Monday, June 4, 2012

Played Lately: Rift

  • The MMO blogging community can be a mysterious thing. One minute we're doing our own thing, next we're all turned in one direction like a herd of cattle. With the announcement of the Storm Legions expansion, it seems like attention is turning toward Rift.

  • Blue Kae mentioned on Twitter that he was thinking about resubscribing. Syp is having a good time back in the game, all the while wondering about how Trion has kept their heads down and built an impressive MMO. And Wilhelm, The Ancient Noob Of Gaming, discusses how launching Storm Legions is the ultimate sign of health for the game.

  • I have long contended that an MMO has two modes: expansion or death. If your MMO is not growing, it's only a matter of time before the servers are turned off. That's one of the assumptions about MMOs that people don't really talk about anymore. I think it's a given for most. But one of the best promises of the genre is that our subscriptions would go toward expanding the world. Everyone likes to point toward the first year of World of Warcraft as the ideal for the model, but I suspect that Trion has them topped. (Not to forget CCP. Those folks are crazy.)

  • It had been so long since I tried the game that I knew it was time to try again. So I resubbed, rerolled, and re... started adventuring. I rolled an elf cleric on Faeblight, just to give it a shot. I was pleasantly surprised by all of the updates since my last time in game. I was aware that they changed the soul system a bit, but I wasn't aware of the pre-built specs. The huge portal in the first quest zone in Silverwood was a welcome addition. And I stayed up too late fishing, a nice little update to the tried-and-true mechanic.

  • It has been so long that Rift feels like a new game to me. And in many ways, it is since I only got a few zones into the world. I'm uncertain if I'll last long enough for the expansion to matter. But in the mean time, I'm going to catch way too many fish.


© 2012 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.

6 comments:

  1. I'm probably the odd man out in that I'm still enjoying SWTOR. I have also been putting some time into EQ II and DDO.

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    1. Not so odd, I think. I'm glad that all of these old games are chugging along. I really need to get back to EQ2 again. Hopefully that will be my next destination after Rift.

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  2. I'm playing Rift right now as well, for the first time since Beta. For me it was the Raptr giveaway rather than the expansion announcement, but I'll maybe get to checking that out at some point as well; it does sound impressive.

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  3. I never gave Rift a chance because shortly after buying the game, TOR announced it's release date which was pretty close. So instead of getting knee deep in a MMO I knew I wasn't going to play I just let my free month go by. At some point I might give Rift a try again, but I still have subs to TOR and Terra and I'm not sure how much time I can give it.

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  4. I'm disappointed! It's been days since I resubbed and my wife still hasn't gone into labor.

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  5. The funny thing is that I always have a good time when I return to Rift - and yet it never sticks. I have resubbed thrice and I would probably resub for the expansion. I had been wondering when they will announce one already. but yeah, there's something about Rift I can't quite explain. I think it really did suffer from all the WoW comparisons (to be fair it is not ground-breakingly different).

    we shall see...I may resurrect my chars once more :)

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