Rift: Planes of Telara

[Fhqwghads]

PvP really doesn't interest me in the slightest, and if that's the "main focus" then I hope it doesn't go the path of Warhammer which focused so much on PvP that the rest of the content suffered. And not to mock you or anything, but comments about there being "tons of stuff to do" and having no doubts about the game's staying power are all things I've heard plenty of times before. I'll be interested to hear what people think after the initial excitement and expectations wear off.

Warhammer is the reason I qualified my statement with "PVP done right." Warhammer was PVP done wrong. Also, the experiences I've had with dozens of other betas versus this one is why my confidence is so high. I've never seen an MMO ready to go live in as good a state as this one. All the other ones had laundry lists of things they'll "address after the game goes live." Now *that* is something I've heard many times before, and more often than not the list consists of incredibly important issues that should have been fixed in alpha, let alone beta, but releasing it with them...? That's always a sign of fail in the making.

[solracht]

Its also going dungeon/tiered raid type too, there are a lot completely finished and more they will be adding after launch. Trion and Rift are the first and only mmo company Im not worried about continuing to do things correctly. If you've been keeping an eye on this game its easy to see.

So you think the removal of 10man versions of raids is a good thing then?

[vrumpt]

One specific thing i'd like to know that i don't think i'll be able to find out for myself before beta ends is if higher level rifts add any kind of new feature or mechanic that isn't found in the first rift areas. Other than that i guess endgame would be the other high and mighty question i'm looking for, but nobody knows about that yet. I really want endgame to have different kinds of content similar to what SE did with FFXI. So that i can rift and dungeon and raid, but in future patches i can also do event A, and B and C.

[Cephius]

Its also going dungeon/tiered raid type too, there are a lot completely finished and more they will be adding after launch.

I haven't done any dungeons yet, but I was over a buddy's house over the weekend and watched him do a couple, they didn't seem to be anything special. Have you been in any that were particularly enjoyable?

Trion and Rift are the first and only mmo company Im not worried about continuing to do things correctly. If you've been keeping an eye on this game its easy to see.

I commend them for being active with the community and listening to feedback and putting together a polished beta, but considering (from what I can tell) this is their first published video game there isn't much history draw upon. If you have faith in them after such a short amount of time that's great, but like I said other failed MMO ventures have made me very pessimistic. I hope it works out, lord knows WoW needs a legitimate competitor.

[Cephius]

Warhammer is the reason I qualified my statement with "PVP done right." Warhammer was PVP done wrong.

I actually thought Warhammer PVP and public quests were very well done, the problem was a total lack of content at higher levels and some balancing issues. Can you say for sure that Rift won't suffer from the same fate? Warhammer's issues weren't immediately apparent in the beta, either.

Also, the experiences I've had with dozens of other betas versus this one is why my confidence is so high. I've never seen an MMO ready to go live in as good a state as this one. All the other ones had laundry lists of things they'll "address after the game goes live." Now *that* is something I've heard many times before, and more often than not the list consists of incredibly important issues that should have been fixed in alpha, let alone beta, but releasing it with them...? That's always a sign of fail in the making.

I thought Aion's beta and response to issues were pretty solid. Unfortunately it was way to grind-y on launch and it was just too time consuming and boring to level. I doubt Rift will suffer from that problem given the abundant number of quests, but it goes to my point that you can't tell everything from how the beta goes.

[vrumpt]

I commend them for being active with the community and listening to feedback and putting together a polished beta, but considering (from what I can tell) this is their first published video game there isn't much history draw upon. If you have faith in them after such a short amount of time that's great, but like I said other failed MMO ventures have made me very pessimistic. I hope it works out, lord knows WoW needs a legitimate competitor.

Just because they have no history doesn't mean they are doomed to failure. Cataclysm has(had) a lot of problems that could have and should have been fixed in beta. If Trion can use its beta even only a little worse than blizz did they have a very good chance at becoming huge. I truly hope they keep it up, more than anything to serve as inspiration for more companies to make a good game.

[Cephius]

Cataclysm was also a massive overhaul to an established game so naturally there are going to be issues that slip through the cracks when you alter the fundamental playstyles of many classes. The transition was pretty smooth considering, most of the remaining issues are class balance stuff and people complaining about the difficulty of dungeons and such. Anyway, if Rift launches as well as people are projecting them to, god bless them.

[Hatedregret]

Dont suppose anyone has a VIP beta code to spare by chance?

[vrumpt]

Dont suppose anyone has a VIP beta code to spare by chance?

its open beta, there are no keys anymore. Just go register and you'll get an email "invitation" with links to DL the client and play.

[Hatedregret]

absolutely correct. Downloading now.

[Pyree]

There's no reason to be worried about lowbie/alt levelling as the average player level rises simply because Trion has stated time and time again that they can manually control the Rifts.

Not a lot of people in a zone? They can scale the rifts that will spawn to be weaker and doable for the few people in the zone.

Rift too tough? They can scale the next ones down so that the lower level people can accomplish something.

As for the incentive to go rifting at max level? I think the fact that the capital city for either faction can be put under siege if the rifts are left alone is plenty of incentive. There's also abilities you can only use if you participate in rifts, and I feel like some of them will be mandatory for endgame raids.

To add to this, it actually doesn't even require manual intervention. They already have systems in place that automatically scale the rifts and invasions based on the people that are around, so there are a lot of things that happen automatically. They also have manual control on top of this, the GM's are capable of starting zone-wide events manually, and those are a blast. In beta they are occurring pretty frequently.

[Man0warr]

It's not like Trion are amateurs. They hired the best developer in the business, Scott Hartsman, to lead the team. A lot of the staff have worked on other MMOs as well, including EQ, EQ2, DAOC, and even WoW.

This is only the 2nd polished beta in the 30+ I've participated in, WoW was the other one. They are so far ahead of schedule that half the team has been working on endgame/post-launch content for the last few months rather than having to put out fires and bugs that other betas have had problems with. Every feature they planned to be in at release is in, from here on out it's gravy.

If you still enjoy WoW, Rift doesn't offer that much more. Some of us having been playing WoW since alpha/beta and it's just time to move on - 5-6 years is about the lifespan of a good MMO, Everquest started to get stale then too no matter what patches or expansions they put out. That was about Blizzard's timeline and they have already put WoW on autopilot while they brunt of their best guys (Pardo, Metzen, Kaplan, etc) have moved on to the next projects.

The end game will be in a similar vein to WoW, but there's a lot they can do with the dynamic content that rifts offer. They have an entire system attached to those rifts that they have barely shown the full potential of yet.

Cataclysm was also a massive overhaul to an established game so naturally there are going to be issues that slip through the cracks when you alter the fundamental playstyles of many classes. The transition was pretty smooth considering, most of the remaining issues are class balance stuff and people complaining about the difficulty of dungeons and such. Anyway, if Rift launches as well as people are projecting them to, god bless them.

Cataclysm was done by the Blizzard B-team (A-team has been on D3/Titan for about 2 years now, shortly before WOTLK launch), of course it had issues. They hardly tested anything and while the questing in Cata was well done, the raid content was largely untested and buggy, as evidenced by them fixing the encounters on the fly for the top raid guilds.

I thought Aion's beta and response to issues were pretty solid. Unfortunately it was way to grind-y on launch and it was just too time consuming and boring to level. I doubt Rift will suffer from that problem given the abundant number of quests, but it goes to my point that you can't tell everything from how the beta goes.

I'd hope Aion beta was solid, since it had already been released for an entire year in Korea. Aion failed because of massive memory leaks in during large scale PvP that were never resolved even from the Korean launch, plus NC Soft NA being so incompetent they had to wait for NC Soft Korea to make changes before they went live in NA - basically they were just a localization team.

Oh did I mention millions of bots that were stealing peoples mobs that were never dealt with or the glacial leveling pace after level 35?

[Fhqwghads]

I actually thought Warhammer PVP and public quests were very well done, the problem was a total lack of content at higher levels and some balancing issues. Can you say for sure that Rift won't suffer from the same fate? Warhammer's issues weren't immediately apparent in the beta, either.

I thought Aion's beta and response to issues were pretty solid. Unfortunately it was way to grind-y on launch and it was just too time consuming and boring to level. I doubt Rift will suffer from that problem given the abundant number of quests, but it goes to my point that you can't tell everything from how the beta goes.

Warhammer's issues during beta/soon after launch were not related to PQs and PVP per se, but there were game-breaking bugs and massive amounts of problems all over the place. It was horrible, and the game was duct-taped here and there to make it work, but nobody ever took charge and fixed nagging issues that permeated that game since day 1. The lack of any solid leadership or direction also left the game in a constant state of feeling half-finished. It could have been an excellent PVP game, and the PVE could have been done a lot better, but Mythic and EA dropped the ball and decimated the Warhammer team.

I didn't mention Aion on purpose. Aion was not a real beta by the time it hit Western shores. It had been running for around a year already. What we saw was nothing more than a localization pass to make sure we could read what was translated.

Edit: Bah, Manorwarr said the same thing I did with regard to Aion.

[Vobent]

The only real annoyance I have so far is the quests to get your other 5 souls since you can only do one at a time. They arn't really hard or anything, all you have to do is go out do a rift, get a quest item then use that item to summon the soul & defeat it then turn the quest in.

The Black Garden warfront is pretty fun so far, getting around 3K XP per win, 2K per loss. Hoping do to Iron Tombs soon.

[Man0warr]

The only real annoyance I have so far is the quests to get your other 5 souls since you can only do one at a time. They arn't really hard or anything, all you have to do is go out do a rift, get a quest item then use that item to summon the soul & defeat it then turn the quest in.

I think it was said those are just placeholder quests, they are supposed to be more involved. Not sure if that will make it in for launch though.

[Maaglin]

I'm pretty dissapointed with the lackluster character creator and what I feel are pretty shitty races. Graphics are a little to cartoonish for me and I don't think the game looks that great overall. I know it's not a gameplay issue, but these things make it harder for me to get "into" the game.

I never played WoW so I'm not entirely sure what to expect when everyone keeps saying it's WoWv2. I think rifts are awesome and I love PvP, so there are two things to keep my interested off the bat. The soul system seems badass really, and at least for me, is a little overwhelming at first trying to get a grasp on it since there are so many options. I don't mind raiding, but I echo the concern that hopefully there will be more to do at endgame besides raid long term. PvP will help with that, but obviously to stay competitve in PvP, PvE raiding/endgame will also need to be accomplished. I hope they find a good balance there.

Also no auto-run wtf? (bots, etc..)

[Pyree]

I think it was said those are just placeholder quests, they are supposed to be more involved. Not sure if that will make it in for launch though.

It was my understanding that the quests we have now are the more involved quests. The placeholder quests that allowed players to get access to every soul at an early level were added back in beta 3, and that is when they told us that they added placeholder quests that would become more involved later on. At that point, the quest was simply to talk to the NPC to acquire the quest, then talk to him again to turn it in.

I could be wrong, maybe these are just placeholder quests v2.0, I haven't really looked for an official word on if these are final or not. I just assumed that these were the final quests, since they did change from when they were initially added.

One of my good friends is a dev for Rift, so I'll ask him this tonight when he's online and see if he knows the answer.

[Jintu]

Also no auto-run wtf? (bots, etc..)

Hartsman recently said that they will never implement auto-run or auto-face, which is a good thing imo. Also, as far as the soul quests; I think I remember reading somewhere that the quests are supposed to be much more involved once release and drawn out (you can't get everyone around 18), there's a progression through 1-50 to get them all.

[Falisa]

Uh what do you mean theres no auto run? Unless you guys are talking about something completely different, the default button for auto run is numlock and you can change what button it is under Key Bindings.

[Pyree]

There's no auto-follow, from my understanding.