I've mentioned this before, but I've been spending a lot of time lately playing Rift. I've been enjoying myself quite a bit, but I don't think it will replace WoW for me. The only games [according to Steam] that I've logged nearly the same amount of hours as I have for WoW are EvE Online, and Mass Effect, and I've quit [and restarted] EvE more often than George Jetson got fired. And other MMOs that I've enjoyed this much have included Aion and DC Universe Online, and I don't play either of those any more. Even when I quit, I always come back to WoW. There's a reason it has the nickname "World of Warcrack". But Rift started to get me thinking about WoW.
A lot of MMOs get compared to WoW, either during development or after release, often unfavourably. Such is the curse of publishing an MMO in the aftermath of the titan that is World of Warcraft. But Rift, doesn't suffer in the shadow of Blizzard-Activision. At least, not in my opinion. In fact, in quite a lot of ways, Trion Worlds did things better. I'm of the opinion that WoW could stand to learn some things from Rift. Yes, you read that right.
Before I get started here, it does bear mentioning that the launch of Rift has been by far the smoothest launch for an MMO I've seen. The list of MMOs that I've been present for the launch of consists Aion, Champion's Online, DCUO, and Star Trek Online. There's been a few issues here and there, and one of the crafting professions is temporarily disabled due to player exploits, but it's been pretty smooth. No server crashes, no inability to log in, nothing. Part of this, I think is that they gave online reviewers access to the beta and, here's the thing, paid attention to what they said. Game reviewers colour a lot of people's views [or at least help them decide if they're on the fence] on a game, so it's important that any issues that a reviewer mentions - assuming it's fixable, of course - get fixed. Preferably before release. Prior to release, there was a patch that dealt with a few minor things in the PvE aspect, and a couple things that were explicitly mentioned in the BFF Report PvP review.
Let's start with one of the most obvious things that WoW could stand to learn from Rift's example. WoW's base UI is pretty simplistic,though they've taken some measures recently to improve on it [the new guild interface for example], and I know that they still have to consider older machines when they do any changes. The computers that could run WoW at launch can still run WoW, though with a lot of the settings turned down. But when you get right down to it, if you want to do more than change the scale of your whole UI or add a couple bars, you have to branch out to addons. And that's fine. My roommate raids comfortably with pretty much the default UI; he has mods, but from what I've seen they're more along the lines of Omen and Gatherer, and maybe Grid.
Rift's UI, straight out of the box, is pretty good. Everything's placed in a pretty logical function, raid frames darken or brighten depending on you're being relative range to the players in the raid. And it's customizable in-game. Not to the extent that is possible with mods in WoW, but that's not the point. Aside from your generic scaling of the entire UI, there's a menu option to re-arrange your UI. Want your minimap to be in the middle of your screen, just above your hotbars? Done. Want your quest tracker and group/raid frames to switch locations? Done. Don't want to see your pet frame or pet action bars at all? Done. And each element can have it's own unique scale and transparency. But now that you've done that to your liking for one character, you'll have to set it all up manually on any future characters, right? Wrong.
Any future characters you make on the same shard [read "server"], whether they're of the same faction or not can import the settings you've put together from any other. And not just UI positions either. You could import your UI from ToonA, your keybindings from ToonB, and your macros from ToonC, if you so desired. That piecemeal approach only works for characters on the same shard, but handily there's a way to import the whole thing [or just the UI placement, I'm not sure] for characters on other shards. There's slash commands. Just log in to the one character and type "/exportui name" and log on to the other and type "/importui name" That's it. And this is in the default game, at launch. Rift doesn't have addons [Yet. The developers aren't opposed to them, to my knowledge.]
There's a few other things that add a great deal to the convenience and ease of gameplay, but they're minor enough that I'm only really going to gloss over them. From your bag bar, it's possible to search your bags if you know the name [or even part of it] of what you're looking for. When at a vendor, your available cash is on their pane, so you don't have to glance down [or up, depending on your UI placement ;p] at your bags to see if you can afford to buy that new sword. Next to your gold display on the vendor window is a little button, that when pressed automatically sells all your vendor trash, leaving all your consumables, crafting materials, gear, etc unscathed. AoE looting. Let's say, you've managed to aggro a whole bunch of mobs, and then successfully kill them all. You're now surrounded by corpses to loot. Normally you'd have to loot them individually, but in Rift, if multiple corpses are in a specific radius of the corpse you loot, you loot them all, simultaneously.
Multiple crafting professions [I'd say all the non-gather ones, but I've only tried weaponsmithing, armoursmithing, runecrafting and outfitting so far] have the ability to break down items for crafting materials. Runecrafting works much like enchanting in WoW, in that you break down [or you would, if it wasn't disabled right now due to player exploits] greens and make runes that can put minor enchantments on specific slots of gear. If you're an armoursmith, you can break down pieces of armour for some metal bars and skins [as well as scraps, which can be combined into salvaged parts which, I'm told can be used in higher-level crafting]. Same deal with weaponsmithing, only you're breaking down weapons, instead of armour. These last things are hardly new approaches to crafting in an MMO, but it does stand to reason that a weaponsmith should be able to figure out how to get something usable out of an axe that is no longer useful, etc.
And finally, public grouping. This one gets it's own paragraph because it ties into a major thing I want to touch on. Public grouping, works like this. Any time you come upon somebody killing something you need to kill for a quest, you can click them, and click a little button on top of their portrait and instantly you're in a group together, and you both get credit. This is handy for normal questing, which is mostly done solo. But the public grouping system [which, if you're curious, you can toggle on your own portrait to private so that people can't randomly group you if you're feeeling anti-social {or douche-baggy}] works just a bit differently for the titular Rifts. When you're near a rift, and at least one other person is too, at the top of your screen [again, assuming basic ui positioning] there's a button labelled "Join Public Group". You click that, and then then you're in a group together, and - assuming the other person is at the rift for the same reason you are - you work together the help close it. This is extremely helpful, especially at some of the larger rifts or during invasions, when there's thirty some-odd people there, all busy making stuff dead or alive depending on their calling/souls [class/specs].
The titular Rifts, as they should be in a game called RIFT, are major points of the game. If it helps, [and it certainly helps me, in terms of describing them] they're like the pre-Cata elemental invasions, only they're everywhere. Some are minor rifts, that you can close all by yourself. Some are major rifts, where you'll need help. And every now and then there's invasions. Four or five major rifts and about a dozen minor ones open up at the same time, and start sending troops to outlying towns to conquer them. If you close all those major and minor rifts in time, a boss spawns. The reward system for closing rifts is interesting too. It kind of works like honour points in WoW. There's a specific currency used to buy stuff [gear, recipes, rift-related powers {one reinforces a wardstone in a town, which helps prevent that town from being captured}], and you acquire that currency by closing rifts. The amount of currency [and other minor rewards] you get for closing a rift, though are based on your contribution. You're going to get a bunch of the lower tier currency and a few of the higher tier ones if you're healing the group, or if you help kill the boss spawn. You might get a few of the low tier currency if you arrive when the boss is at 5% and help from there. And you'll get nothing if you stand around in the group doing nothing.
The Rifts also provide something that I, at least, have found lacking in WoW in a long time. Feeling heroic. Ask yourself this: When's the last time you did something in WoW, where you felt like a Big. Damn. Hero? For me, barring the rescue of lowbies from their certain death here and there, it was back in vanilla, when I killed Nefarion for the very first time. That was a long time ago. A lot of the time in WoW, I just feel like a glorified delivery boy, bringing So-and-so twenty bear asses, or at best, a mercenary, killing a boss for phat lewtz. Closing a rift, makes me feel good. Helping defend a town from an invasion? Makes me feel heroic.
And finally [again], a sense of humour. Now this is one thing that WoW doesn't lack. Blizzard-Activision are more than willing to make a joke. The gnome-killing fireball quest in Uldum, being a quest-giver in Hillsbrad, the inclusion of the hunter NPC that walks up and down the road from Orgrimmar to Razor Hill, by the name of "Tednug", and his pet cat, "Scratchfever". But a lot of other MMOs out there seem to have lost their sense of humour somewhere during development. This is just one example [the only one I've encountered so far, but I'm sure there's more]: When you kill a critter, you get a one minute debuff, essentially calling you a terrible person for just killing that rat/cat/deer/whatever. However, every now and then, when you kill one it's lootable. And that loot? Is a tear. With a tooltip with flavour text along the lines of "That coyote was someone's mother" or "I hope you're proud of yourself". And those tears can be collected for an Artifact set [I've not completed an artifact set yet, so I have no idea what the reward for doing so is]. The Artifact set itself, has flavour text that reads, "You're such a mighty warrior, aren't you?"
All in all, I've been enjoying myself in Rift, and I still enjoy playing WoW, but Blizzard-Activision could certainly learn a few things from Trion Worlds.
Oh, and if you're curious to see the BFF Reports on Rift, here are the links. Because no post by me is complete if it doesn't have any links!
First report
PvP report
Dungeon Guide report
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