Rift: Planes of Telara

[Draegan]

I kind of liked it when Life fought Fire and then got Zerged by Defiant Invasions and I watched while the game fought itself.  Then I jump in the end and claimed lootz from the weakened NPCs.

[Kageru]

It's still a dead-end mechanic though. If there's going to be progression it's going to be in a more controllable format fairly much guaranteed to look like WoW raids. So pretty much a waste of development time and game focus.

Now if they had a world where rifts have enough game interaction (dynamically changing the world) and spiraling challenge where they are the end game I would be impressed.

[Nija]

The only thing that the rifts and invasions added during my limited playtime were extra ways to get killed while I was AFK pooping. You can't park anywhere for any period of time. There is just all kinds of crazy shit going on with this game. Even the map screen looked like a rave towards the end of that last beta. Blinking crap and arrows all over the place.

[UnSub]

This thread needs more tired analogies.  Let's see, we had steak a few pages ago, McDonalds and blowjobs on this one. 

Apparently we're orally fixated in our analogies as well.

[Hawkbit]

Odd question I can't find the answer to, if anyone knows:  If I preorder through Trion, do they charge me immediately? 

WoW required immediate payment for Cataclysm digital download.  I'm not sure if that's the trend now or not.

[Kitsune]

So, nobody's yet chimed in at all on the presence or lack of gameplay mechanics beyond 123456121212120 loot repeat.  Synergies, combos, different ways of doing things aside from just mashing your best spells and waiting for cooldowns.

[sam, an eggplant]

So, nobody's yet chimed in at all on the presence or lack of gameplay mechanics beyond 123456121212120 loot repeat.  Synergies, combos, different ways of doing things aside from just mashing your best spells and waiting for cooldowns.

There aren't any.

Character development is extremely flexible, allowing all 4 classes to fill pretty much any role. That's pretty cool, and if it works out, an idea that I expect to be stolen by competing titles.

Rifts are dynamic randomly placed PQs with limited emergent effects. They're a cool concept, although I don't see how they could compare to going through a dungeon with a group (which Rift also has). I hope they do a lot more with the actual rifts.

Quests are TBC-era collecting bear uteruses. Deeply disappointing in a 2011 title.

The actual gameplay mechanics are the same as WoW, WAR, and any of a dozen other dikuclones. I don't have a major problem with that, although I'd love to see someone do better-- the familiar tank/heals/dps interdependencies work, and it's not like anybody else has improved on them in any real way, although GW2 is ambitious enough to promise that they will and SWTOR dresses up those stodgy mechanics in a thick creamy frosting of story and consequences. That's Rifts problem in a nutshell, lack of ambition. They think polish alone is sufficient, and it's just not.

[Draegan]

The whole rift mechanic from simple minor rifts to raid rifts, from small invasions to zone wide crusades is a pretty ambitious system.

[Tarami]

Technically, yes, mechanically, no. It spawns random mobs. It's a massive olde encounter table filled with only wandering monsters. It gets stale, really really quickly, as expected. The entire thing feels half-baked.

[Ghambit]

It's still a dead-end mechanic though. If there's going to be progression it's going to be in a more controllable format fairly much guaranteed to look like WoW raids. So pretty much a waste of development time and game focus.

Now if they had a world where rifts have enough game interaction (dynamically changing the world) and spiraling challenge where they are the end game I would be impressed.

[insert usual strat layer argument here]

I looked at the rifts as a viable "tool" for players to use to dynamically change the world themselves.  As said before, opposing factions can help push rift footholds and invasions into opposing territory... essentially "pushing the map" as is done in a game like WW2O or PS.  This is even more apparent on a PvP server obviously, where I imagine Rift will be a fairly chaotic and difficult experience unlike any other MMO out there.  The blandness comes from what actually occurs after these "dynamic" events happen.  Towns dont really get sacked and things tend to just reset and respawn instantaneously.

It really should be more like fighting over Astranaar in early WoW, where the quest hub would take quite a damned long time to respawn the NPCs if they were killed.  Mix in some Tabula Rasa type base battles and LOTRO world effects and you're set.

The reality is though, they can more easily inject these mechanics into the game than any MMO prior.  That's not anything to snicker at is it?

[Rasix]

Gah, March 1 is just too damn soon for me.  I'm not done with Cataclysm yet (leisurely leveling a goblin) and by the time I burn out or realize Blizzard still hasn't learned the lessons I thought they already learned, I won't be in the mood for another DIKU.  This sort of thing doomed some of my attempts at LOTRO and EQ2.

Only way this would work is if I go cold turkey now.

The only thing that the rifts and invasions added during my limited playtime were extra ways to get killed while I was AFK pooping. You can't park anywhere for any period of time.

That's not good. I need a poop-escape mechanic.  Any classes get feign dead?

[Ashamanchill]

Honestly now, that ad is just plain out pathetic. "Hey everyone! We're not WoW!!! (Implication on being edgier and more hardcore then WoW).....but don't look too hard at our interface, dungeon design, class moves, et al came from"  I Know that being just like WoW but different is their big selling point (hell it's how I've gotten my friends to play it), but when you come right out and say it like that, instead of at least sugar coating it, the whole thing comes off as entirely desperate. Really desperate.

Hartman, dude, smack marketing until they make a different ad! That one has no effect on people that haven't played WoW, and just puts off those that do.

Edit: Petty, that's the word I was digging around for. Fucking petty. I dunno, it feels like, if this game can't at least say what it is that separates it from WoW, then why should I bother?

[Margalis]

I watched a little bit of the stream that someone here had set up - to me it looked exactly like WOW, down to the font and the < > surrounding some of the nametag text above character heads.

If there was ever a game not to attach "we're not in Azeroth anymore" to this is probably the one. Also this makes the exact mistake that Blur vs. Mario Kart commercial did - it gives me no positive reason to play the game other than that it's not the game that has sold a bazillion copies and that everyone loves. I don't think negative campaigns like this can work except in very special cases.

Who is the target audience here? WOW players? But WOW players like WOW, they like Azeroth. People who don't like WOW? But the game looks exactly like WOW. They even showed a Warcraft enemy (2 headed Ogre) It's like if you showed a picture of Dorothy dancing with the Scarecrow and some Munchkins and wrote "we're not in Oz anymore." What?

After watching that commercial I'm very confused as to why in the world I'd want to play Rifts. If the game is different from WOW tell me how. If it's like WOW but better tell me how, or at least hint.

Most readers won't understand, or care what that means. (The server side change on the fly thing)

Agree 100%. I don't care if the game is changing because a person is operating it, or a robot, or because a cat is randomly prancing on a keyboard in their office. What I care about is the end result. If the Rifts are fun and awesome then I don't care (as an end user) why they are awesome - they're awesome. If they're merely ok then the fact that they can totally be tweaked by hand in real-time is just technobabble porn.

[Spiff]

I wasn't terribly impressed by the promised on-the-fly tweaking of the rifts tbh; on several occasions I ran into elite filled rifts when there was only 2 or 3 of us around and (even worse imo) rifts often got zerged and very little seemed to change to difficulty and/or amount of mobs spawned.

Having 20-30 people fight over a 5-10 mob spawn (regular mobs that die in about 4 hits anyway) isn't terribly epic.
For some reason (my own deluded hopes?) I was under the impression it would be more responsive.

Maybe I just haven't seen the full potential, but I'm not putting down €50 before I do.

[Maledict]

If there is dynamic adjusting of rifts, it wasn't working in the beta I played over Christmas. Myself and another low level payer got absolutely curbstomped by a rift spawning in the starting zone straight after the intro area, that was ridiculously stronger than my two people could cope with - or indeed, felt like a group would really struggle with it as well. We got one mob down by burning cooldonws and healing like crazy, but then fell over straight after.

Also some sort of defiant invasion seemed to have killed the quest NPC I was after, leaving my map pointing me to a person who did not exist. Instead, that camp was full of defiant NPCs who were green and non-aggro to me, which all seemed very strange.

Having the potential for this experience so early on is very risky I think - whilst there are definitely players who will respond to this challenge with gusto, I would guess that the majority will just switch off if they got rolled by an event the game is telling them to do and then find they can't hand in a quest because the outpost has been flattened.

[kildorn]

Most readers won't understand, or care what that means. (The server side change on the fly thing)

Agree 100%. I don't care if the game is changing because a person is operating it, or a robot, or because a cat is randomly prancing on a keyboard in their office. What I care about is the end result. If the Rifts are fun and awesome then I don't care (as an end user) why they are awesome - they're awesome. If they're merely ok then the fact that they can totally be tweaked by hand in real-time is just technobabble porn.

The reason I care is the same reason GM events sucked in UO: The creation of them or not was entirely driven by some random meeting up top and was infrequent at best. Because any MMO system that requires some dude to sit down and hand edit things that will vary on every server and every zone misses the Scalable mark by a mile. Only have one server? Cool! Your GM staff can happily tweak away! Have 300 servers? Good fucking luck ever having any settings tuned.

It also annoys me because in my IT career I see a ton of people make this mistake in every aspect of companies: having someone do what automation needs to be doing, because *effort*, and then wondering why the hell it takes so many people to run their application. Scaling, people. Your business model needs to scale.

[Lantyssa]

It also means you don't have the game spawning invasion-sized rifts in the newbie zone when there are two people in the whole area.  As Spiff explains, it's not terribly fun to have the game stop all your progress cold.

You may not want to know whether it's a person or the computer controlling things but you will care, even if indirectly, because it will impact your play experience.

[Sky]

oops

[Sky]

 The blandness comes from what actually occurs after these "dynamic" events happen.  Towns dont really get sacked and things tend to just reset and respawn instantaneously.

You really think a longer respawn for dead npcs is a good idea? Because I know I love sitting around with my thumb up my ass waiting for a respawn.

[kildorn]

"the world changes!" is a great end goal. I love the idea that what I do has an impact, or what I don't do.

I don't think it's doable without some form of procedural quest generation years down the line that will properly handle it. Until then, I think WoW's phasing is as close as we've gotten, and even that is kinda meh implementation wise.


Anywho, all my bitching about IT process and automation aside: I do think this looks quite polished, and I'd love to give it a spin. WAR made me distrust highly focused beta phases, but I think that's just reactionary (DAOC made me instantly distrust any expansion involving water, for example)

[Modern Angel]

There's effectively a long respawn timer on NPCs in the form of the evil guys sitting on top of the quest hub. When you need to get your buddies to go clear it the NPCs don't need to stay dead for another ten minutes after it's cleared. That's stupid.

[Mrbloodworth]

 The blandness comes from what actually occurs after these "dynamic" events happen.  Towns dont really get sacked and things tend to just reset and respawn instantaneously.

You really think a longer respawn for dead npcs is a good idea? Because I know I love sitting around with my thumb up my ass waiting for a respawn.

That's just immersion bro.

[Spiff]

I was honestly expecting a pretty high degree of micro-management at a certain point, not just for the where and when or the 'omfg mega events' (the 2 which I participated in were quite excellent).
Rifts changing their tactic/numbers/strength from round to round based on what the players were doing and/or how many entered the rift, so the kind of mechanics that are absolutely impossible to have an actual human being do real-time (unless you plan to have about as many GM's as players).

The only noticeable difference I saw was whether there was a bonus round or not (which usually consisted of a boss mob).

I'm still impressed from a technical PoV at what they're doing and especially their ability to handle large loads (i.e. the mega-events) is without precedent for my experience in MMO's, but I seriously hope they've got a few aces still up their sleeve because the actual gameplay I got out of their dynamic system just felt ... lightweight.  

[kildorn]

The bitter in me would expect the huge loads to have worked because they allocated more hardware than expected for live in order to shore it up ;)

But that's just the bitter person in me who doesn't trust heavily phased betas after WAR used them as a smoke and mirrors game. Hey, this game ROCKS (if you didn't have to level properly into this content or try to get gear or anything else besides exactly the two variables we're testing this week....)

That said, it's entirely within the realm of reasonable this day and age in server tech to quickly and easily alter the hardware behind a node on the fly if a heavy rift starts up. DRS is a godsend for things with spikey and unpredictable loads.

[Tarami]

The mega events in the beta ought not to have been that massive a spike, as the player density was already at its maximum. I do not think simply adding a lot of mobs results in very high load, since most of them will be "at rest" (i.e. not engaged in combat with a player character.) Traditionally it's sudden surges in player density, not mob density, that make servers go bye-bye.

[Mrbloodworth]

Next Wow Expansion will include a Rift like system.

Heard it here first.


"We are back in Azeroth now!"

[kildorn]

It would not shock me at all if WoW added a PQ type system, or at least put it into their next MMO. They already switched a number of "event" type quests to be quest credit no matter who tagged the actual mob.

I loved WAR's PQ system. Seriously. Some of them turned into a giant slog, but that was WAR's overall issue: they made the early game FUN, and completely lost sight of what made it fun while building the mid/late game.

[Mrbloodworth]

I do believe the Rift system was designed by the same guy who did the PQ system.

[Modern Angel]

I'd also go google "Age of Conan" and "hiving".

[Mrbloodworth]

It all makes sense now. Thanks, I didn't make that connection.

This is floating around, and made me chuckle.

[Modern Angel]

Yeah, the rifts are basically a hybrid of AoC's aborted hiving system and WAR's PQs. I *think* one of the guys behind the hiving idea is now at Trion.

[trias_e]

Having listened to one of the podcasts at riftpodcast.com, I believe with Hartsman on it, the goal of rifts are to be dynamic, AI driven.  They want them to scale to the amount of people in the zone, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to take out every rift solo even if you're alone in the zone.  I think they envision emergent/social gameplay coming from people being forced to work together to defeat some rifts, and they are hoping this will just work automatically.

I found a rift role calculator, although I'm not sure how accurate it is (and obviously everything is subject to great change during beta).  This game may turn out to be like ChampO for me, where I build tons of characters but never actually purchase the game.

http://www.riftrolebuilder.com/

Looks like if you want to build the WoW mage go Stormcaller/Dominator/Pyromancer.

[Threash]

Looks like if you want to build the WoW mage go Stormcaller/Dominator/Pyromancer.

Hunter would be ranger/marksman/saboteur and rogue would be assassin/bladedancer/riftstalker

[Segoris]

Having listened to one of the podcasts at riftpodcast.com, I believe with Hartsman on it, the goal of rifts are to be dynamic, AI driven.  They want them to scale to the amount of people in the zone, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to take out every rift solo even if you're alone in the zone.  I think they envision emergent/social gameplay coming from people being forced to work together to defeat some rifts, and they are hoping this will just work automatically.

I found a rift role calculator, although I'm not sure how accurate it is (and obviously everything is subject to great change during beta).  This game may turn out to be like ChampO for me, where I build tons of characters but never actually purchase the game.

http://www.riftrolebuilder.com/

Looks like if you want to build the WoW mage go Stormcaller/Dominator/Pyromancer.

For forcing social gameplay, that has been working pretty well as people will beat the rifts but just not group. Grouping isn't really as important anyways since contribution seems to be done on an individual basis.

As for the role builder, the last I heard was that it was using info from right before beta 3. So it's fairly accurate, just not exact.

[AcidCat]

That's Rifts problem in a nutshell, lack of ambition. They think polish alone is sufficient, and it's just not.

Yeah I agree. The game is functional and looks decent enough, but when the basic gameplay is something I've done in too many other games, I just need more than that. The way you can mix class abilities is neat - but certainly not enough to overcome how generic-MMO the meat of the gameplay is.