Rift

**Zappy** · 01-27-2011, 01:49 PM

I played a bit more into last night (all solo) and got my warrior to 9 and a rogue to 18.

I don't even know where to start to list all the good and bad, but I'll put up my little mini-review.

Their graphics engine needs some work in their MSAA dept. If you enable that, it'll cripple your machine. I'm running an i7 975 extreme, 12gigs ram, 2 580GTXs in SLI, and running it off an SSD with a Dell 30" monitor. With everything cranked, I see about 20FPS until i turn MSAA down to edge smoothing, then I see between 40-60. Graphics overall are good. The animations can use some work as they don't seemed as polished.

A lot of the built in functions for configuring your UI, keybindings, etc are very nice as you don't need addons to make it work. From going straight from WOW to Rift is very easy in the sense that most of the default keybinds are the same.

Questing - from 1-11 seemed very quick (I was running with a friend), then last night I did 11-18 and it slowed down a lot. You get the same quest grind feeling that wow has rather quickly. Kill x of y quests all over the place. That gets old, but I think any and every MMO has that. What I found though, if you get bored questing, simply run off and do the rifts as they provide decent XP as well.

Battlegrounds - Once you hit 10, you can start doing BGs and queue from anywhere. I'm playing defiant and the queues seem to be quite long (like 15-20 minutes) and right now I'm only eligible for Black Gardens and at first we got destroyed so quick, I didn't enjoy it at all. The next BG, I learned a little more to what's going on - rather than a zergfest, the objective is to hold onto the flag as long as you can - There is one flag in the bg and whoever holds it gathers resources for the team rather quickly. I had a few games where it was very close and quite entertaining. I can't comment a ton on the PVP so far, but it seems to be solid. The few solo fights I had were not quite 3-4 second bouts, but tended to be more in the 10-15 second range, so I think learning the classes / combos will make this quicker, but should also provide you with resources to last longer as well.

I haven't tried any dungeons yet, but from what I understand, I should be ready for iron tombs, so I'm ready to try that one out and i'm really curious to see their PVE portion of the game. I've read a lot of good things so far, but until you experience it, who really knows.

I got to Meridian last night (the first major Defiant city) and I must say that it's well thought out and quite impressive. I spent a good hour last night just combing through it doing a bunch of quests and checking it out. It has auction houses, class trainers, soul trainers, banks, etc there.

What really seperates this game from WOW is their talent system (Soul Tree). If you haven't seen the calculators yet, you can go here: http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html The level cap at release is going to be 50 with 66 possible points to allocate. What this means is that you'll be able to get the top skill (31 point talent) on two different trees and have a few more points for a 3rd tree or any combination between them. At first, it was very confusing, then I started to get a better idea of what I wanted my character to be, and after playing with the calculator and respecing, it's fun to build your and do some nice theorycrafting. I started with a ranger/marksman/nightblade, but found nightblade to not go with it at all, and wanted to try either a bard or saboteur and to my surprise, found out how easy it is. When you first start, you should have all three of your souls picked by around level 6, and to add more souls, you pick up the quests in the Meridian to get a new soul. That involves going to an active rift and performing a few actions, then once you turn it in, you've now learned this new soul. When you respec from your trainer, you can now change any/all of your souls and respend those points however you feel. In addition, you can train up to 3 extra roles (think dual-spec here) along with a pvp role allowing you 4 different specs that you can change on the fly anywhere. What this means is that you can now roll a class and once you're level capped, you can try out just about any new flavor of the class without having to start over or create an alt for it. This is a huge plus IMO.

One piece here that makes it feel like a grind to me that I remember back when WOW was first out -- walking everywhere. And what a pain that is. I can't wait to hit 20 so I can actually mount up and have some faster travel, so I'll see if that takes away part of that grindy feeling.

At first, I found one of those things in wow that I grew to detest and hate -- groups of people all waiting around to tag-kill mobs making it very painful. I've found that almost everybody/anybody will group up for these making it a lot easier - I just hope they add something to where you can form a public group for these types of quests like they do for the rifts as that would make it smoother.

Another big plus - there are people everywhere. The world feels very much alive because of this. One of the things I hate with wow today is the LFD and what it did to the game. People now sit in cities either queued for bgs, arenas, or LFD rather than going out exploring the worlds. World PVP is extinct for the most part - I blame this to on how flyers were implemented. IMO, they should have made it so that you have to wait 10-20 seconds before you're able to use your flyer after engaging in pvp or rezzing from pvp action. Wows form of world pvp is either the daily quest hubs or the occasional flyer that picks the fight in his favor and swoops in for the quick gank. In Rift, I'm looking forward to some of those epic battles around the dungeon entrances that wow used to have, and those big open fights in contested zones like the ole TM/SS fights. I miss the days where horde would camp on the boats at menethil harbor.

Lastly, I'm almost level 20, and haven't made it out of the starter zone. I have a feeling that once I get out there, it'll bring back some of those memories.

I'm not sold entirely on this game yet, but have to admit is has some rather strong points and I believe could be the first real answer to WOW. I don't see it ever taking the kings spot, but I could see this one as putting a serious dent into the competition.

**Lokked** · 01-27-2011, 03:03 PM

**EDIT - Disregard the piece here about Chloromancers AE healing each other. It's either been fixed or I'm an idiot. Probably the latter. **

I must say, the starter quests and mobs are far too easy, at this time. I've heard it gets harder around lvl 20, when OP classes (Druid/Warden and Cabalist, basically all Cleric classes) level out in effectiveness. Lyon, because you are rolling 4 of the most OP class (according to some forum posts), you may be finding the early game too easy because of this.

As far as the Edge Smoothing setting, I sat back in my chair, where I normally sit, and compared a line (building edge) and didn't notice a difference between Edge Smoothing and No Smoothing, so I think this is a fail algorithm.

AE Looting is not something you can bind

It just makes it so when you loot one mob that is near others, it auto-loots all the mobs in the area. Slightly useful, but not what I was hoping for :/

For anyone wanting to run WoW's 4xShaman equivalent, try 4x Chloromancer. At level 10, with 10 points spent, they get an ability called Veil of Lifegiving, which AE Heals the party (minus the Chloromancer) for up to 80% of the direct Life damage done by the Chloromancer. So you can nuke and heal at the same time! 1 is able to MH a tank in dungeons (as shown by some youtube vid), so I'd imagine 4 is overkill, but you can spec some for more damage.

This game is very similar to WoW, and the Rift experience is going to make or break it. If Rifts aren't a fun alternative to Questing, Grinding, Farming or PvP in the WoW sense, what point is there to play this game? Public Quests were a spectacular idea in WAR, and were fun for a little while, but their implementation turned them into a gear grind. Rifts can actually take over towns and areas, and spawn (in later areas) at mostly random spots. Occaisonally, Rifts (Minor Riftsspawns can open up to become Major Rifts, spawning harder mobs and dishing out more valuable items. You could think of this as the whole Placeholder/Named spawn EQ thing.

I have high hopes for this game, as long as they up the difficulty of the first 20 levels. Unfortunately, the early level range can put a veteren MMOer to sleep.

**Zappy** · 01-27-2011, 03:39 PM

Originally Posted by Lokked

As far as the Edge Smoothing setting, I sat back in my chair, where I normally sit, and compared a line (building edge) and didn't notice a difference between Edge Smoothing and No Smoothing, so I think this is a fail algorithm.

I can say for sure on my setup that I didn't see any FPS change whatsoever, however, if you can some buildings in the landscape where you can noticeably see the jagged edges and toggle the setting, it absolutely makes a difference.

**MiRai** · 01-27-2011, 06:09 PM

I'm just going to quote you and build from it.