» Thu Jun 17, 2010 6:26 am
Played WoW since it's beta. Dropped that game just before Wrath of Lich King. Played Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and a few others. Now enjoying founder sub for Rift.
Rift is fun if you like the constant movement of extraplanar invasion. The game has far more solid and consistant storyline, but the dialogue scripts and voice acting are amatuer, sometimes I wonder if they were written by English speakers to begin with.
Anyway, the soul system is the thing that attracts me most. 4 callings (essentially classes), with 8 souls each (essentially talent trees). New abilities on each soul are gained only if you put enough points in there, each with different playstyle so you essentially can have 32 playstyles not counting the even spec. Another is the multi spec. You can have 2 spec in WoW, but in rift you can have 5. So say someone dropped out in the mid of dungeon, you can get a guy in there to fill up his role with just changing the role. This makes dungeon raiding very flexible. Warriors can range dps with riftblade or straight up tank. Rogues can be dps, tank or support (Bard). Mages can be dps, heal or support. Clerics can be tank, dps or heal. You won't get the craps like "if you don't do this you svck" in WoW, you just change and adapt.
Its overall gameplay however is just like any other MMORPGs out there, nothing special. Go there kill that, go there use item, go there fetch that. It added some dynamic pve actions with rifts. Like Warhammer Online public quests spred over the map. A lot of the game is based on vanilla WoW, so if you are the kind who think WoW was good back then you may enjoy it. Trion is made up of former developers of many MMORPGs, so it's no suprise you could find the shadows of the old titles in this product.