RIFT: First Impressions

Yesterday I decided to try RIFT.  This decision was influenced by the fact that RIFT seems to be the only MMO I've tried so far that has working social media integration.  LOTRO had a Facebook app at one point around 2010, but development of it appears to have stopped with no announcement as to why.

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?320632-LOTRO-Player-Feed-Fedback/page4

CO also had a /socialmedia menu at one point, but this too was removed without any notification.

http://co-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=205331

I find this puzzling considering the fact that some players enjoy telling their friends what they are up to in virtual worlds.  While some players on the above links are worried about friends and family being annoyed by alerts, I think there are lots of players who might want to share things about their alternate lives.  Better still, it might expose their friends and family to something they haven't seen before....especially in the case of LOTRO, where there are many people who have seen the films or read the novels that may have no clue that a game like it exists.

While searching for information about social media integration, I also looked into smartphone integration.  The idea seems pretty simple, a smartphone app that allows you to chat with your game friends when you are away from the computer. LOTRO doesn't have one, but I found that RIFT does. Further research showed that RIFT also has different F2P model that supposedly gives you all of the content for free.  So, to a plate already full of MMOs, I broke down and added another to my list.

Right away, the first thing I noticed was that RIFT has built in Twitter, Tumblr, and Youtube integration.  It has a built in ability to record up to 10 minutes of game footage and send it directly to your Youtube account without leaving the game.  Very impressive.

Gameplay feels similar to games like LOTRO and WoW, though mobs of equal level seem to take much longer to die than they do in LOTRO.  It also took me a bit to get used to manually looting bodies again.  Due to the mounted combat added in the Riders of Rohan expansion for LOTRO, remote looting was added and proved to be so popular that it was added to the whole game.  It's one of those features you get so used to that I find myself sometimes leaving a trail of shimmering bodies behind in a game that doesn't have remote looting.

I also found myself a little frustrated when I reached the point where I was given player housing, which exists as pocket dimensions in RIFT.  You get the house from completing a quest, and once I clicked on the object, a new menu popped up.  I must have clicked on the wrong button because the menu window was closed I hadn't warped to my house.  The quest said "Go to your house", but neglected to mention how to open up that window again, or even what menu I was looking for.  I finally found it after searching through the in-game help.

The pocket dimension is a nice idea, but it's marred by the dreaded invisible walls that I hate so much in CO.  In a situation like this, I think an island surrounded by a void of stars would have been better than trying to create the illusion that there's more around you and then breaking that illusion with an invisible wall.

Finally, I got a chance to try out the smartphone app which allows you to chat with your in game friends and guild, along with local alerts.  You are also given credits with which you can play scratch cards for in-game loot.  You have a maximum of 6 credits, and you get 1 every hour until you hit the maximum.  It's not a bad idea, but I think a mini-game that teaches you more about the world of the game would be an even better one. Games based on existing properties like LOTRO have the advantage of lore that has existed in other media first, so entering the game feels like seeing that world come to life.

RIFT doesn't have that. I haven't the foggiest idea about the world of the game other than the fact that rifts open there a lot. There seemed to be so much lore related information in the introduction that it made me feel like I was joining a story already in progress rather than starting out from the first episode.  Too many names, places, and events that I know nothing about yet being thrown at me as if I have been reading books about RIFT for a long time.