The Raid scene was comparable to WOW at the time so I don’t agree.
I loved Rift. The Class system was amazing and many of their designs were eventually cherry picked by WOW. I loved being able to be a Rogue and have the option to Tank, DPS as Ranged or Melee and also Heal.
I also liked the Support spec idea.
Rifts were pretty fun, but the second expansion I think gave instant adventures, which was just too many people cycling in and out, doing rift-like scenarios, and just dominating. It was great for exp, so the last 20 levels were over in an hour, and most of those elemental improvements (can’t remember the name) were filled in a day or so. The problem was, no one talked at all, and you could see upwards of 50 different people in an hour.
The game was in a very healthy place leading into Storm Legion which is a big reason we got that x-pac in the first place. The problem was they were too ambitious. The Storm Legion zones were too big and pretty empty . Players missed all the great story quests from the Vanilla game.
Then going Free to Play killed the game. They lost their best devs and while F2P was a bandaid that kept the game alive for a bit in the long run it drove away all the loyal players.
Trion is just a crap company.
It didn’t help that the team got so small, people knew them all by name, lol. Then you had the forum heroes that put WoW to shame. The game was buggy as hell the last time I played it, too, about 3 years ago.
Their bard concept was awesome and I loved the strumming sounds of some of those songs.
Fantastic Explanation why
Yeah, the combat animations were very funky at times as well. Compared to how polished WOW was and is Rift’s combat animations always felt off.
Yes I remember how terrible Rift was from day 1. They had some decent concepts, but by trying to be yet another wow killer they doomed themselves.
I remember logging out one night in a village.
I remember logging in the next day and being immediately killed by a horde of mobs because that village had been overrun by an unchecked rift. I died several more times, unable to get out of that village.
I logged out and uninstalled. Didn’t even make it through the 30-day trial period.
I remember the “You’re not in Azeroth” ads and thought they could give WoW some competition with the unique classes and rift/invasion feature, but then it died down and the only other time I heard of them was back on Jim Sterling and he was laughing in disbelief at them charging $100 for a loot crate.
I remember it existed and I tried it maybe once but was too put off by the graphics. I seem to recall it was trying pretty hard to have the opposite look of this game, ie “realistic” and “gritty.” Whatever it was I found it a distinct lack of style. I just seem to recall every option on character creation looked very much the same, thinking back I might have run around for a few minutes. Am I wrong or was this the game where falling didn’t kill you? Man my memory is getting bad.
Ironic that they would go by “You’re not in Azeroth” when the game copied WoW so much that it looks like a WoW skin mod, down to the font colors in chat and the self/target portrait placement on the layout.
While every big budget MMO that came out between 2008 and 2012 was a WoW clone, RIFT was in a class of its own. It copied WoW shamelessly.
It was indeed.
Awww, that was actually one of the best bits. The randomness of invasions and rifts was awesome!
They even used the same names for tons of skills and talents.
Rift was a great game. The ability to combine and switch specs etc was probably best ever in an MMO. PvP was also quite fun. My biggest problem with it was the aesthetic, the character models and especially the armor models, were just plain ugly, and generic to boot.
That’s a funny statement considering wow literally lifted it’s entire keybind structure from Everquest. When I started WoW, I instantly felt at home, because it was so pervasive. Blizzard in no way invented the wheel here, they just refined it, made the genre much easier, and hit right at the time people were getting broadband.
Mmm. Rift.
The combination of a goof concept made by one of the worse companies ever.
Ooooooh slaps! So much slaps! The WoW killer has arrived! Man those threads when rift, Warhammer, WStar announced. Great entertainment there.
I remember swapping to RIFT with some friends, and I made a ranger/sniper build that was essentially a modern MM hunter.
I had a lot of fun in Black Garden, and wish WoW had a version of that (although I guess Temple of Kotmogu is the closest to it). Standing at the edge of the bit of cliff that led from the GY and prevented GY camping and sniping the FC as he tried to stand in mid? Good times.
It is. I’m not sure when they changed it, but fall damage used to be a thing. It was the reason I rolled a Dwarf, since they had a racial passive that allowed them to fall further without taking as much damage (similar to the Pandaren’s “Bouncy” racial).