Rift: Planes of Telara

[Nebu]

Were I to roll a character, which side and server should I do it on for the open beta? 

Note: I'm annoyingly chatty when I game, so keep that in mind.

[Rasix]

Heh, if you're annoyingly chatty, what does that make me?    Of course, I've yet to speak in the beta.    

I don't know where the PVE server folks are playing, but I've been able to at most catch one or two days out of each beta. 

[kildorn]

Notes are lol.

Also, the only time I've spoken in this beta have been instance groups or mistakenly getting involved in a dps meter conversation in the global chat. I didn't know it was the sore an issue with the community D:

[Merusk]

Good lord the low level areas are flooded right now.  Logged in to the level 7 Bard I'd made at the end of the last beta and I couldn't move.

Nebu: From what I've seen everything is chatty right now so it doesn't matter.

Kild: Anything that makes them think of WoW is a sore issue right now.  Some folks were asking "what's the best spec" and got reamed for thinking that way.  Never mind that in 3-6 months there will be plenty of "zomg you combined justicar with inquisitor and purifier, you noob!" comments.

[Modern Angel]

People will freak out if you bring up DPS meters in general chat in any MMO not named WoW. Apparently, if you add DPS meters, you become WoW. This is also automatically a bad thing and all MMOs are lifestyle choices, not games, so it is impossible to speak well of more than one game.

I'm very worried what will happen when they find out MMO devs all use DPS meters in house.

[kildorn]

It just amused me because the anti meter crowd was basically blaming meters, something we've had forever in some way shape or form, for people being dicks about sub-par performance.

And then I went to the forums and every freaking post was about recount.

[EWSpider]

Morfiend and co. are on the Sunrest(PvP-RP) server.  I believe people have toons in both realms.

[Nebu]

Nebu: From what I've seen everything is chatty right now so it doesn't matter.

I was more wanting to play with some of the folks here.  That's why I asked.

Thanks EWSpider!

[Cadaverine]

I believe there were some f13 people playing on Faeblight, as well, but who can keep track of these things?

[fuser]

Morfiend and co. are on the Sunrest(PvP-RP) server.  I believe people have toons in both realms.

Is that the same server as the PA people?

[tazelbain]

PA in WAR had a bunch of exploiters.

[kildorn]

My Stormcaller/Chloro's nerf of doom (removing Recharge) has just caused me to turn silly (20/20 point split so far into Stormcaller/Chloro for the Chloro mana regen)

Oh, and the replacement to Recharge is.. hilariously useless. Like, unbelievably useless. Look, we already HAVE a charge based damage booster. Don't give me one that.. kind of rolling crits on my least used spells.

edit: I'm amused that the Rift open beta/stress test lasted ~five hours.

[Lantyssa]

I believe there were some f13 people playing on Faeblight, as well, but who can keep track of these things?

Yes, Faeblight, but I know two of us haven't really done much since beta 4(?).  Both because we're not looking for DIKU and we didn't want to burn ourselves out in case we do get it.

[Paelos]

Well I tried to make a character. The server didn't appreciate that today. 

[Ashamanchill]

I was given a beta key a while back, and I said what I always say for games I want to play: "no thanks, I'll play on release." A week a go I was given another beta key....."no thank you (voice straining), I'll play on release (biting fist)".....when is this coming out in stores again?

[Paelos]

Well I got into the servers in prime time, finally. Not bad.

[Cadaverine]

when is this coming out in stores again?

Pre-order head start is the 24th, with release on 3/1

[Lakov_Sanite]

Playing the beta now, man they are cdopying a lot of other games. Some good, some bad....like the plasticy eq2 look

[Paelos]

Playing the beta now, man they are cdopying a lot of other games. Some good, some bad....like the plasticy eq2 look

I got that feeling as well in my first two hours. It's very much a patchwork quilt of other games right down to the UI. I found the idea of immediately being thrust into 3 different specs at once a little confusing, but not unfun. I made a warrior paladin-warlord-void knight.

[Draegan]

This game has no where near the horrible plastic graphics of EQ2.

[Lakov_Sanite]

This game has no where near the horrible plastic graphics of EQ2.

It's not as pronounced but it's there.  The graphics aren't as jarring though as having almost the same exact gathering animations as wow. Really, there's skinning/mining/herbalism and even the damned animations look the same.  As someone looking for a wow alternative sometimes while playing I feel it's more like a wow re-skin.

The warhammer style group quests are neat, as is the fact they don't activate until someone opens that rift.

What really bothers me is that there might as well be only one race in the game for how different people look on my screen, there is almost zero variety in the player characters.  Sure armor should be the same with us all being sub 10 but i cant tell what they are until i mouse over them most of the time.  really gives it a bland feeling.

Less worse but something I'm not fond of is them jamming paragraphs of lollore down your throat via quest text.  Some things could be shown, told in a short cinematic etc.  Sure that costs money but this game kinda starts you in the middle of everything and tells you to catch up and I dislike that.

In other games(lets forget wow a sec) you get your own racial starting zone, a feel for who your character is and what's bugging your faction/race/etc  in this game on horde side(*cough* defiant *cough*)  you start as a clone/something and are told to catch up on all this lore shit because you are getting sent back to the past.

Ok that's ll well and good but having a couple paragraphs to start is fine but after two dozen quests of text walls I just stopped caring(and this coming from someone who read every single cataclysm quest text) it just turned into accept quest, go to spot on map. which is awesome, don't get me wrong here I think every game should have mapped objectives but the trick here is to still make the player want to know "why" they are going to the X and killing the Y mob to get the Z foozle.  I just didn't care.

This isn't a bad game, far from it I bet it's worth a couple months of fun, perhaps more but it's 'meh' it lacks style.  It may be polished in aspects of gameplay but there is no(forgive the pun) wow factor to it, nothing that makes me tell my friends they 'have' to play it.

[ghost]

I got into the beta just a very, very little bit this weekend and came away impressed.  Something that no other MMO that I've played has been able to reproduce is the UI responsiveness of WoW.  Actions in Rift seem very fluid and fast and fairly accurate.  I think I'm going to enjoy this game. 

[Draegan]

Snip

That's probably as fair a review as you're going to get from a WOW fanboy.  I disagree on a few points, but I'm obviously a Rift fanboy.   

For example, some people really love those racial starting areas.  To me it's the first few hours of gameplay and I never go near them again.  It's a valid argument though.

As for character models there are Dwarves and giant Bahmi, two human races, and two elven races.  Not that great of a variety, not like WOW, but to me it's not an issue.  It will be a valid issue for a lot of people though.

I don't read quest text either except for the quests labeled "Story" in game, though I always though telling a story through quest text is a very poor way of doing it.  Maybe SWTOR will fix it  

The main draw of the game, for me, is the PVE dungeons which have really great fights in them.  The Rift and Invasion system is fantastic.  I've seen some really awesome things from my trip to Trion Studios.  I can't say what, but what I can say is that the Rift events you've seen in Beta are extremely simple version of what they can do.

[Lakov_Sanite]

It's not the quantity of races that bother me, it's that I honestly can't tell them apart. They look far too similar when all dressed in the same armor especially since you can make a really tall human and a really short not-orc.  Combined with lack of racial zones it just makes picking a race seem meaningless beyond stat bonuses and if that's the case why even have them at all?

The character creating feels a lot like age of conan but the models in that game were relatively bigger so there did seem to be a variety of looks, in rift you zoom out so much for normal play that any slight differences become invisible.

[Paelos]

I was also confused as hell by what was going on, but I was on the Guardian side. Something about being ascended and gathering old souls, and then I was beating up on undead.

In that regard it wasn't that unfamiliar.

[Draegan]

It's not the quantity of races that bother me, it's that I honestly can't tell them apart. They look far too similar when all dressed in the same armor especially since you can make a really tall human and a really short not-orc.  Combined with lack of racial zones it just makes picking a race seem meaningless beyond stat bonuses and if that's the case why even have them at all?

That's odd then, because Guardians have Dwarves, Humans and Elves.  The Humans and Elves look similar in the fact they both are the same height I suppose.  Their animations are different though.  Dwarves are obvious since they are the short race.

[Threash]

He has a point, the "ugly" races like dwarves and the big guys from defiant are very under represented so 90% of the time you will only see human/elves which look fairly similar while zoomed out.

[Paelos]

He has a point, the "ugly" races like dwarves and the big guys from defiant are very under represented so 90% of the time you will only see human/elves which look fairly similar while zoomed out.

I can only tell the difference between dwarves and everything else on the guardian side.

[Draegan]

He has a point, the "ugly" races like dwarves and the big guys from defiant are very under represented so 90% of the time you will only see human/elves which look fairly similar while zoomed out.

Bahmi's are badass, don't know what you're talking about.  Their idle animations when they are dual wielding are awesome.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Zoomed in the races look distinct and quite good but the problem is you won't ever be playing this game zoomed in.  The game really could have used racial armor skins like warhammer if they wanted to avoid the cartoony wow look, or just make the models bigger like AOC but that would have been a lot more about changing the core gameplay which probably wouldn't have worked.

fake edit: even the big defiant race is hard to spot in comparison.

[Merusk]

I'd agree with lakov on the lore aspect.  I found I just didn't give enough of a shit to find out.  It made me a little sad, because I feel like one of the guys I'm always criticizing.  I haven't read jack-squat on quest text unless I don't know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. (Like the few quests that say "talk to zyx, then use item abc")

I can't be bothered, the lore feels like nothing more than window dressing so I haven't given it a 2nd glance. 

The game itself is pretty fun, but I feel it needs to do a little more hand-holding in-game.  Things like recommending not speccing out into all 3 branches initially.  I did that on my justicar and learned after being able to afford a respec that, hey I'm much better off just going up this tree as far as it will let me then branching out into a second tree, using only the passive bonuses from the 3rd.   The way they throw souls and additional spec points when you get the 2nd and 3rd soul at you is counter intuitive to this.

I'd also agree that things are samey looking. The ears are the biggest difference between elves and humans.  Then there's the fact that each calling will have the same look.

That's been a problem in most MMOs, since EQ, with classes looking the same because of "class armors"  In Rifts, however,  you're only ever going to have 4 armor types (and I've checked out the L50 armors) that's going to be a bigger problem in live.  A justicar will look the same as an inquisitor a purifier a warden and a shaman.   That strikes me as a bit lazy.  Perhaps it's something they'll alter, but given the homogenization of stats and the fact that you can be every class in your calling I don't imagine they want to make players carry around multiple sets of armor.

[Morfiend]

I usually use the racials as indicators for race. Got wings? elf. Can jump far, big defiant guy. Moves a little faster, probably human.

[kildorn]

There are some hilarious target ID problems on pve servers due to four of the races having the same basic shape/size. I've rolled up to a few rifts and found myself trying to heal an opposite side tank for a second. I guess it comes from my daoc days, where target identification was pretty easy, unless it was a celt versus an alb.

[Hawkbit]

Are Shaman more of a 1hd/board or 2hd class?  Nothing in their tree stands out as one or the other.

[Cadaverine]

I'd say 2 hander for the bigger hits, myself.  I don't think there's any Shaman specific bonuses that would make having a shield more beneficial than not.