f13.net

Including the "first 20 levels are on us" thing! (http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/02/01/rift-lite-announced-makes-first-20-levels-free-to-all/)


I'll say the same thing about this like I said with WoW's free-20; "There goes the bottom PvP bracket."   :why_so_serious:

Oh, and something about 1.7 going live today, which apparently is being referred to as "kind of a big deal". 

- The whole "soul system" is confusing as fuck for newbies?  NO MORE!  New players can now just work with pre-made soul templates!
- Never enough of the other faction online to PvP?  NO MORE!  Now the over-populated team can be drafted by the underdog side as 'mercenaries'
- Can't find a game that allows you to have that perfect in-game wedding?  NO MORE!  Have your wedding in style in an instanced area just for you and your party.  Hell, what else are we going to use these barren servers for?!  :why_so_serious:

The mercenary thing fucking rocks.  This game is so amazingly good.

It is rather impressive to see the list of changes and stuff they lined up for this patch.  I imagine if they released the game now in this state as opposed to how it was 12 months before, they would have had much higher retention numbers.  With any luck, the people falling off the TOR bandwagon after their free month is over will gravitate over to give the 'lite' version a try.

Still, seven major releases within a year's time.  Bravo, Trion.   :drill:

Did they patch in an interesting game world?

 :why_so_serious: Touché, good sir.

He's right too, the game they released was already incredibly good.

I only play a warrior (tank), and the premade souls are pretty decent.  There's four options, two DPS and two tank.  They're good, but not perfect.  There's room for depth as players learn the class over time, yet the premade isn't going to outright gimp a newb that doesn't know how to play. 

Frankly, it's a better option that outright removing talents like WoW is.

Yeah, I liked the system well enough when I was testing it in beta, it was the godawful setting that drove me away.  At first blush I'd thought I'd love some techno-magic faction, until I played it and discovered that it was... precisely the same as the not-techno faction.  Was my summoner summoning freaky mechanical things?  Nope.  Did the necromancers have steam-powered skeletal golems?  Nuh-uh.  Was any single class doing ANYTHING at all techy?  No.  So that right there instantly told me that it wasn't the game for me.  Any game that wants my monthly dollar needs to show more care spent on the world I'm supposed to be playing in.  Which is a shame, because the gameplay itself and the rift mechanics were both fine with me.

SOME PEOPLE in beta may have been dicks about the lack of steampunk. When you have a steampunk faction. Ffs.

They should fire their entire art and lore design departments. The tech guys did great, the gameplay guys as well.

Necromancer? Pfft. TECHNOMANCER. For reals, what a wasted opportunity for awesome.

Gaaaarwhargaaaaarble.

So you guys wanted to play a game that was 99% defiants? :P

You're not going to start in about mmo pvp, are you. Because  :uhrr:

Steampunk > pvp.

And if there was a talented lore department, having an interesting faction is a challenge to design a second faction that stands up to it.

The problem came about when they went from Heroes of Telara to become Rift.  They wen from a full world where everything was based off of rifts and dynamic content and shit was constantly changing, to a static world of just rifts, and two factions.

They also had a class system where you could equip any soul, and they didn't have four callings.  You also had to loot souls and shit too.

I think they should of stayed with their original design. 

But yeah, I think they took a wrong turn at Albequerque.

I think making souls equippable by both factions was actually a wrong turn, too. Paladins should have only served the gods, etc.

The mercenary mechanic is a lot of fun. I'm glad they put in in place.