tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?
My pet rock. He’s kind of inanimate.
Thoughts on RIFT
Very recently, my friends have convinced me to start playing RIFT. I’ve been MMORPG-less for a while now and I’m seriously craving the leveling and loot collecting. I can’t say that I’m not excited to get started, but I definitely have some worries about the game. I played the beta and, from what I gleaned during that short time, I felt that it lacked many things including visual polish and new mechanics.
I think that the word “polish” is thrown around too much by modern reviewers. I feel like it’s when everything works together and creates a smooth finished product; something that is especially important in video games. When I say that RIFT lacks visual polish, it doesn’t mean that I think the game looks bad. Quite the contrary. I think the actual character models and game world look fantastic. My problem is with the animation. In general, I felt that they were stiff, unresponsive, and generally silly looking. MMOs in general need to have good visuals, including animations, to succeed. Why? Because the gameplay of an MMO is so simple. You right click, press a few buttons, and you watch your avatar carry out the order. MMOs need to be immersive and having choppy animations and unresponsive controls really screw up the experience. People talk about how Killing Floor (A Co-op FPS) has terrible animations. But lets be honest… How often do you even notice that the enemies swing around in stiff fashions when they beat on your face? I’m not saying that good animations aren’t important in other games, but they’re certainly less so.
Hearing my friends talk about the game as if it was the next best thing was actually sort of comical. It sounded like they were trying to convince themselves rather than me. Other than the actual rifts themselves, I felt that RIFT didn’t actually change much in the genre. People say we shouldn’t compare it to WoW. I say why the hell not? It should be compared to it. Honestly, RIFT is too similar to WoW. It honestly just felt like a WoW expansion. As soon as I got into the game I knew exactly what I should do and how to do it. I didn’t even need to read the quest text to know that I had to kill 6 of the little guys and 4 of the big ones. The only thing different was the setting and a few other interesting things. At some point someone is going to have to change the mold so we don’t keep getting the same things over and over again.
If I just hated RIFT, I probably wouldn’t play it. So I’m going to at least talk about what I think it does right. And it does enough right that I’ll give it a go for at least a little.
The soul system is very interesting. It’s like having a bunch of talent trees that one can swap around and combine to make a “custom” class. It seems like it would be really fun to test out new combos and mess around with all the abilities. The only problem I see with the system is that, eventually, there might be a set of accepted souls to use with your points allocated a certain way. The rifts are amazing. I’d love to see more stuff like that in the newer MMOs. Random world events that draw people together are always good, as they promote interaction and help you feel that you actually are in a persistent world.
So yea. First post.
I’ll definitely post more when I get into the game again. The end might be a little rushed because my Portal 2 download finished, so I’m going to be playing that. Oh, and I’ll write about it too!
