Wanna try Rift?

[Manic Velocity]

I watched the opening cinematic on youtube. It was pretty predictably cheesy, with all the classic fantasy concepts played in nearly assembly-line sequence.

[Tbone]

I've played up until about level 10. So far it's predictably boring.

After viewing previously mentioned cheesy cinematic, you just sorta spawn in a building with everyone else. Tutorial tips pop up as you do your first mission. It starts getting repetitive pretty quickly. Click on the guy with the icon above his head, click accept, follow waypoint, kill or click stuff in waypoint, go back to the guy with the icon above his head.

The story didn't suck me in. I didn't feel like reading any of the text. There were corrupted things and goblins - your basic bad guys. And they were doing bad things to people. Eventually they led me into a "rift", a circle where the ground and sky get dark and you have to fight a mini-boss. The first one was instanced for a quest. The others are just random and kind of confusing.

For rifts, you'll get a notification that your area is under attack or that a rift has opened up. An icon will show up on your map, and if you go there, you'll run into a bunch of other people and it'll give you the option to just join a public party. Most of the time I wasn't even able to kill anything because by the time I got there, it was almost over and the remaining mobs had already been engaged. I did get to a rift at the beginning and just got insta-killed by the swarm.

In theory these rifts sound interesting, but so far they're just confusing. There was one where like 5 of them opened up, but I'm not sure why. And I think we lost the battle or lost one of them, but again I'm not sure why. The combat in the rifts are the same as everywhere else, only it's harder to see if you've targeted something.

I have yet to figure out how to auto-run or auto-target. The usual key binds didn't work. Targeting can especially be a pain as you left click to target, right click to attack, and then use abilities. However doing any of these things out of order can leave your character standing there looking confused. There's no simple tabbing between enemies that I've found so far.

The graphics were fine, though Aion's were better. Controls were ok, though lag caused a delay. Combat was pretty boring as a dual wield warrior - basically spammed the same two abilities. Story is non-existent unless you want to read the wall of text for the quests, so if you like doing that, let me know how the story is.

The soul system seems like a way of just never having enough skill points. I don't know if they want me to focus on just one or divide my points out between all three. New abilities aren't unlocked until you go high up enough through a soul (class), so I don't know why you'd spread them out and have a bunch of level 3 abilities that don't go along with each other when you're level 10. I ended up just putting most of mine into the dual wield tree and just one or two into the others.

In the end, I just don't think it has anything special about it. There's a soul walking thing you do when you die, which seems a little gimmicky. There are the rifts, that don't really do much except reward you with some items that I don't know what they do. I really am just ready for the cinematic, voice-acted quests to immerse me into the game. Or at the very least a virtual world that really appeals to me (a la Matrix). This game really isn't any different than EQ2, except not as polished.

I'll try to do some group stuff with those of you who are trying it out, just to see what that's like. I don't have anything else going on!

[likwidtek]

Yawn...

[JP]

myself and a group of friends are jumping into this as a timekiller til TOR hit me up if you would like to join us.  Got my Cleric up to 30 in beta so got a chance to see the game more fleshed out.I can expand on some of the concepts and features of the game to whoever is semi interested.

[Revalis]

Well, I managed to play through to level 25 on this, but I'm not sure... definately felt I would like it better than WoW, but once I got to Gloamwood, I fell into the tendency of chasing Rifts with the public groups rather than focusing on my 'Kill/Collect X number of Y' quests... I think I actually hit levels 24 and 25 on public quests alone.

It definately looks and plays better than WoW, but I don't know that I could see myself playing it for, say, a year. One of those 'same song, second verse' scenarios, I suppose.

[JP]

In general Rifting is far more fun than the questing so i did quite a bit of chasing Rifts myself, gloamwood was a pretty depressing zone, but the next area, Scarlet Gorge. more than made up for it.  And if TOR doesnt come out for a full year i'll be sad panda.