at 27th and every step of the way from about 10th upward just got better and better.
I see. I guess I’ve just never got to experience this big invasion so I never see its impact, or maybe there were too many people so the invasions never really get far. But that brings me to another point though:
Isn’t this more or less like a “Forced PQ”? Instead of do it or ignore it like PQs in WAR, you have to do them to make sure the zone is safe at all time. That would be fine at first, but after a while there won’t be enough people to do them in every single zone (this is one of the problems of WAR too isn’t it?), what would happen then? Wouldn’t we face with the “people were spread out too thin” problem again?
If the invasions are scalable then maybe that would help a bit. But then again if it’s scalable you don’t really need to participate as it will scale to people who’re doing it anyway. The fact that the rifts have fixed stages like PQs doesn’t help either.
Am I wrong? What else did I miss?
@Bhagpuss: I seriously don’t understand why everyone hates the initial levelling zones. I can think of a fair few MMOs (the supposedly awesome LOTRO, Champions, pre-Shattering WoW, Guild Wars, some of EQ2) that all had abysmal starting zones that were mind-numbingly boring and didn’t give you very much in the way of, well, anything. I really quite like the Defiant one especially: sure, it’s linear, but it’s got a really interesting premise and setting, and you do get a good few abilities very early on.
Frankly, I found Freemarch’s middle stages a bit of a slog as well, but beyond that I’d agree with you and say it does get better and better.
I liked LotRO’s 1-10 more than the rest.
I just looked at an MMO preview for 2011…saw that one of those games has just been released and, well, it sounds pretty good on paper…has anyone tried “Earthrise?”
I quite like the Rift starting zones – well I had to in the beta since I created some 13 characters…
I like the game so far and it seems just the Male Dwarf was comically animated.
why dont you worry about it when you get there?
have you even played the game? did you play OB?
take it one day at a time chief, have fun playing the content that you are progressing through currently then worry about endgame when you get there.
if the developers didnt tailor the endgame raids to how you see fit and learned that was true now, would you even play at all?
1) Do 10-man rift raids give loot that is just as good as 20-man?
a.) probably
2) Does this gear make you competitive in PvP?
a.) i hope so, maybe for a short time, but there are lvl 50 epic rewards you can obtain through favor that are PvP centric items
3) How focused on raid progression is the future end-game?
a.) who cares right now, no one has played it except alpha testers, focus on the now.
I’ve played Alpha. I’ve played plenty of OB.
I care. The questions stand.
@28 – Male dwarf mages are the best, the starter great staff is twice as tall as they are!
Keen Does the NDA on Alpha drop after release or is it forever?
Argorius : Earthrise looks great on paper, but the bottom line is it’s a buggy piece of trash.
Might not make it to the 6 month mark the way it’s going right now.
I’m pretty sure the alpha nda will stay up, which is unfortunate. I prefer when companies transition from a true alpha to a true beta testing like the old days instead of alpha being the real test and beta being a stress test/marketing ploy.
I played game to 42 . And kinda still on fence about preordering and playing at release. Everything is bleh about the game – save for souls. I am junkie for templating and sometimes stick to a game for sole reason of experimenting with character builds. Leveling is lighting fast so I think I might jump on it to try out lvl 50 templates.
As about rest -rifts are very boring, after you seen one you seen them all. You just grind them for planar currency to buy some gear .Dungeons are well -dungeons- . BGs are same thing except queues for defiants are up to 40 minutes long. If they dont hide a huge ace in their sleeve I dont see the game lasting more than 1-2 month for me. Its everything I already seen many times before and I wanted play that I would still be in wow
Obviously everyone is going to have different views about some of these things. I like the rifts and so far i haven’t minded repeating some of the same ones or that they are similar in nature. I like the fact that they are a little bit more than what they are, if left alone for a few minutes they start spawning invasions that are actually dangerous. It’s been too long since I’ve felt a world had even a small amount of danger to it.
The zone wide massive invasions are something i liked too sure you could look at it and say it’s “forcing you” to fight these things and well sure they are, the enemies are attacking! The world is a little bit more dangerous than the stationary quest mobs waiting for a million hours just for you to come finish Objective A by killing them.
I can totally understand when people say they don’t like these things however and I’d understand if they don’t want to play, but I’m gonna have fun 🙂
server list out where you rolling keen
We’re debating between Sunrest and Briarcliff.