Kulamata
Unemployed
Mane Man
Posts: 1,362
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Rift
Dec 2, 2010 23:40:42 GMT
Post by Kulamata on Dec 2, 2010 23:40:42 GMT
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Rift
Dec 3, 2010 1:54:43 GMT
Post by Pharcellus on Dec 3, 2010 1:54:43 GMT
Interesting. Very similar idea to a MMO world I've been working on for a while.
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Rift
Dec 3, 2010 15:49:53 GMT
Post by sheral on Dec 3, 2010 15:49:53 GMT
My husband's been kind of watching this one for a while. Having said that, he was also keeping an eye on Final Fantasy and we know how that ended up. Safe to say, he'll be watching with interest but keeping a safe distance
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Rift
Dec 3, 2010 17:58:13 GMT
Post by Darkwater on Dec 3, 2010 17:58:13 GMT
I have a friend who scored one of the beta keys that Massively gave away, so he'll be in beta this weekend I think. I'll let you know what he thinks of it.
I've been watching it too, ever since I heard about it on a podcast a while ago. Cautiously optimistic too. A dynamic NPC world? I've been promised and waited for that since Horizons, and been disappointed since. I'm not convinced that it can be done. Real multiclassing? Yes please. Unless I'm understanding it wrong, and its more like that you can have multiple classes but not use them at the same time, well then, that's fine too, I wont need retarded alts.
My main concern with the whole dynamic rift thing is, are they gonna turn out like WAR's public quests? In beta and at the start of release, when EVERYONE was lower level, they were awesome. Plenty of people around to do them and they were considered total win. However, after the player population bubble rose higher in level, any new player, new alt, or folks who leveled more slowly were fucked. They didnt scale with the available population of players, so no one could complete them.
In Rift, if no one can stop them right away due to lack of population, they're supposed to get even harder as they are left unchecked... so yeah, I can forsee a problem right there. After the first few weeks of launch, I can see whole groups of players never being able to do a Rift until they hit the level cap with everyone else. They claim they WILL scale, but we'll see. heh
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Rift
Dec 3, 2010 22:12:07 GMT
Post by Deth on Dec 3, 2010 22:12:07 GMT
I got luck myself. I finally got back from my work trip and i am about to log in I will let you know what I think.
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Rift
Dec 4, 2010 13:45:10 GMT
Post by Algenon on Dec 4, 2010 13:45:10 GMT
Wow, looks impressive. And i haven't said 'wow' about an mmo (well, except for WoW of course) for a long long time. Fingers etc crossed...
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Rift
Dec 4, 2010 16:32:44 GMT
Post by Deth on Dec 4, 2010 16:32:44 GMT
You can color me impressed as well. I have not played WoW since it came out I have never played any of the expansions, but I really feel this game is what WoW is now. Not that that is a bad thing at all, at least with this game. I feel they looked at WoW said " what makes WoW so go? OK Now that we have that what can we do to make it our own and better.
So for those that do not know the back story, or as the Starter area is timed, the futurestory. It is the future a great evil has been released and your one of two factions that want to go back in time to stop it. The two factions are a Technomagic group and a more natural/divine group. At least that's what I get on the second group. You can not play them yet. Basicly the other group attacked the Technomagic group and blame them for releasing the great evil. Using technomagic you are an old soul that has been brought back and bound into a new body by magictech, the other group will use divine magic to do this. You get to pick from 1 of 3 souls for each class type. As a Mage I had Warlock, Experimentalist and Pyro. Cleric had Inquisitor, Shaman, and some form of straight healer.
Where it starts getting interesting for me is you can have up to 3 souls bound. Each is it's own sub class of the mage, rogue, warrior, and cleric. I got my second set of choices at about 6, I could be a Necro, Chronomage, Dominator and something else, but still had the other 2 classes from 1st I had not picked. There may have been another class. I want to say I had 8 choices total counting my starter class. Now I never got to my 3rd soul, but if they add another 3 or 4 classes that will be really cool and a lot of customization in classes alone.
Now what is fun is when you level you do not get a new ability, but a skill point that you can put in any of the trees you have. Think WoWs talent tree, BUT here is where they went "what can we do better then WoW?", Based off the number of points you put in a tree is how you get new abilities. At second level I had 2 points and 2 trees, so I picked 2 points of + damage to my main DD spell, and unlocked my next ability a Dot. So you can see once you have 3 souls you could spread out across all thee or two or even just go very specialized in one.
I love the look of the world. The starter zone is very post apocalyptic magictech with a very over run dead feel. No green anywhere dead/reanimated people running around. You travel from one War camp to the next. The quest are nothing new. Run over here kill X of X, run over there pull this level, Run back here for reward. but they do seem to add extra little bits here and there. Like in the first combat area a "boss" will show up and stand above you raising the dead, he was only level 2 and goes do easy but if you leave him along he raising s massive level 1 real boss that is a giant abomination that will take 2 or 3 people to take down. Later down the road I was attacked by this big suit of Armour. A light rough till I popped my racial ability to do auto crits for 10 sec. He fell to pieces and I went on, only to noticed that the Armour had one of the items I had to harvest laying around as "decoration" was what I had killed. So you have the decoration pieces and can be attack by the suit of Armour as well. I thought that was cool that you could really "interact" with the terrain and not just see like, big sets of bones you never see the mob for. Think the Desert skeletons from Horizons. Imagine running through a set only to be attacked by what they come from on the other side.
There are also many just random clickies around. I found a book I could collect, a weapon wrack that gave me Armour, a set of mortars I could fire that but a debuff on the mobs I had to kill below, a switch that opened some cages and maybe spawned a mini boss. I am not sure if he random spawned when I freed them or what.
The Rifts are very cool. I ran to the end of the starter zone and there is this guy you talk to that opens one so you can go back in time. Once you ready you click on him then watch as the rifts opens and the land around it changes. Think Zerg creep. It flowed pretty smoothly away from the rift and spicks grew from the ground and the machines around changes some. It was really well done. It was then a open quest just like WAR and other games are using now. That is one other thing, if you have a quest that uses something in a world and you get there when someone else id doing it you get credit as well. I once had to go use a device to put out a burning machine. I put out 2 fires another player put out the other 3 and turned it on and I got credit. The only problem I had with this is at one point I needed to listen to someone and came in towards the end of his message and I got credit but could not hear all of his message.
Over all I really enjoyed my time playing and looking forward to see the other side to see what it is like.
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Rift
Dec 4, 2010 18:53:45 GMT
Post by FrithRae on Dec 4, 2010 18:53:45 GMT
Do you think those open quests will suffer the problem that WAR had at one point - as DW said - once the areas are cleared out of the "initial numbers" the public quests were almost impossible to complete (until they scaled them..) Are Rift's open quests scaled or soloable - or will they be in the future? Else will they run into similiar issues. Also you spoke fo the "Rifts" opening up - was it a like instance you got sent to where the environment changed around you - or is it more like WoW Phasing, where the actual environment changes around you forever more (and not instanced?) I had read up on this game and put my name in for the curse-game key - though haven't received anything . I thought it looked interesting, though none of the player races really interest me and if I don't get to beta test I doubt I'll be trying it out - just due to not wanting to pay full price for a game and monthly sub without really knowing what I'm getting into. And time...with Caty coming Tuesday, lack of time..lol.
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Rift
Dec 4, 2010 20:31:08 GMT
Post by Deth on Dec 4, 2010 20:31:08 GMT
I have not been in any instances yet and no real open quest. The one I spoke putting out the fire was a solo quest and I got to the area where I was to put out 5 small fires and click a clicky. Another guy ran up as I was putting out fires on one side and started putting out the others. I was like "Damn now I have to wait for the fires to respawn. Wait what I got credit for him putting out fires? Cool." So I could have literally ran up watch him put out the fires and click the clickable and I would get quest credit.
It was open world. Kind of like the WoW phasing, or a amped up Horizon Blight anchor. I ran up. Someone talked to the Quest NPC. A rift open in the middle of the machine and if you ever watched the zerg creep appear, that is what it is like. The grown becomes black and crusty just like creep, and the earth would crack and spikes would slide up. I have never seen WoW phasing so I do not know how smooth it is, but this was smooth it is not like (pop) and the area around you change it was like something you could try to out run if you wanted to. It is something you have to see I think to fully appreciate
Yea the races look like your basic fantasy races. but you will be happy to know during beta they have RP servers. Had a PVP-RP and PVE-RP
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Rift
Dec 4, 2010 22:12:16 GMT
Post by Darkwater on Dec 4, 2010 22:12:16 GMT
After doing some more reading up on it, it appears that most of the rifts you wander across will be able to be completed solo.. you can close the rift and get rewards. However, doing it faster, opens up new phases of the rift... er think more stages of WAR public quests.. that lead to greater rewards. So doing them in a group, will advance you into more stages and end in greater rewards for all. But they can still be done slower and solo if you wanted.
There will be harder ones though that base of a group difficulty, and can, I assume, ramp up into more stages if you had a couple groups doing it faster, lets say.
Finally some will be invasions, where they spawn armies and generals that march out from the rift to conquer player warcamps and other NPC rifts.
Leaving a rift alone for a while, expands it slowly, moving it up in difficulty towards the invasion level. There's a bunch of video links on the website that explained most of it.
Also, my friend is loving it too, though its a bit crowded he says lol.
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Rift
Dec 5, 2010 1:18:25 GMT
Post by Deth on Dec 5, 2010 1:18:25 GMT
Yes it is. They have about 10 servers all on the same faction and everyone I have seen have been at Heavy. Oh I also hope they keep up the speed of thier fixes. They had a patch out the first 8 hours of testing. Fixing a couple minor issues and increasing spawn rates.
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Rift
Dec 5, 2010 1:46:27 GMT
Post by FrithRae on Dec 5, 2010 1:46:27 GMT
ahh well that all sounds good then! And yea I know their beta tests are only for select weekends, and only one side is open each time (at least the first two weekends) so..more like.."limited and controlled" testing, possibly to get that high-player count effect to test their servers.
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Rift
Dec 5, 2010 4:04:18 GMT
Post by Warhorse on Dec 5, 2010 4:04:18 GMT
When I first started hearing about this game I was hoping it was going to be a game based off the old PnP game RIFTS but dang it, it's another fantasy game (though it does look pretty cool from what I have seen). I'm just kinda burned out on Fantasy gaming at the moment.
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Rift
Dec 6, 2010 16:01:03 GMT
Post by sheral on Dec 6, 2010 16:01:03 GMT
I got in the beta on Saturday, although I didn't see the email til Sunday so I downloaded and let hubby play for a bit yesterday afternoon, since he was the one watching it and I only applied Saturday to give us an extra chance to get in (which miffed him no end since he applied ages ago lol).
After about 3 or 4 hours of play, he didn't find anything to write a bug report on. He did send in some feedback, mostly good with one little niggle, but I forget what that was right now so it can't have been important.
Graphics looked decent - a cross between WoW and Warhammer, IMO, although character creation had a lot more choices than either game (still not as many as EQII or Vanguard).
Gameplay and UI was enough like WoW to not need the pop-up hints.
The 'souls' thing was interesting. Putting points in opened up new skills - so by putting points into + damage and healing and + crit on the top half of the board, opened up a new damage spell and a buff on the bottom half. The next one you get, allows you to put points into one of three other classes or you could continue putting points into the one you had. Hubby made a pyromancer first off, and then got to add a storm-something and got a lightning bolt. I'm assuming that happens again with a third soul at a later level.
Interesting. A little Steam Punk with all the machines and such (you were only allowed to play the Defiant side, who use technology and magic). The premise is kind of Terminator-ish: the world is screwed and the bad guy (Regulos) is about to win. You get sent back in time to stop it happening.
Saw a few of the rifts in action and they do work pretty much like the public quests in Warhammer. Rift opens up, everyone in the area joins in to kill it (it goes through 3 stages ending up with a boss mob) and then it goes away. If left untouched, from what I can gather, the rift will turn into an invasion and they will take over an area so not sure how that will work in lowbie areas when the bulk of the population has moved on to higher levels.
Didn't get time to mess around further and of course I have no idea whether the game stays good at later levels or whether there is much to do other than quests and rifts. From what we did see though, it was quite impressive to say that the launch date is months away. Of course, that could be the one area that's working perfectly and the rest is no good, but it definitely left a good impression.
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Rift
Dec 6, 2010 19:04:01 GMT
Post by FrithRae on Dec 6, 2010 19:04:01 GMT
Yea, I always get nervous if betas aren't up/open long enough for people to do higher level content. Much like in AOC - you can clearly spend all your work on the early levels and then have next to zippo polished off outside the starter area.
It was a concern I had when I played through AoC beta (that ended up being wellfounded - but then I knew that they had initially wanted to put out the 1-20 level as a standalone CD and then only MMORPG the levels after 20...) so its something I remain aware of when I go to a beta test.
I may not be someoen who plays fast enough to test the mid-level content but I know there are beta players who DO level fast enough to do so - so I watch for their forum posts to let me know how it plays once you get out of the beginner areas. heh.
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