Rift

I'm playing in early release now and it seems to be a well made game. On release day it was overcrowded but this problem has improved over the days as people spread out. I like how easy they've made it for people to cooperate in quests and rifts, and from what I've gathered you can help out when guilds start the larger rift raid encounters too. The game music also seemed somewhat familiar. It was done by two musicians responsible for the Heroes Of Might And Magic tunes.
 
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So, 1-2 weeks later, what's the verdict on this one, guys? I played the beta, couldn't stand it, but I'm morbidly curious: Will Rift be a threat to WoW, will it slowly fade into nothingness as so many MMO's before it due to tedium and unoriginality?
 
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Its actually pretty good. However some classes are op imo like the cleric. It will b eup to devs if they balance it correctly if it is good.
 
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I bought it in my desperate and ongoing search for an MMO that would entertain me until one of the greats come out.

It worked…. For about a week.

I'm level 27 or something now, and I stopped playing.

It's just not a very interesting game - and though it's extremely impressive in terms of a launch that just works - it's not enough.

It's like going back in time and playing WoW again, but with an inferior combat system, an inferior world, and inferior PvP POTENTIAL. It's pretty obvious it'll never be an open world PvP game - at least I don't see that happening.

I had hopes for WoW originally, but they went and completely ruined it.

So, Rift is already pretty dead to me.
 
wolfing said:
I hate to say it, but …. told ya! :)
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EverQuest is not a good compensation, though :)

For the moment, there's only one single MMO that I know about, which seems to be doing the kind of thing I would consider a REAL step forward:

ArcheAge.

If that game is half of what they promise, it'll be the real next-gen MMO I've been waiting for since Ultima Online.
 
I picked up Everquest II for the first time about 3 weeks back. I'm really enjoying it; there's a lot of depth to the game and some dungeons are just wickedly cool in terms of lore. Very casual-friendly too, which is kind of strange for an "Everquest" game.
 
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DArtagnan said:
I bought it in my desperate and ongoing search for an MMO that would entertain me until one of the greats come out.

It worked…. For about a week.

I'm level 27 or something now, and I stopped playing.

It's just not a very interesting game - and though it's extremely impressive in terms of a launch that just works - it's not enough.

It's like going back in time and playing WoW again, but with an inferior combat system, an inferior world, and inferior PvP POTENTIAL. It's pretty obvious it'll never be an open world PvP game - at least I don't see that happening.

I had hopes for WoW originally, but they went and completely ruined it.

So, Rift is already pretty dead to me.
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I dunno. I agree it is an inferior world though i always skip the story. Might i ask what class you were?
 
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Damian Mahadevan said:
I dunno. I agree it is an inferior world though i always skip the story. Might i ask what class you were?
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I was a rogue, focusing on the Saboteur class - which is a novelty. It's like a demolition class, with grenades and charges.

Quite entertaining, and I absolutely dominated every single "Warfront" I was in - but the combat system is quite stale compared to the best, like Age of Conan and World of Warcraft.

It's much more like Warhammer in that it's somewhat slow and clunky in terms of the visceral feel and response to key-presses.

When I said world, I wasn't talking about story - but about the sensation of exploration. Rift's world was VERY linear, and the areas were WAY too compact in terms of monster density. Just didn't feel like an actual world.

I will say that the atmosphere is pretty strong, especially in Gloamwood. Very well done.
 
Drithius said:
I picked up Everquest II for the first time about 3 weeks back. I'm really enjoying it; there's a lot of depth to the game and some dungeons are just wickedly cool in terms of lore. Very casual-friendly too, which is kind of strange for an "Everquest" game.
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I recently re-tried it, and would have played it now - if only there had been a european PvP server.

The engine is absolutely abysmal as well, which is pretty sad.

But it's one of the most content-rich MMOs out there.
 
I also found the game a bit boring around level 25. The world seemed to get more dense and smaller as I progressed, so I would have prefered much larger zones and no barriers for the whole continent. Leveling is a bit fast for me and the mobs also got easier and easier as I progressed, so a bit of tuning in that regard would be nice. Questing got very boring around level 20 but that I had already assumed that before I started the game. No comments on PVP since I find it pretty boring, though I like getting ganked on PVP-servers and carrying a grude for months on end.

Other than that I think it's as good as it gets at launch for an MMO in this genre. It'll be interesting to see how much effort Trion Worlds will put into the game post-launch. Some good points about the game is it's story-quests, the roaming mobs, and rifts. I didn't play a lot of dungeons but what I saw seemed pretty decent. The soul system is refreshing and I like how easy it enables different roles.

Atleast it's not a half-baked game as Conan was, where Funcom even gutted half its team right after launch to work on an expansion.

As for my MMO saviour, my hope lies with Carbine Studios' generic fantasy MMO.
 
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hishadow said:
I also found the game a bit boring around level 25. The world seemed to get more dense and smaller as I progressed, so I would have prefered much larger zones and no barriers for the whole continent. Leveling is a bit fast for me and the mobs also got easier and easier as I progressed, so a bit of tuning in that regard would be nice. Questing got very boring around level 20 but that I had already assumed that before I started the game. No comments on PVP since I find it pretty boring, though I like getting ganked on PVP-servers and carrying a grude for months on end.

Other than that I think it's as good as it gets at launch for an MMO in this genre. It'll be interesting to see how much effort Trion Worlds will put into the game post-launch. Some good points about the game is it's story-quests, the roaming mobs, and rifts. I didn't play a lot of dungeons but what I saw seemed pretty decent. The soul system is refreshing and I like how easy it enables different roles.

Atleast it's not a half-baked game as Conan was, where Funcom even gutted half its team right after launch to work on an expansion.

As for my MMO saviour, my hope lies with Carbine Studios' generic fantasy MMO.
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Yes carbine studios MMO with Tim Cain should be good.
 
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DArtagnan said:
I was a rogue, focusing on the Saboteur class - which is a novelty. It's like a demolition class, with grenades and charges.

Quite entertaining, and I absolutely dominated every single "Warfront" I was in - but the combat system is quite stale compared to the best, like Age of Conan and World of Warcraft.

It's much more like Warhammer in that it's somewhat slow and clunky in terms of the visceral feel and response to key-presses.

When I said world, I wasn't talking about story - but about the sensation of exploration. Rift's world was VERY linear, and the areas were WAY too compact in terms of monster density. Just didn't feel like an actual world.

I will say that the atmosphere is pretty strong, especially in Gloamwood. Very well done.
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I like the fact that it is linear. I hated WoW's levelling in the sense once you finish in one area you either grind or go to another area where the quests are low level and you are forced to max out your quest log. Very annoying in WoW. As for being too compact i agree. Nothign pisses me off more in the game than completign a quest and having to run through hordes.
 
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Drithius said:
I picked up Everquest II for the first time about 3 weeks back. I'm really enjoying it; there's a lot of depth to the game and some dungeons are just wickedly cool in terms of lore. Very casual-friendly too, which is kind of strange for an "Everquest" game.
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I am on a MMO kick at the moment. Tried Runes of Magic and Lord of the Rings Online, I would be playing EQ2 right now if I hadn't already played for a couple of years. It was the best MMO I have played. It has some great quest arcs very close to single player stuff.

So far Rift doesn't have that and it might take a zone re-imaging to get there. The quests just don't make me want to read them. I still try though the lore is a bit junk.

I tend to dual or multi-box MMO's now or I get bored. It started as my play times are erratic and I couldn't commit to a group let alone a raid.
I found multi-boxing quite easy and is just like a large open world party based RPG. Often I have to make the story up in my head though which is fine with me.
Currently running a Warrior, Cleric, Rogue in Rift and having a great time. I can see the lore isn't going to hold me but the character system is interesting, combat is fun and the world is beautiful.

I use ISBoxer for the multi-clienting and it helps a lot.
 
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pox67 said:
So far Rift doesn't have that and it might take a zone re-imaging to get there. The quests just don't make me want to read them. I still try though the lore is a bit junk.
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That's exactly the same vibe I got when I briefly beta tested it. The setting and quests had no impact on me - I wasn't interested at all. Then I kept reading all these glowing reviews about how well the game ran and I kept thinking to myself, "so what?"

I am really having a terrific time in EQ2 though - there is just SO much content, it's a bit crazy. And the quests interest you to the degree that you feel you've missed something if you delete an old quest from your quest journal.
 
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Drithius said:
That's exactly the same vibe I got when I briefly beta tested it. The setting and quests had no impact on me - I wasn't interested at all. Then I kept reading all these glowing reviews about how well the game ran and I kept thinking to myself, "so what?"

I am really having a terrific time in EQ2 though - there is just SO much content, it's a bit crazy. And the quests interest you to the degree that you feel you've missed something if you delete an old quest from your quest journal.
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I'm really tempted to resub to EQ2… It really does seem like the only meaty MMO with halfway decent support these days.

I could never get the engine to run right, and there are a ton of glitches and performance issues. But the content is fantastic for the most part.

If only they could give me my european PvP server.
 
I tried to get into EQ but the interface and old style interaction is hard to get used to.
 
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Drithius said:
I am really having a terrific time in EQ2 though - there is just SO much content, it's a bit crazy. And the quests interest you to the degree that you feel you've missed something if you delete an old quest from your quest journal.
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My favourite quest lines were in Zek. That is level 30 to 40. Well worth it once you get there to take your time and read the quests.

DArtagnan said:
I could never get the engine to run right, and there are a ton of glitches and performance issues. But the content is fantastic for the most part.
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The way I heard it they designed EQ2 for high frequency single core processors as that is the way the CPUs looked to be heading at the time. Not long after it came out dual core CPUs took off. They patched in multi core support (from memory) but it never worked properly in my experience.
 
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The way I heard it they designed EQ2 for high frequency single core processors as that is the way the CPUs looked to be heading at the time. Not long after it came out dual core CPUs took off. They patched in multi core support (from memory) but it never worked properly in my experience.
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Yup, that's true.

Their biggest mistake, in that way, was to make it all heavily CPU dependent, rather than offloading work to the GPU.

The game would have been much smoother if they'd done more work to accomplish that.

They did do it partially - and recently with Shader 3.0 support and GPU shadows. But it's really buggy and messy.

Too bad, because the core game is strong.
 
The EQ2 engine runs ok on my computer. Since I've only recently begun playing the game, I don't know how much of that (if any) is tweaks they've recently made to the engine and how much of it is my Phenom CPU running at 3.4ghz. Still, it took me a while to get it to run to my satisfaction and I'm happy with 40-60fps in many places.

If any of you guys wants a recruit-a-friend code for a 14 day trial lemme know. There's also the EQ2 "Extended free to play" game, but it's completely separate from the other EQ2 servers... and, oddly enough, more expensive should you choose to get all the privileges of normal servers.
 
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