f13.net

Rift 1.1 - 3/30/11 8:00am PDT/3:00pm GMT


One of my favorite changes:

* Pure-Endurance 'Of the Fortress' items will no longer drop above level 13.

Only wish I had waited on solving all the puzzles & cairns for 45 & 50.

* After merging your group with another public group, you can now un-merge it! Look for the menu option to Unmerge Group if you were the party leader of a group that has been merged.

Woot! Not as good as having public groups be different than private groups, but a decent alternative.

That youtube thing could be awesome.

FUCKING yay!

First MMO I have seen spam so many different "Social media" sites.

Won't be the last either.

The new rifts for the world events have a new mechanic, it requires people to not kill things until they've been dragged to the edge of the ridge and 'cleansed' by an item.

Prepare to be incredibly fucking aggravated by retarded pubbies who don't read say, yell, whispers, or anything else as they kill shit immediately and you can't advance the rift!  :awesome_for_real:

Oh wtf. I leave my abode to come to the great white north to bury my grandfather and they drop a world event the day I leave. Fuck them, I want my moneys back.  :why_so_serious:

but yeah, I am disappointed I won't be around.

Don't worry too much. A lot of confusion in game right now about "WHAT AM I SPOSED TO DO?!!!"

Some new mechanics with finishing quests using rifts that has folks confused.

The big payoff is on 4/9

I blame WoW for creating a lazy generation of gamers.  No one can be bothered to read a quest anymore. I'm as guilty as the rest, geez "what am I sposed to do" just makes me nerd rage. 

Yes, before WoW every gamer I knew was just champing at the bit to read half a page of rehashed, banal tripe in order to decipher the secret clues (which direction, what foozle, how many fibulae) that would allow them to continue the game, because it was so much more world-y and immersive when you felt like your battle-hardened badass adventurer stopped to commiserate over a spot of tea during every world-weary innkeeper's tale of how they need just one more ingredient to make their dying grandma's favorite recipe in what some systems coder surely thought was epic prose. If only Blizzard had never implemented an addon API, then 90% of the innovations in MMO UIs since 2004 never would have happened and we could all be reliving the glory days of WoW 1.0 forever - because you can't truly appreciate anything that happens in a video game unless you spend at least as much time reading about what you did as you spent doing it.

Quest text is fucking dumb and has always been fucking dumb. The correct people to blame in this scenario are Trion for not just putting the relevant shit in the quest tracker, and for thinking that anyone still thinks to read that drivel in 2011.

I remember keeping a notepad by me during early EQ days, to make sure I knew what I was looking for, and the directions on how to get there. I think about that sometimes when I am following the arrow to the highlighted area.

I think about that too!  I don't miss it much.  Although the "find this hidden foozle" oh you mean the one marked on my map over THERE quests are pretty lame.  Then I think back to some of the ridiculous find 50 unremarkable (and decidedly NOT sparkly) little clickable objects hidden on top of bookcases, under chairs and behind crates scattered across 40 zones with NO hints or logic as to why there like EQ2 did way too many times and I figure I can live with a game feature that short circuits the idiot quest designer who comes up with that crap.

What I do miss is having a map that I can annotate.  Yeah, it pretty much has to be stored on the client side which means folks will *gasp* collaborate and post the locations of all your secret stuffs to cheat sites and share them with each other!  Yeah, the EXACT same secret stuffs that you are ALREADY HIGHLIGHTING for me on my map with big circles and shiny stars and arrows and flashing beacons just in case I miss it.  But let me mark where I found that remote ancient wardstone or even where every portal is so I can see them at my convenience?  Oh the game-breaking horrors!

First post-social media MMO isn't it?

Well first one not designed by complete idiots.

Anyone who ever played Star Control II or any other game with real exploration and real problem solving quests understands that quests that do not tell you in explicit detail exactly where to go are actually fun. I mean come on, entire video game genres are built on this gameplay, pretending that quest trackers solve something that is never anything but a problem just seems like willful ignorance of history. Sometimes quests that require thought, planning, and problem solving are more fun than quests a five year old could do because all they involve is moving towards an arrow and clicking a button. (Just think about what is actually involved in most RIFT quests, they are like 50% 'press the button at the place,' and 49% 'kill the mobs at the place.' These are surely not the greatest heights to which this genre can aspire.)

What is not fun is putting in the effort required for the former sort of quest and receiving rewards that are fit for the latter. If you expect me to complete an average of 40+ quests per level -- and this is the only way you expect me to level at all -- then yes, they better be easy to do.

As far as I can tell the entire potential for questing as genuinely fun gameplay has been completely and utterly crushed under the bootheel of Standard MMO Pacing. Everything in RIFT takes exactly as long as everything else. Every fight, every quest, every rift. All exactly the same pace. You just can't design very many interesting quests in that sort of space. Even longer quests are broken up into these chunks, so that they still never require anything more complicated than the absolutely simian mechanics of all the other quests. Their story is more complex but the action rarely is, and a story without support in the gameplay really is text that nobody will read.

Even heavily story-based games will cut the exposition and get all "GEE, I WONDER WHO IS BROADCASTING THAT DISTRESS SIGNAL FROM RIGEL? MAYBE SOMEONE SHOULD CHECK THAT OUT" if you dick around long enough though. I'm not asking for a giant beacon over the head of everything I have to kill; I just want my objectives - however general they may be - to be clearly stated so I don't have to play hunt-the-important-text with a story that has nothing to do with the game's overall narrative.

You make a good point and I do agree; the narrative structure of MMOs is detached enough from proper adventure/RPGs that I wasn't really considering the latter for the purposes of my little rant.

Man I'll just paste this in from here (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=16539.msg617477#msg617477).

[Party]Koyasha:  Okay guys, we're supposed to discover which person in town is actually a spy. Now I've compiled a list of clues, and I think if we put our heads together...
[Party]Beefmeat:  QuestMod says it's the baker.
[Party]Stelthkilla:  lol clues! dl qm, fagass
[Party]Koyasha:  Ahem, well anyway, there are probably more quests here. Since Blizzard removed those exclamation points to give a more immersive experience, we should spread out and...
[Party]Stelthkilla: WTF is this ur first day?
[Party]Beefmeat:  Yeah, there's a mod that puts all the exclamation points back. I already got all the quests in this zone. Here, I'll just share them.

The problem is calling every single minor task a "quest" when in reality most zones and actually the whole game is connected into one big storyline that more closely fits what a quest should be.  Your quest isn't to kill ten boars, that is just one small step in you saving Silverwood from the Aelfwar.

Personally, if I open up a game and it tells me to go do something with no direction as to where or how to do it, I spend about five minutes figuring out what the game dev wanted me to do, then quit the game if I can't puzzle it out and do something more fun.

Quest Trackers may remove some of the mystery, but there really shouldn't be much mystery in most of these tasks in the first place. If someone asks you to go kill 10 boars, they aren't going to act fucking coy when you immediately ask "so where are these boars? Point me at em", same with "we need you to thin the number of elven defenders at this fort", they're going to mark the fort on your damned map.

If you're wandering in town and someone needs an adventurer for a quest, they're going to go "hey, hey you! I need some help!", not expect you to go chat with every one of a hundred villagers trying to find the one who needs something done.

Solving a mystery: that's a quest that shouldn't have much help from trackers. Go kill 10 boars, or go talk to X? Those logically have map markers.

Well, no, some Like EQ2 have there own sites. Just just saying, rift seems to spam twitter, Youtube, and facebook all at once.

Not unless you want it too.

Yes, absolutely agree with this (and similar comments.) Frankly I have no idea when it became sensible to have a kill quest for literally every single mob in the game -- the whole general premise of the game is that there are dangerous things around and you should kill them. Why not just have some kind of integrated achievement for killing X of every mob type, that gives the same amount of experience, if you absolutely must make sure that every player kills 10 of absolutely everything in the game, instead of killing 3000 of whatever mob they enjoy killing most or can kill with the greatest efficiency (see: previous MMOs.) It's particularly bizarre when all your mobs are identical in terms of 'what it feels like to kill this mob.'

Besides that I think there is a subtle difference between 'the NPC tells you -- using language -- where the boars are' and 'you get a blinking light on your map.' I admit though that I have seen enough frustratingly-vaguely-written quest objectives that for the really boring shit I'd probably rather have a blinking arrow -- but it absolutely creates a culture of totally insipid quest-grinding when 90%+ of your quests have that arrow.

Personally I want to see a game where achievements replace most grinding quests, you don't need NPCs to get item-drop based stuff, and there are a small number of much higher effort:reward quests that give major bonuses to progression. But obviously it ain't RIFT.

Well, yeah. I was not talking about that, just the capabilities to do so.

I'd rather an MMO that bothers to explain why I defeat the Big Bad Guy at level 10, and then have to give a shit about him again at level 50. Dude was a pansy at 10.

Also, why vendors and other random folk around town are higher than the level cap for players. Seriously? Did that dude just grind out enough to become so powerful just because he wanted to finance his floral sales company?

The "every boar has a quest attached" thing came from the idea that "if it's in the world, it needs to be there for a reason", which probably went too far with random critters. But the idea is that if you make a badguy fort in the middle of a zone, give it a story. Make someone in the game world care if it gets flattened or not. Don't just stick a random spawn in the middle of nowhere. It also disguises the grind a bit, where in reality I want you to kill 3,000 fozzles to level up, but if I just gave you a 15/3,000 counter, you'd blatantly see the grind ahead of you. Some players may like that, most seem to like the incremental approach, where every 50 fozzles you bop, I tell you good job and send you back out for 50 different fozzles.

I only get annoyed when quest design is directionless, and that's a lot better now. I will now usually get 10 quests to do different things in An_Elven_Ruin_00, instead of running back to it 10 times. So instead of dealing with a quest series that's about 50% walking to and from gameplay, I get a series of quests that's 90% actual gameplay.

How about the bad guy you kill at level 10 that spawns again 2 minutes later?  If you're going to have antagonists in your story, please put them in an instance. 

Those are my favourite when they combine with the quest hubs that loop you back into the same area -- so you're totally guaranteed to be jogging along to the next Terrible Evil and you look to the left and oh hey, there's Johnny Evil the First, happily hanging out next to his corpse.

Anyways I accidentally turned this into a Gripes & Irritations thread. How about them patch notes!

I will say I enjoyed WoW's poke at that with their newer daily. You kill some mean dude named Glop, then it becomes a daily to kill him. Called Glop, Son of Glop.

At least they can poke fun at their genre's own silliness.