WoW Petopia Community

Interesting game. I did the first friend-invite trial, promptly grabbed the CE around day 3, and have been giving it a poke now and then. I am too lazy to breakdown my opinions as wall-of-text-y as I normally do so I'll just link to my original blog-wall on the subject. Highlights: I want to kick the devs in the nuts for refusing to have any non-human player races; I'm not as fond of the art style as I am of WoW's, although the UI is way less of an eyesore; much of the gameplay has finally, FINALLY evolved beyond MMO Generation 1-style sadism; the class system makes me giggle with glee.

ANYWAYS. I don't think there's an original feature to be found in Rift-- off the top of my head I think there's maybe three or four options/features I don't recognize from a game I've been playing for years, and they probably just took those from a game I haven't tried. It's not a WoW clone, but it's happily borrowing everything it can get its hands on from WoW, with the occasional feature from other games (hello EQ2 collections). There are way, waaaaay worse ways you could build a game. Honestly, power to them for not trying to reinvent the wheel all the time.

I do think, when you want to critique it, that you have to look beyond the WoWness. It sources heavily from WoW, but it really isn't the same game. They cater better to vain RPers; they acknowledge that explorers are a real thing. The playerbase is still in its infancy: take a swing by the forums and you can easily have your fill of flamewars raging over how to play "correctly". The devs are not some omnipotent, far-removed deity occasionally handing down patches like they're the 10 Commandments. All told, it's quite a bit different than the initial impression would suggest.

Honestly, if I don't stick with the game, it'll probably be because of the art flavor (SIX FLAVORS OF HUMAN, ARGH) and/or the much-overlooked fact that I am simply very comfortable in WoW, and getting that far in a new game is a MASSIVE commitment. But they let me ride my very own okapi, which is a pretty big vote in Rift's favor.


(Aside: obnoxious fanbois are an unfortunate fact of life. It's worth remembering that they're generally a tiny minority, though, and coming in swinging with the assumption that all detractors are going to be of the idiot fanboi variety is mmmmaybe not the best public relations move. )

I think the biggest reason I wouldn't stick with it after trying a friend's account is that not only is it too similar to WoW for my tastes, if I wanted to play a game that samples that heavily from WoW...I'll just play WoW, where I'm already comfortable and settled into the game.

I hope the other games coming out do better as I think Rift is too much of a "you love it or you hate it" kind of thing.
From what I've been reading, people either really love Rift, or they dislike/hate it, with few lying in between.

TygerDarkstorm wrote:I hope the other games coming out do better as I think Rift is too much of a "you love it or you hate it" kind of thing.
From what I've been reading, people either really love Rift, or they dislike/hate it, with few lying in between.

Odd. I know I'm not feeling anything like that.

It's as welcome change of pace/scenery from WoW, where I have been basically out of goals for a year or two. I don't crave it the way I do EQ2 (do not stand between me and my EverCrack when I need a fix) but actually playing it is less the acid sting of addiction and more honest enjoyment, with the option to put it down when I'm no longer interested. It is mechanically superior to Istaria, as measured by my willingness to go kill stuff, but UTTERLY fails me in all the ways Istaria is amazing. Race choices? Terrible. The mythos? Nothing I'm interested in. Non-combat advancements? Middling to awful. Lord, even EQ2 is better on that last count... which is rather horrifying.

So I'm definitely giving Rift a chance, and it's a welcome synthesis of the better parts of MMORPGs, but in terms of a lot of the things I want out of a game it's inferior to a pair of decade-old MMOs (good lord).


Clearly I just need Diablo 3 to come out so I can get my fill of hack'n'slash there, and go back to my old stand-bys for my crafting/building/housing fix.

It was just a typical observation I'd picked up on between here, MMO-C, and real life.

But it is interesting to see it from a different point of view, of course. I wonder if trying a class other than the hunter related one would be better, but at the same time, I like where I stand in WoW, even if it's boring me a little bit. Hell, I've made almost a dozen trial accounts for CoH for when I feel like I want to go back to that but don't want to pay the $15 to reactivate my account. But then I remember that my favorite part of CoH is costume design and that it's gameplay and content are far more repetitious and the same than Blizzard has made WoW's.

Oh yeah Coh/CoV is very repetitious lol. Still its fun to rob banks.

I'm glad to see Going Rogue populated the game again because it was dying when I left. I think the patch where they let us create our own story arcs, while fun, just sort of came off as kind of lazy. However, I made a pretty awesome WoW map. XD

I did not know Going rogue came out XD you can tell how much attention I pay lol

Got into the groove of playing a Paladin/Champion/Riftblade and did some tanking for a group. It was really fun because the feeling of the group was like "Hey, if you're in the warrior class, don't care what combo, just attack and we'll provide support."

Probably in more composed groups and guilds what class combos people make are important, but since everyone in my group was just there to test the waters we had a good time.

cowmuflage wrote:Nar I played a bit of rift. I personally can't stand that kind of "realistic" art style for RPGS anyway. Well really games in general :S Unless it's warhammer related (aka dawn of war) but thats becouse thoses guys are realy good at detail (this from someone who plays the table top game trust me those tiny models are VERY well done).

Hell yes. IMO Samwise Didier drew a LOT of inspiration from the folks at Games Workshop. Which I think is fine, just saying. Man I used to spend so much time messing around with those miniatures (I particularly enjoyed doing the "conversions" - there was a period back when a lot of the units in WH40K were described in the manuals but didn't yet have actual miniatures, and everyone was going wild making them from scratch... good times)

cowmuflage wrote:The only MMO I'm looking forward too is the Warhammer 40K one if that ever comes out. I'm so getting the collecters one for that even if I don't like the game there art books rock!

That would rock.

In re: the "realistic" characters approach.

The only thing about wow toons that really strikes me as cartoonish is the oversized hands (and maybe feet... haven't really paid as much attention to those); I suspect this started out as a something they did to make the characters look better in an RTS like WC1 / WC2 / WC3, and later discovered that in a quirky way it actually worked well in an MMORPG too; not only does it connote a feeling of more power it also looks more appropriate when a character is wielding some improbably massive weapon.

Rifts strikes me more as D&D based, on a few levels. This is not a bad thing - if you want to play a human non-hunter (or are willing to play a ranger with pre-assigned pets a la wow warlocks), I'd imagine there's a lot of potential, and some day if they make the free trial account a permanent offering, I probably will give it a whirl.

But you can't roll out a game so heavily derived from wow and not have it be compared to wow, any more than Blizzard could create wow and not have it be compared to EQ; it's just the way games (and virtually everything else) tend to evolve.

*Necros*
Please don't tell me this game is PC only. >.<
It is, isn't it.

Well. I would have tried to play the free trial, but unless there's a mac version...

It's PC only. But download Wine, you can run it through that.

If you get a chance to try and look at it through eyes of it being its own game; it's not half bad so far. I like that so far the leveling process is taking longer than WoW's and even though it almost feels as if many of the things implemented are a direct rip of WoW, they feel done in a good way.

The basic UI is pretty customizable, the animations are smooth--I've noticed very little clipping. I'm very impressed by their underwater stuff. It's really well done and I like that when you hit a deep enough section of water to swim in, you do this little jump dive thing. And when you're underwater, all the sounds and everything get muffled, which is kind of neat.

I'm appreciating a lot of the small things they've done with the game and the Rifts and public quests have been fun so far too.

I'm downloading the trial's patches right now. It's taking forever - 14 hours remaining, but it'll take longer because my sister will come home and clog up the network with her bazillion youtube videos :C When I have then etwork empty it's about 160kbps, with one other person on it's 90, with everyone on it's 50.

Rift's download takes a long time because they limit how fast you can download it. I had to wait like two hours on a fast computer and connection speed.

Why would they do that? Think it might just have been too many people downloading?

My boyfriend said the speed looked capped to him when he went to download it a couple months back. Dunno why they would cap the download speed. Really annoying on a fast connection.

And my bf and I have our own net connection and neither of us were doing anything different than we normally do when downloading stuff so it wouldn't be from that.

Hmm, yeah, if it looked capped I'll take your word for it.

Seems unnecessary to me.

Yep, we thought the same thing.

Kay. It mysteriously made the charry I was playing on yesterday disappear, kinda dumb...

The complaint that all races are human is completely off; in that description, only one Vanilla WoW race wouldn't be human. They'd be:
Human
Short Human
Really Short Human
Purple Pointy-Ears Human
Green Human
Bloo Human
Gray-Skinned Rotting Human
Cow

Seriously, guys, dwarves and elves aren't humans.