Video Game Review: RIFT

Before I get started let me state some caveats. I haven't been playing RIFT very long. I'm writing this review because a friend asked me what I thought of the game. My highest level character is only level 15. I haven't even done any instances yet much let seen the endgame content. So keep that in mind while reading my review.

For those who don't want to read the full review I will say that overall I like the game and recommend giving it a try. However, it hasn't been out for very long and there are still some problems that need to be addressed.

Overview

RIFT is a fantasy MMO set on the world of Telara located at a nexus of elemental planes. It is under near constant attack by the dragon gods of the Blood Storm, led by the dragon Regulos. These attacks generally take the form of invasions from the elemental planes of air, earth, fire, water, life, and death.

Opposing the Blood Storm are the Guardians and the Defiant. The Guardians are faithful servants of the gods of the Vigil. The Defiant are heretics who have broken with the Vigil and instead use technology to fight the dragons.

Player characters are known as the Ascended, brought back either by the Vigil or the machines of the Defiant. They are able to call upon legendary souls from Telara's past to give them the power to fight against the Blood Storm.



Game Mechanics

At its heart the game is like most other MMORPGs. Basic game play amounts to kill the monsters and take their stuff so you can kill bigger monsters and take their stuff. To Trion Worlds credit they do try to provide some other activities. So far my favorite is a quest line where you prove yourself to a knight by destroying a practice dummy with a single blow, beating his squire in a foot race (the squire cheats), demonstrate your stamina by eating a lot of cheese in a short amount of time, and then best the knight in single combat. But mostly you'll be killing things over and over again.

To me the game feels very much like an evolution of World of Warcraft. RIFT's big innovation is that they have distilled the usual assortment of character classes down into four "callings:" warrior, rogue, cleric, and mage. Each calling has nine souls available. Eight of the souls are earned by questing. The ninth soul is a PvP soul which is earned by engaging in PvP. You are free to mix and match these souls, three at a time, as you see fit. So if you want to duplicate a WoW hunter you can by combining the Ranger, Marksman, and Saboteur souls. On the other hand, if you ever wished your hunter had a rogue's stealth capabilities instead of a bunch of traps you could swap out the Saboteur soul for an Assassin or Night Blade soul.

Instead of WoW's talent trees, RIFT has soul trees. Each time you level you receive one or two points to spend in your soul trees. You cannot spend more than your level in points in one tree so even if you want to specialize in just one tree you'll be forced to spend points in the others as well. Soul trees are a little different than talent trees in that they have "branches" and "roots." You spend points on branches, which are your usual talent tree things like modifiers to your chance to hit, and as you spend points in a soul tree it unlocks the roots of the tree, giving you access to the tree's core abilities.

Each character can have four "roles" which are different soul tree configurations. So, for example, you could have a warrior with a questing (solo) role, a tanking role, a melee DPS role, and a PvP role. Or a mage might have a questing role, ranged DPS role, support/crowd control role, and PvP. Which means you can have a lot of diversity in a single character.

As with anything where you have a lot of options, there is a lot of potential to gimp yourself. Care should be taken when choosing souls so that you don't take souls with a lot of overlap in abilities but which work well in conjunction with each other.

The developers have tried to diversify things as well. Clerics, for example, have several different types of healing souls that specialize in different aspects like melee healers who get in there fighting shoulder to shoulder with the tank and melee DPS, single target healers, group healers, healing over time. Mages also have a healing soul, the Chloromancer, who is quite effective in their own right. Every calling has at least one pet soul while mages have two; the Necromancer and the Elementalist. Rogues and clerics can not only be either melee or ranged DPS but can also tank with the right soul.

Historically hard core MMO players will min-max things until they determine a particular configuration is optimal at which point it can become hard to find a group if you don't conform. For example City of Heroes made it possible to customize your powers by "slotting" enhancements into them but if you didn't slot them to enhance damage you were generally frowned on by the CoH community. Accuracy and endurance cost reduction were also acceptable, as long as not done to extreme, but forget about enhancing secondary effects like endurance drain or disorient duration. It will be interesting if the developers can keep this under control when it comes to RIFT.

Rifts and Footholds and Invasions, oh my!

The other big innovation with RIFT is the assaults from the elemental planes. Occasionally a rift will appear somewhere. To start with it is just a column of white light but if no one does anything it will eventually open on its own and forces from whatever plane it leads to will come through. Players have an ability to force a rift to open prematurely though I don't think that actually changes anything about the forces that come through.

Rifts come in waves. First you get a wave of normal mobs. Defeat them and a second wave of normal mobs spawns. Defeat them and a boss with a timer spawns. Defeat him before the timer runs down and a bonus wave of normal mobs with a timer spawns. Defeat them before time runs out and an elite boss spawns. Fail to defeat the first boss or the bonus wave before the timer runs down and the rift will close upon completion of that wave. The more waves you complete, the greater your rewards when the rift finally closes.

In an interesting dynamic, if local mobs aren't allied with the forces that come through a rift, for example a fire rift opens in a faerie controlled area, they will fight the invaders. Though those same mobs will happily attack you if you managed to aggro them before an invader does.

Footholds appear in certain areas on a regular basis. These are small areas controlled by either one of the elemental planes or the opposing faction. These generally consist of four mobs patrolling around a "wardstone," idol, or similar object. The mobs can be pulled singly but if you attack the object they are guarding you'll pull all of them. Being able to single pull them makes footholds easy to deal with.

If nothing is done about a foothold it will, I believe (keep in mind I haven't been playing long), occasionally spawn an invasion force that then goes rampaging across the countryside, fighting other mobs as well as player characters. These groups generally consist of a boss mob and a number of supporting minions. Attack one and they'll all jump you unless they're busy fighting someone else which can make fighting them tricky if you're not in a group.

Invasions will target wardstones, which are generally located at quest hubs, seeking to destroy and replace them with the invaders' own version, killing any NPCs that try to defend the wardstones in the process, and establishing a foothold in that location. This effectively shut down the quest hub until players destroy the foothold, allowing the wardstone and its defenders to respawn.

Occasionally zone wide events occur in which a major elemental invasion takes place.

Invasions are one of the areas where the game needs some tweaking because I hope it's not working as intended. The Guardian starting zone is a very dense zone with content for levels 6 through 20 packed into a relatively small space. This results in invasion forces wandering into areas that are sometimes considerably below their level. One of the first times I died in the game was when my level 9 character was jumped by a roaming level 15 invasion force. I barely had time to realize what was happening before I was dead. Another time my level 11 character returned to a quest hub to find it had been replace by a level 11 and two level 15 footholds. With elite mobs. There was no way I could clear it alone or even with the help of a slightly higher level player who was also in the area which meant I couldn't turn in my quests much less get new quests until some higher level players came in and dealt with the situation. And when I got to the next quest hub I found a similar situation which, again, meant waiting for higher level players to come help me. Another time on another character at the same quest hub I found a foothold teaming with an unusually large numbers of mobs that were all linked so you couldn't pull one without pulling them all. Again the hub was shut down and there was nothing players of the level the hub was meant for could do about it.

I've learned that when these things happen it's time to log out of the game and just go do something else and that's a problem. Your game shouldn't be actively driving players away.

Grouping

RIFT has both a LFG tool and public groups. What the later means is that if you see someone who is questing in the same area as you are and you want to join forces, you can simply target them and then click on the group button on their frame. There's no need to ask them to group with you unless they've set themselves private. During rift events a large button will appear at the top of your screen  that will let you join any public group in the area of the rift without having to target anyone in particular. Its not the first game I've seen do something like this but it can be quite useful.


Trade Skills

Some people really get into trade skills. In RIFT there are three gathering skills and six crafting skills. Most of the crafting skills benefit from two of the gathering skills though outfitting, used to make cloth and leather armor as well as bags, only needs butchering and runecrafting, used for making enchantments, doesn't need any gathering skills. Resources nodes respawn quickly so gathering crafting materials is pretty easily as long as there aren't multiple players trying to farm the same area.

User Interface

The developers have only recently made a scripting API available to players so at present there aren't a lot of addons available for modifying the user interface. However the game itself comes with a built in editor to allow you to move UI elements around as you please so while the lack of addons is still noticeable, it is not as bad as it could be.

Graphics & Sound

RIFT is a pretty game in my opinion. My system is a little over a year old with an Intel i7-860 with 4 gig of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 5800 graphics card. With graphics set on high I run around 50-60 frames per second. If I move the graphics slider up to the ultra setting I drop to the 30s and 40s. I am particularly pleased with the effects when rifts open and close.

Animations tend to be a mixed bag. For the most part I like them but there are some that just rub me the wrong way. Unless I'm playing a Bahmi I tend to avoid 2-handed weapons because I feel like they aren't scaled right for the character models and a lot of the animations look kind of goofy. On the other hand, if I am playing a Bahmi then 2-handed weapons look pretty cool because the Bahmi are themselves rather oversized and though they can only equip one at a time, frequently wield 2-handed weapons with just one hand a look badass doing so.

Same thing goes for sounds. For the most part they're good but sometimes they're not. Some of the voice acting leaves something to be desired. One trainer in particular sounds like someone doing a bad Ronald Colman impersonation.

Something that I think is kind of nice is that sound becomes altered and muted when underwater though I would think it would be louder than it is when its right next to you. There's also a visual effect to being underwater that's also pretty good.

Wardrobe

A common complaint with these sorts of games is that all the characters look the same because everyone winds up wearing the same gear. The developers have tried to address this somewhat by adding a wardrobe tab to the character sheet. On this tab you can wear gear without effecting the stats you get from your equipped gear. So if you want you can appear to still be wearing the clothes your character had upon creation while actually having the Buttugly Breastplate of Uber-Badassery equipped. You can also apply dyes to your clothing to change the colors. It's a nice little feature to have.


Setting

Personally I'm kind of burned out on fantasy games but as such games go, the RIFT setting is decent enough. The religion vs. technology theme is an interesting twist though from what I've seen they don't really do that much with it aside from giving the Defiant a more technological look to some of their areas. It would be nice to see Defiant PCs using more technological gear but they seem to have the same stuff as the Guardians.

Since I'm somewhat tired of the fantasy setting I appreciate it when games let me do something at least a little outside of the box. For example, in WoW I love the fact that you can play as what are normally non-standard races like orcs and trolls and tauren (minotaurs) and undead and, now, goblins and werewolves. RIFT has gone in the opposite direction with a very limited selection. Both sides get humans; the Mathosians and the Eth. Both sides get elves; High Elves and Kelari. The Guardians get dwarves and the Defiant get Bahmi.

Mechanically there's not much difference between the races. Each race gets its own special little movement power and increased resistance to one of the elements. It's enough of a difference to provide a little flavor without making any particular race better than the others.

Summary

Overall I'd probably give the game a B. For the most part it's a well done game and I'm having fun playing it. It's not a perfect game. There are some rough edges which will hopefully be smoothed out in time. The developers have done some things I flat out disagree with but they are things that are pretty standard for this kind of game so I don't expect them to change any time soon. Free trials are available so you can try it out before you buy it. If you have a friend playing I suggest asking them to send you an Ascend-A-Friend referral. If you decide to buy the game it gives them some benefits and makes it easy for the two of you to keep in touch in game.