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MMORPG in-depth reviews, design ideas and analysis from a gamer/writer with thirty years experience

Author: Skuldin

Rift Review

Posted by Skuldin Monday April 4 2011 at 6:56PM
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Rift MMO Review

MMO Examiner is taking a look at the newest MMO on the market Rift: Planes of Telara. We will review some key elements for this MMO including graphics, immersion, races and classes, game play, crafting, PvP, character customization, fun factor, and an overall average of the scores between one and ten (ten being the best).
Character Creation Options:
Rating: 6
Like most modern MMORPG games, you are given two faction choices from the outset: Defiant and Guardian. The storyline is that the world was destroyed in a cataclysm and the survivors were the technology driven Defiant and the gods worshiping Guardians. Each faction has three races, both sides have a "human" race given different names, and an elven race. The Defiants get a half-ogre/elemental looking race (Bahmi) where the Guardians get dwarves as the only true difference. The racial abilities are very bland having been stripped to meaningless out of combat fluff just out of beta. The racial choices really only come down to the skin (appearance). I was underwhelmed with only three races per side and then further disappointed with the race abilities being neutered into the ground. While it wasn't game-breaking for me, it certainly was a negative. The models can be customized with a fair amount of choices between eye color, markings, facial features and to my delight height. There is also in-game armor dye that can be made from the apothecary profession or a dye merchant. The character model customization and armor dye moved this rating from a 4 to a 6 given the poor number or racial choices, standard faction number and pointless racial abilities at launch.
Game Play:
Rating: 7
The game runs well on an average rig like mine, I consistently have a ping under 100 and with graphics on average settings I run about 35 FPS. Those owning a better gaming rig can certainly have far better performance than I could pull off and the game looks good for an MMO. The combat animations were a negative to me and quite bland, in player-vs-player combat I found it very difficult to discern exactly what was happening to my character at a given time. The buff/debuff UI was also poor and did not aid in this. I moved quite a few of my buff and debuff timers to the center of my screen and it still did not help figure out abilities by just watching the poor animations. On a positive note, the game was noticeably without many glaring bugs and the movement was decently smooth although not to World of Warcraft's level. Overall this area was a plus rating only marred by a lack of noticeable buffs/debuffs and animations for specific abilities. The graphics were a major improvement in my book over World of Warcraft and they managed to keep the movement from being too stiff. I will mention the smooth launch here as well and I hope this sets the bar for how a MMO should launch.

PVE and Immersion:
Rating: 5

Rift took no steps forward in the genre in questing, game immersion or depth of character development. If I had never heard of Rift you could have easily convinced me this game was put out in 2003. The quests are the collect foozle tails, kill ten foozles, delivery and escort quests typical for the genre. The other problem was the sheer number of pointless quests was overwhelming and each quest gave only a tiny fraction of a level. They felt more like tasks or a job and they were not engaging in the least. I'm not sure on three characters ranging from 24th to 46th level that I ever read a full quest. The pacing in the game was very mediocre as well. I never felt like I "needed" to do anything, everything was more like a suggestion in regards to quests and Rifts. It's like the developers at Trion were scared they might offend one of their players by putting a sense of urgency on something. An old saying that pertains well to MMOs is, "A friend to everyone is a true friend to no one." Trion was so scared of offending anyone that they ended up with an offense to everyone that doesn't enjoy mindless quest grinding. As an MMO veteran I can get through it, but it felt more like work than fun. The dungeons were fun, but again with the five person group and use of the trinity (tank/heal/3dps) did not break any new ground in this area either. It all felt contrived and the story did not flow well.

  • Rifts: Joining public Rifts in the starting zones is fun and get you excited when the horn blows to sound the call to battle. By the time my character was in his mid-thirties they had lost their luster and became more of a "grind" or sadly a way to break up the monotony of the quest/task grind than any truly engaging experience. The invasions were better, but again they still didn't offer any new mechanics. By the time you had done one rift you could pretty much do them all. The addition of a bonus stage took even more away from the immersion, it took some all important Rift and added a Mario Brothers feel to it. I know it's a game but this game is supposed to have a different feel than Mario Brothers, I highly disliked the "bonus stage" implementation.
  • Character Development: There isn't any. You pick up three souls (specs) by the time you leave the starting zone and you may gather five more by picking them up one at a time and completing rifts in the first "real-world" zone (Silverwood for Guardians). For 2500 Favor (earned in PvP) you may buy your 9th soul. The bonus to the souls was that you could mix and match and try to make hybrid builds. The negative is that you never had a true identity for your character. One minute he's a song-spinning healing bard and the next he's a dual-wielding tank or assassin. If you don't care about immersion great, but for those that do, prepare to never identify with your character at all. There are no "out of combat skills" in the game at all such as climbing, swimming or diplomacy. Standard for the typical cardboard MMO, but still leading one to only bash skulls and never have to think or develop the character much. Another game that has no RP in MMORPG missing housing, an ability to have "appearance gear" like LOTRO (where you can wear one set of gear for appearance and a second set for stats) or any type of character choices. You are on rails the whole way through.
  • Story: Bland and unimaginative, it's like watching the formulaic romantic comedy only applied to MMOs.
  • End-Game: If you are a veteran of World of Warcraft; you will know this game's end-game including "tier gear" and "expert dungeons". If you are not I'll give a quick synopsis. The same dungeons you ran from level one through fifty are now rehashed only more difficult and keyed for level fifty characters. You run these many times over for plaques and/or gear to be ready for raids. The first set of gear you acquire are called tier one sets and have epic stats and then you do raids and collect better loot for the next set of raids ad nauseum.
Crafting and Economy:
Rating: 7

  • Crafting: World of Warcraft set the standard for this game's crafting, and like many parts of this Frankenstein monster of a game, Rift did nothing to advance upon it. Three collection professions and six creation professions are your options. Of course most of the professions that "create" something are major money/time sinks in the game meant to eat up hours collecting flowers, nodes or butchering animals to create into items. Apothecary can make dyes and they split up the weapon and armor smiths, but it is fairly standard fare for the genre. I found the "gray" daily quests to be an annoyance and the rare drop distillates in apothecary to be particularly burdensome. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't nearly as engaging as say Vanguard or as smooth as World of Warcraft. I've seen worse and I've seen better.
  • Economy: It's early into the game but so far the economy was decent, but I found the amount of deposit you had to put down for trade goods and "green" items to be a bit high. Artifacts (items you collect in the game to make sets) on the other hand, only cost a single silver to put on the auction house and they would sell from 10g to as much as 3 plat for a blue that I sold. A collectible item found throughout the world was by far my most steady source of income.
  • While I'm here, the auction house was average, a step below World of Warcraft. Simple auction house features such as setting an amount of items per stack and then how many stacks was not available. If for instance you had twenty of one particular item that you wanted to sell into stacks of five, you had to have room in your inventory and shift-click creating a stack of five. Instead of it then asking if you wanted to sell four stacks of five it would only allow you to sell one stack at a time thus you had to shift-click and use a slider bar four separate times to create your four stacks of five. It turned what in World of Warcraft was a five minute auction house visit into a twenty minute ordeal. I had to literally plan part of my night into whether or not I was going to put items on the auction house or not.
Rating: 6

  • Warfronts: Staged and instanced fights exactly like World of Warcraft's battlegrounds. They are fun until you see how much you have to grind them for the PvP gear and prestige ranks. They offer nothing new inventive or dynamic. They do not further the story or game in anyway and typically involve kids yelling at each other while people "fight in the middle".
  • Open World PvP: If you play on a PVP server and are in contested zones you may engage in fairly pointless PvP combat much like World of Warcraft (I'm seeing a theme here). People have begged for some zones to fight over with a greater point but up through 1.1 there are no signs of this changing. I am a PvP player at heart, but mindlessly running around "ganking" people loses its luster without a greater point to the fighting. Also for those old Dark Age of Camelot and to a lesser extent Warhammer fans, sorry no keeps to battle over and no relics.
  • Combat: Early on warriors were doing too much damage, mages too little and saboteurs (rogue soul) too much burst with two buttons. Most of this has been corrected and the PvP in the game has great potential to be fun, if they can give it to a point beyond the mindless Favor grind. The ability to change specs on the fly while non-immersive, was a nice way to balance the paper-rock-scissors that other games suffer from.
  • Valor Stat: Those familiar with World of Warcraft will recognize this stat as resilience and it was a game-breaker for me. The inability to collect gear in a dungeon and PvP to be used in PvP was a serious negative from my standpoint. The complete separation from PvP and PvE players was a major drawback in my opinion in World of Warcraft and now Rift because there are a large number of people that like to do both. The trouble starts when I have to choose one or the other because the gear that can be used to slay a demon lord is inexplicably useless against a player in PvP. A huge negative right there.
Overall Average: 6.2
A six feels like a harsh score given how smooth the launch was. The customization of the souls and overall feel of the game was also nice, but the game felt (no pun intended) soulless. It was seriously missing a stickiness that kept me wanting more. Rift took a gamble making a WoW clone when many people already have WoW-fatigue and for me that along with the Valor stat was the game-breaker. The end-game was another 'grind expert dungeons to do raids' set-up that has really plagued the genre for years. There are better ways to handle this but Rift took no chances with their investors and stayed tried and true much like they did the rest of the game. If you were a World of Warcraft veteran and loved it, but want new skins, a different way to handle class trees, and the occasional Rift to battle this is the perfect game. If you are looking for a game with more "point" to its PvE/PvP experience, immersion or "next-generation" technology Rift is not the game for you.




I will be posting further MMO thoughts and analysis at my primary blog below:





Skuldin writes:

I updated the review slightly making things a bit easier to understand and using less references to World of Warcraft without further clarification.  I can post the blog post here or just provide the link.  Constructive feedback is wanted.

Thank you!


Mon Apr 04 2011 8:31PM Report
BTrayaL writes:

I strongly disagree with the rating of 7 on crafting. For a system that just mass-produces stuff to increase level, do you honestly think that it deserves better than a 5?

Tue Apr 05 2011 10:09PM Report
Skuldin writes:

Well I had originally scored it a five as totally average and it "works", but then after having played Warhammer and Age of Conan's flaming piles of crap for crafting I was feeling generous because the economy was lumped into that rating and the economy was actually fairly decent. 

Tue Apr 05 2011 10:14PM Report
daltanious writes:

OP posted just pure BS. I would designate him mainly as classic troll.I will however not comment on PvP because I could not care less in any game.

Partially could agree about character creation, but still i would give at least 8. And all haver VERY different goodies. From being able to jump much deeper with dwarft, transform in fox for 30 secs with less aggro on mobs, jumping with angelic flight, .... etc etc.

Gameplay is exceptional, avatars does excactly what player wanted to. Besides all graphics and immersion are best so far. On my computer all on max (where War and Aoc stuggle) all runs completely smooth. Performance is at par with wow. Love cartoony look also from wow, but mainly graphics cards love him as well. Here we have very high realism with no performance penalty. ATI 5700 here. Have noted slight delays only with 15 or more players at once close like with rifts, but still completely playable. And if one actually READ quests ... they are very well done, exceptional. And only ads to immersion of beautifull landscapes and environment.

At this point I lost all wish to comment more on op trolling.

Wed Apr 06 2011 2:28AM Report
MurlockDance writes:

Hmmm can't say I agree with the way you scored at all. Take for example what you said about PvE and immersion:

The PvE mechanics are way better than average: there are no gross bugs or major deficiencies, I haven't even encountered the 'evade' bug that so many MMOs have. The pet AI is good, pet pathing is good, mob pathing is good, and the game feels more dangerous than many on the market today. Death mechanics penalize you a little bit: maybe they're just a bit soft, but they at least do the job of halting play for some time. The combat itself seems well-balanced: you have to think in some fights in order to be able to survive them, in others, you do not. The pace of combat is average. No major timesinks with downtime between fights.

For immersion, I think Trion did very well, though there is always room for improvements. There are many different ways to learn about the lore of the world: collectible books, just chatting to random NPCs, asking 'what's going on here?' or 'who are you?'. You don't get all of the information through questing, you have to search for it a little bit. Then there are all of the hidden quests as well.

The quests are completely average to the theme-park genre. But then you have the rifts and invasions that really mix things up. There's nothing like being steamrolled by a bunch of angry mobs when you are hanging around an encampment. I find that very exciting.

So I would rate the combat mechanics at an 8/10 because it works incredibly well and the class abilities give a unique flavor to how every character plays. For the immersion, I'd say 7/10 because the quests are average (so would be a 5) but rated higher because of the extra ways to get the storyline and design of the environment as a whole. The storyline is not that bad: I haven't come across another MMO that does 'ascended' or tech vs. religion in a fantasy setting so far. Therefore on average I'd say 7.5/10 for that category.

On the other hand, with crafting, it is completely average. It has one LotRO element (additional crafting items to change the properties of the end result), but completely the same harvesting as in LotRO and WoW. I would rate this at a 5/10 since it's not broken but also isn't new. Economy I can't rate since the shard I'm on is really new at it hasn't really gotten going yet. So for crafting, I'd say 5/10.

Another case in point: you say that rifting is to break the monotony of questing, well that might be one way to look at it, but it's a negative way to think. I guess this is the case of 'glass half-empty' or 'glass half-full'.

You could have spared us the review and just said, 'I'm really not fond of the game elements this sort of game has to offer'. We all know Rift is a theme-park and if you dislike that sort of game, then of course you're going to rate it badly. I mean, I don't like LotRO very much, but if I were to review it, I would probably give it a score around 7/10 pre-F2A despite because even though it does not cater to my style of play, it doesn't do anything hideously wrong other than have some annoying bugs.

Wed Apr 06 2011 4:36AM Report
Skuldin writes:

I appreciate the feedback, however to call someone giving a thought out assessment a troll because they weren't enamored with another warmed over WoW rehash is not really the way to debunk my review. Keep in mind a 5 means something is completely average or "on-par" with the norm in the genre and not something to be ashamed of. Perhaps I should explain my rating system and how I arrive at my numbers. 

Wed Apr 06 2011 8:48AM Report
MurlockDance writes:

He might have called you a troll because you seemed to put everything so negatively. Even some of the stuff you rated better than average you descibed in a negative way. If you read many of the mmorpg reviews, whether one agrees with them or not, they seem to pick up a more neutral way of expressing themselves whether they like the game or not.

Fri Apr 08 2011 3:27AM Report
BTrayaL writes:

A report against someone belief system will always seem negative.

Mon Apr 11 2011 11:42AM Report
tryklon writes:

Dont go any further than this: Check his forum post history and see how he bashes the game on other threads...

So please, refrain from any more Reviews, or do you really think an honest and unbiased reviewer goes to forums bash games?

Mon Apr 11 2011 1:18PM Report
Skuldin writes:

I think the review is fair and unbiased. I bought the game, handed them fifty bucks and played for five weeks on three of the four classes leveling two creation and all three gathering professions. I saw every zone and most of the dungeons.  I bought this game wanting to like it, wanting to believe the devs but in the end I got a warmed over remake of the past seven years of MMOs. A 6.2 Rating means it was slightly above average.  1-10 the average is 5.5 meaning this game exceeded average on most categories. Yes I've trashed on Rift some, but mainly for what they didn't do and not so much on what they did.

Mon Apr 11 2011 1:47PM Report
denzelian writes:

why cant   some one   make an updated  dark age of camelot :)

Mon Apr 11 2011 6:56PM Report
darlok6666 writes:

I'd say the review is for the most part pretty darn true depending on how you would rank stuff.  To me an 8+ would be an innovative game which Rift is NOT and that is agreed upon.

I palyed Betas and thk myself for not throwing away any more money into subs on the game.  The game is polished n smooth...yes.  However it really isn't anything special about the game. just a buffed and spit shine of WoW, I lied to myself and blinded myself to this in hopes of it providing what other MMOs competing against WoW failed at.  But in the end those who leave WoW for some other MMO it's they want something different.

The real test though is when SWTOR releases you will see a dent in the population and an even bigger dent with GW2 which both are games that are innovative MMOs (GW2 being more so imho) which coming from a non betting man I'd wager that there will be some server merges by the end of the year. 

I know a lot of people who are just killing time in Rift till one of the two titles releases I mentioned above and this is just one person's contact with people.  The real test of an MMO is 6 mnths down the road when people reach lvl cap and end game.


But regardless of each of our "biased" opinions, time will tell...

I just honestly can't think how Rift can compete against WoW. SWTOR, GW2, and D3 using the same old formula by the end of the year or the end of this fiscal year.

Mon Apr 11 2011 7:07PM Report writes:
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