Rift summary in a word?
Decent.
In many words?
If you’ve played any MMO games in the last decade or so, Rift is familiar territory. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of perspective. If you’re business-minded, it makes sense to design a game that players can easily move into and feel comfortable. This is especially true if you want some of those long-time WoW subscribers to move over to your game. It’s the same car engine and chassis, but with a fresh paint job, detailing, and has that new car smell.
The downside is…well it’s more of the same. That’s not to say Rift doesn’t have anything new to offer…
Breakdown: Gameplay
The main gameplay features that Rift brings to the MMO table are…well, rifts of course, and class/role flexibility. The former is an interesting idea: periodically, planar rifts open up and let loose very angry, otherworldly creatures who are bent on destroying the world (how come nothing friendly ever comes out of extra-planar dimensions?). As long as the rifts remain open, they will spew invasion forces into the world , and attack the various towns and camps throughout the zone. so it falls on the players to close these the rifts by banding together in public raid groups and defeating the rift creatures for experience, loot, and tokens that can be exchanged for gear. This system does provide a welcome distraction from questing, although it is sometimes annoying when you return to a quest hub, ready to turn in your quests only to find it's over-run with enemies that must be cleared.
Unfortunately, it's all too scripted to be considered truly dynamic, and the challenges presented to the players who engage these rifts are lacking in variety, as are the rewards. In order for this system to really work in the long-term, Trion has to create some pretty attractive incentives, otherwise players will eventually ignore the rifts altogether in favor of doing what they’ve always done: grind dungeons.
The Soul system is the flexible class/role mentioned earlier. In a nutshell, a player chooses one of four possible “callings”: Warrior, Rogue, Cleric, or Mage. Each calling has nine distinct flavors called Souls (read: talent trees), and the player will choose three Souls to combine. The various souls of each calling have fairly run-of-the-mill purposes - tanking, DPS, healing, and support, but it’s the combination of three souls that allow for more interesting variety. Rogues, for instance, have a couple Souls designed for tanking and support. In the end, you can have mages healing, clerics DPS’ing, rogues tanking, cats and dogs living together, total chaos.
Although Trion is still working on early post-launch adjustments to fix gross imbalances, the Soul system is successful and interesting. I’m definitely looking forward to having new souls thrown into the pot. Sure, complexity and variety make balance difficult, but I’d argue that the benefits outweigh the extra balancing work.
On the exploration side, and the Devs have done a nice job of peppering the landscape with treasure stashes and artifacts (artifact collecting being the standard “not-really-useful-but-fun-for-players-with-obsessive-hording-and-completionist-disorders” side-game that we’ve come expect). The treasure stashes are great (they frequently reward very rare items), and make exploration rewarding. This is especially true if you like the artifact bit. Many artifact nodes are tucked away in clever locations, and finding them can be fun in a sort-of Easter egg hunt way. Unfortunately these Easter eggs are not filled with delicious candy, but with Moldy Troll Toenails.
Finally there is crafting, which Rift handled in a way that could not be more thoroughly uninspired. Gather resources from nodes, turn said resources into parts to make widgets via a very familiar crafting interface. MMO gamers have probably danced this jig in a half-dozen incarnations. In addition to this striking lack of creativity, some of the crafting professions are downright broken due to rarity of materials and competition from NPCs. Yes, competition from non-player character vendors. I tried Apothecary for the ability to make armor dye. Since I’m the sort of irrational person who finds value in playing dress-up with my characters, Apothecary seemed like a good fit. As it turns out, some of the ingredients to make dye are rarer than taxes paid by GE, propelling the cost of making these things skyward. To add insult to injury, Trion put Dye vendors in the game who sell the most wanted colors at very inexpensive prices. In other words, my Apothecary is supposed to compete with NPC vendors who can sell for pennies what costs me dollars to make. Crafting needs a lot of TLC in this game. It’s too late to expect an original take on crafting and professions from Rift, but the least Trion can do is correct the absurdity of the current situation.
Breakdown: Graphics
Rift is pretty, I’ll concede that much. The environments are very nice and detailed. Each zone does have a unique feel, and feels lived-in with monsters, critters, towns, and small outposts dotting the landscape.
The character models are good, and I’ll give the Trion team kudos for leveraging moderation here. No muscle-bound testosterone factories here (with one exception, the Bahmi male model). Similarly, the female models sport wider hips and smaller breasts than the norm in video games. That's a good thing. On the tech side, textures, normal maps, specularity, and atmospheric effects all look very good, especially among its peers in the MMO spectrum.
Character customization is less than great, however. There is a two-axis slider that governs face morphing (chin, jaw, cheeks, and brow). There is also a slider that allows you to choose one of a half-dozen different face skins, although there isn’t much difference between the maps, except for the old age face map. You can also adjust eye size/rotation/color, nose size/arch, and lip fullness, and ears (if you chose one of pointy-eared races). Although there are technically enough options here to make a variety of unique characters, it’s still a bit difficult to really get away from the mold. If Trion broke apart the 2-axis slider into individual components and added more unique face maps, it would be golden.
That said, most of your character identity is going to come from skin color, hair style/color, and perhaps tattoos. The hair styles for female models are decent, but the ones for males are sorly lacking, especially the Eth (human) Male. Their haircuts run somewhere between Carlton Banks, and Bob Marley.
The armor design and animation has some issues, and leads me to believe that among the artist/animation staff at Trion, there is a wide discrepancy in skill level. The armor in this game goes from nice-looking and reasonable (leather armor) to eye-rolling plate bikinis, and then…the most hideous potato-sack bathrobes ever conceived.
Animation has a similar problem. A lot of the animation is fine (and in some instances, very good), but some of it is really lacking. The walk cycles are pretty bad, -almost- as bad as the walk cycles in Champions Online. If you have never animated before and/or have no expectations of good animation, then this probably won’t be an issue. However if you’ve studied animation and have a discerning eye for the stuff, then you may find yourself struck by the occasional /facepalm.
But what does it all mean?!
Rift is new. It's well-polished. It sparkles. It’s got some nice ideas and overall it’s well-executed. But it also reads like a checklist of everything we’ve seen in major MMO releases, with a couple ideas tacked on at the end to distinguish itself from the herd. Sure there's a healthy amount of people out there who enjoy the type of gameplay that MMORPGs have apparently evolved into, but for those of us who are looking for a fresh, new idea of what an MMORPG can be, you’ll have to keep looking. I put myself down for Trion’s discounted Founders Plan subscription because it is a solid game among its peers, and warrants a good 4-6 months of play. Whether Rift will still be attractive after that period remains to be seen.
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 09:30PM 