Rift vs. WoW
Long nerd post. Beware.
I've been playing World of Warcraft pretty much since early 2005, a few months after it's initial release. Things were different then. Level 60 was the cap, the cool raid to go to was UBRS, Azeroth was small and difficult to traverse as an epic mount cost 1,000 gold and training was 900g which was extremely hard to obtain. I waited in line for the midnight release of The Burning Crusade expansion. Over all my accounts and characters, I've probably posted near 200 full days played.
Unfortunately, the game has changed. The tide has been turning for a while but just within the last couple of weeks I've started to realize that the core draw of the game is gone for me. Perhaps it was the introduction of patch 4.1, which disappointingly added only 2 new 5 man heroics based off of former raid instances. Don't get me wrong, ZG and ZA were great as raids, and the new 5 mans were interesting for the first couple of run throughs. Once my main character was geared up with most of the 353 epics (which only took a few runs), once again I was stuck with nothing to do. I already had a level 85 bear that I could run through for more gear as well as an 83 shaman and 81 warrior that I could level to 85, but why? To get ready for Firelands in 4.2? Content that I wouldn't actually see until 4.3 or greater? If Blizzard continues this trend of releasing a couple 5 mans in one patch then a raid in the next, that's a lot of downtime for non-raiders. Sure there's the Molten Front dailies which will be interesting for the first week or two, then again it becomes grindy. It's time for a break.
I took a break from WoW before for almost a year and followed it through fan sites but eventually came back. This time I've decided to try to replace it.
I first tried Rift during the public beta a couple weeks before it’s retail launch earlier this year. I didn't pay much attention to it simply because I was already in WoW and knew I didn't want to juggle 2 MMOs. The style was interesting, the graphics were definitely better than WoW, and it had a unique class/skill configuration. I maybe played for an hour or two and that was all. It wasn't until I saw last week that they were now offering a free 7 day trial of the finished product that I wanted to see how far it'd come since February.
I picked my class and souls and dove right in to playing. It had a similar feeling to vanilla WoW and similar elements to allow an easy transition. The stars must've been aligned as Steam was actually running a 33% discount on both the regular and collector's editions of Rift so I took the plunge and purchased the full version of the game.
The first thing I noticed was that leveling took a LOT longer than what I was used to. I've played around 16 hours thus far and I'm barely level 20. You can be level 60+ in WoW in that time, even without heirlooms. The quest path is very fluid, which WoW didn't achieve until Cataclysm.
I was also able to run an entry level dungeon in Rift over the weekend. I'm reserving my overall opinion regarding dungeons until I run a few more, but based off the first, the dungeon was the perfect length. It wasn't a 20 min face roll but it wasn't an hour long excruciating pain fest. I also used the Looking for Group tool which took around 20 minutes to find a group (which is fast for DPS by WoW standards).
The crafting/gathering aspect of Rift is a bit clunky but not unusable. The other major issue I have with the game is transportation. I've been spoiled by flight points in WoW every 50 yards so all the running around gets a bit frustrating. There's typically a teleport or two in each zone but you typically have to search for them and they aren't easily discovered. The collector's edition included a mount that increases speed by 60% so it's not as bad as it could be.
Another interesting aspect of the game are the rifts themselves. Minor or major tears occur in the elemental planes where players can open rift events. These elemental events consist of waves of monsters or a single boss monster and you earn rewards as each level is completed. Rifts usually close within 3 or 4 levels and the public group system of Rift allows you to easily group with nearby members working to close the rift. Occasionally a large boss event will overtake the entire zone where players have to quell invaders, collect items and/or close rifts. The random aspect of this is a neat idea but can be cumbersome when invaders destroy the camp you are questing at or a rift 3 or 4 levels above you surrounds a quest target.
I'm not going to say that Rift is the new WoW. It won't ever have the player base that WoW has, nor the advertising or development. It does bring a relatively polished experience and good play value. I imagine the soul system will see some simplification as the game develops, right now there's a ton of abilities which make rotations difficult. And yes, a lot of the features introduced at launch or patched into Rift thus far have been taken from WoW, but the implementation of these features are important for the game. Additionally, these features have been in previous MMOs from what I understand so it's nothing ground breaking. Rift is lacking some of the nicer features WoW provides, like add-on API and an Armory profile site, but chances are that the developers are working on these. However little things like AOE looting and built in full UI customization is a solid offering from Trion Worlds.
Will I keep following WoW updates? Yes. Will I give Rift a fair chance to keep it's content fresh and game interesting? Yes. Will I ever go back to WoW? Hopefully not, but sadly cannot rule it out.
