Rift: Planes of Telara

[Lantyssa]

That's not true at all.

[Sky]

Not even close.

[Draegan]

You just ruffled the feathers of the local SWG fanbois.

[Pennilenko]

You just ruffled the feathers of the local SWG fanbois.

I didn't think such a thing still existed.

[Simond]

SWG was mostly an adequate design at its core but completely wrong for Star Wars. If it had been generic_space_mmo, it wouldn't have been such a colossal failure.

And Verant should have just reskinned EQ for SWG anyway.

[eldaec]

SWG crafting was adequate. Resource model was great.

But object design was terrible (one pistol/carbine/rifle/armor/whatever was always flat out best and the only thing worth using). Despite this objects literally broke the database with the number of irrelevant stats they had to store.

Skill xp was interesting. But skill design was terrible (master box >> all)

SWG combat was appalling (HAM, damage not stacking from mixed weapon types, doctor buffs etc).


But yes, wrong ip altogether. If they'd called it Ultima IN SPACE, then who knows where it would have gone.

[Numtini]

SWG was a very good game design, despite the bugs and incompleteness. The problem was it was a very good game as the direct sequel to UO, set in Sosaria. It was a terrible game for Star Wars.

[Shatter]

I still enjoyed SWG crafting over any other game, its all the same stale shit now.  You could easily of made crafting a full time job and the people who did were hella rich for it. 

[Hawkbit]

Another thread devolves into madness.  Ever wonder if Raph keeps a tally of the threads that end up like this?

[Nebu]

Ever wonder if Raph keeps a tally of the threads that end up like this?

I shudder at the thought of the amount of nerd rage that Raph has been witness to in his life. 

[Mrbloodworth]

Here is what was wrong with SWG: Doctor buffs being retarded. Holocron Grind. Eye shots.

There you go.

[Count Nerfedalot]

LOL I don't know if it's worth the time to blow some of that dust off those rose-tinted glasses, but what the heck. 

First off, content.  SWG had next to none. That was supposed to be one of its strengths, remember? A sandbox game where you could live out your self-directed fantasy life in the star wars universe. OK, it had content in the form of clothes and vehicles and races and classes and dances and all the stuff you could craft, so in one respect saying it had little is silly.  But I was specifically referring to that other kind of content, stories, quests, factions, puzzles, and such. The stuff you do WITH all those races and classes and crafted items.

Now, about those systems. SWG had lots and lots of complicated and interesting systems, many doing things never before (or since) attempted in an MMO.  And while some of them worked some of the time, few if any worked all the time.  And of the few that worked well on their own, almost all of them interacted poorly with other systems or had serious unintended consequences.  HAM was the poster child for this, but by no means the only one. factories were buggy pos. The whole creature spawning system was obviously only partly thought through and they completely forgot about putting in any garbage collection/clean up functions. The resource spawning system that reset EVERYTHING once or twice a day was a nightmare starting a couple weeks in when they started jiggering with it after realizing it wasn't changing anything at all at launch. And do we really need to elaborate on how inadequate their class balance design was, especially where it totally failed to take into account the quality of gear which would inevitably eventually be built with all 999 quality materials?

Don't get me wrong, I loved many aspects of that game and even more its potential had it been actually finished.  But it wasn't, not on any level of design, architecture or implementation. And from a month our so after release on when apparently all the original team burned out/got promoted/moved on and people with no clue how the undocumented house of cards they had been handed was even supposed to work, things rapidly went from bad to worse to frantic redesign of what few parts were actually working well enough to understand and thus were the parts l least needing worked on!  And then failing all that, they tried the NGE, and all the accumulated incompetencies that had gotten them to that point were largely forgotten in the shock of such breathtaking stupidity.

[Shatter]

Here is what was wrong with SWG: Doctor buffs being retarded. Holocron Grind. Eye shots.

There you go.

lol, all good times.  Dont forget spammable pistol whip and combat medics!

[Njal]

I loved pistol whip. Until it got nerfed. :(

But it ranked up there with the others listed.

[Falconeer]

I know this is sudden, but alllow me to necro this considering that the Rift sobforum got recently swallowed in the Graveyard dark pit of invisibility.

They announced yesterday the addition of 3 way open world pvp (in one zone). You will choose to join a faction that apparently has nothing to do with the original (warring) two, and will fight for control of structures and land in a maxi-warzone that resets itself (granting rewards) every 5000 kills or when your faction holds 40% of the resources.

Here's the full thing.

Conquest – Capturing the Essence of Open World PvP
Not all Telaras were created equal – and some slivers of our world may control the fate of all.

This is a game about domination. Set in the windworn foothills of Stillmoor, the familiar landscape has been transformed with control points and sourcestone powered fortifications as Ascended banners billow under the blood-red sun.

Pitted against two additional competing teams you must wrest control of as many Sourcestone Extractors as possible while preventing your opponents from doing the same.
These control points open access to buffs and resources to your team which provide a wide variety of benefits in addition to unlocking additional buffs and abilities you earn by contributing to your factions cause.
You won’t find gated doors in Conquest – your battle is on the field, not in a cozy castle! However, Caer Mathos (cleansed of its Endless occupants) now holds strategic importance for all three forces.
The match ends when a single team has claimed 40% of the control points or 5,000 players are killed – once this happens a 10 minute timer will start, this is your chance to make a last grab for control – after which you’ll earn your rewards!
Conquest offers yet another way to augment your gameplay and characters and there’s something for everyone. Even crafters play a vital role by refining the battlefield resources into upgrades and even more perks – you’ll find new recipes available at your crafting trainer!

Seems like 2012 is the "Official Year of PvP", but mostly the year when every single MMORPG developer out there realized what has been known to any PvPer for longer than ten years: you need three or more factions for your PvP to work.

Honestly, it's easy to jump on the bandwagon as an emergency u-turn now that GW2 is about to wipe everything else away, but the question is unavoidable: what have they been thinking for a decade? Was it so hard?

On a side note, this is just another slap in the face to SWTOR. Which eventually will get there, maybe, in 2013.

[Hutch]

On a side note, this is just another slap in the face to SWTOR. Which eventually will get there, maybe, in 2013.

WoW doesn't have 3 pvp factions (yet), so why would TOR ever make a move like that 

[palmer_eldritch]

I don't think I would be a fan of this idea if I was still playing Rift. I played it for a few months and enjoyed the game while it lasted.

I played on a PvP server which was a lot of fun. I like open world PvP - the type that involves attacking people, or being attacked, out in the standard game world where you and other people are also trying to do your quests, close rifts or just kill mobs.

In Rift, that PvP has two factions. You'll often end up riding around the zones (certainly the end zones) in groups or raids with other people from your faction, doing rifts and having battles with the other faction, if you run in to them. There's a certain feeling of solidarity with the rest of your faction, however artificial that may be.

Rift isn't a game like Eve where you form social bonds with your side in the conflict and feel genuine loyalty to your buddies (people also stab each other in the back in Eve but that only has meaning because the social bonds are there in the first place). It's pretty superficial. Even despite that, I think you need to have the same factions all the way through, not start with two and then switch to three in some new zone.

[Sky]

Three factions good.

Two factions for most of the game not good.

Too bad they didn't go all in and add the third faction as an expansion pack, with supporting content and maybe going back to the idea of faction-specific souls.

[shiznitz]

It is bad business to make those more radical changes this late in the game's life.  It is all about keeping those who are playing happy now.  New players aren't worth trying to attract with development budgets.

[Draegan]

Well they are actually attracting a decent amount of new players just from my observation.

This isn't a third faction though.  You just join a team and play the Stillmoor map conquest mode (in the open world).  Might as well call it Red Team, Blue Team, Yellow Team.  It's just a new battleground overlayed on the open world.

I haven't seen it though, but that's what it appears to be.

[Ingmar]

No matter how many times people say it, it will not change the fact that there is nothing magical and special about 3 sided PVP.

[Falconeer]

Open world PVP/huge battlegrounds, or small-sized arena PvP? In the latter, you might be right. In the former, any number is better than two. That's why I said "three or more factions".

[Ingmar]

It doesn't matter how many sides you have. What matters is enforcement of team balance. Is Rift doing that? If they're not, this will suck just the same as any 2 sided world PVP with uneven sides does.

[Segoris]

While I disagree with Ingmar in the multi-sided pvp discussions generally due to different experiences with similar scenarios, I will agree that balance can improve the experience (I'm just trying to keep input regarding this topic at that so we're not in the endless loop that is the multi-sided rvr discussion....again). Which is why it's a great thing that Rift (and GW2) has found one way around that issue by using a lack of true permanence in their systems. In this upcoming system from Rift - when a team meets the victory conditions it seems that match is over (who knows how long a match will be though (5000 kills may not be that many depending on how large each side is), especially with this being cross-shard and with players having the ability to switch between the three factions, that lack of population isn't even an issue here.

Here is a key part that I think Falc should hae quoted

Engage in massive, cross-shard battles capturing the excitement of Open World PvP at its best!

The cross-shard thing is quite possibly very important to keep in mind imo, since that means the 3-sided fight is pulling from various populations. Overall, I'm getting the impressions that this is more similar to a 3-way Alterac Valley (without the final commanders) than anything

[Tannhauser]

All of you three-realmers are going to be disappointed when you trade two-realm issues for three-realm ones.

Still, I'm back and enjoying Rift, so for the first time I think I'll try their pvp when this releases.  I still need expert dungeon upgrades though.

[Falconeer]

New video about the threeway PvP

[palmer_eldritch]

I think my favourite PvP experience so far (outside of Eve which is a different type of thing) was nuking people as they tried to do their quests in Stranglethorn Vale in WoW, and just having two factions worked just fine there.-

[Spiff]

The issue some of us have with 2 factions isn't that everyone's unhappy, one faction usually is, for a little while at least.
The other faction is the problem, strangely enough spreading that problem over 2 losing factions instead of just 1 can ameliorate that.

One could wonder how fondly the people you were nuking remember that experience also.

[palmer_eldritch]

The issue some of us have with 2 factions isn't that everyone's unhappy, one faction usually is, for a little while at least.
The other faction is the problem, strangely enough spreading that problem over 2 losing factions instead of just 1 can ameliorate that.

One could wonder how fondly the people you were nuking remember that experience also.

I'd imagine they were pretty pissed off at that exact moment, but the other side did just fine killing my side in general. Having a third faction would have made no difference to them - I think it would actually have made questing harder, because two thirds of the server would have been red instead of just half.

Perhaps the key issue is whether you actually have losing sides and winning sides, or not. The idea that three factions works comes as far as I can tell from Dark Age of Camelot, where you had objectives like capturing keeps etc, and some level of persistence (I never played it myself)

WoW, and Rift, which I have played, don't actually have winning sides and losing sides on a persistent basis. If you bump into somebody from the other faction (on the PvP server) then it's likely one of you will end up dead, and if you take part in an arena game then one side or the other will win, but there's no sense that any faction is winning on the server or losing on the server. It all resets the moment you res or once the 10 minute arena game is over. From what they have on the site at the moment, I'm not sure the new conquest feature changes that. It looks like a larger scale arena game.

[Spiff]

Fair enough, in the absence of any persistent goals I don't really see any point to more than 2 factions either (but then why have any factions at all really?).
I got the impression that's part of what Trion is trying to add here, but the info I've seen is sufficiently vague.

Also: I'm not a fan of shoe-horning stuff like this in, when it so completely seems to go against the initial design, but if it helps them in giving some weight and meaning to what has been quite a bland world so far, more power to them.

[Rokal]

Details about the first expansion pack "Storm Legion" are up on the Sub-forum if anyone cares.

[Falconeer]

That looks really neat. And a hell of an expansion. Rift keeps being my favourite DIKU shit out there.

[Tannhauser]

Looking forward to this more than MoP.  Glad to see more real estate, the current world feels a bit cramped (haven't went far in EI).

Wish they'd improve crafting, it feels bare bones.

[Falconeer]

Go to 3:10 of this.

 

And don't forget to watch the part at 9:50 too.

[Threash]

Holy fucking balls that looked amazing.