Another one bites the subscription dust

Last Updated on Wednesday, 15 May 2013 11:49 Written by Kadomi Wednesday, 15 May 2013 02:00

The big news yesterday was something I had somewhat expected ever since Scott Hartsman left Trion Worlds in January:

Over the years I have mentioned multiple times that I find Rift one of the nicest MMO experiences out there. I was a subscriber for 9 months after release, and went back on a trial basis last year. It’s a great, highly polished game with tons of interesting features and cool classes. Unfortunately the playing experience is maybe a bit too close to WoW and so I never really went back full-time. When I read about the F2P transition next month my first thought was ‘Wow, how awesome is that?’ It means that a ‘WoW tourist’ like me will have the opportunity to go back whenever I please, without any pressure, and without any obvious restrictions that would make it unpalatable to me – like say, SWTOR’s reduced amount of action bars, come on. Of course that’s easy for me to say. I am not a current subscriber, and some of those might feel entirely different about the transition, like Liore, whose opinion I value greatly. She is bummed, and probably for good reason. Non-cosmetic gear for sale in a cash shop smells like pay to win to me. On the other hand, if it’s solely catch-up gear so people can start raiding with their friends, maybe not so bad. I guess only time will tell, but as always, I wish Trion Worlds well, because ultimately, they always struck me as a good publisher who worked hard on making Rift very polished, with an incredibly high pace of new content delivery. Come June 12, I will likely download the client once again and dip my toes in. I always thought chloromancers were nifty.

In WoW news

No 5.3 this week means I can mostly just putter around again. This coming week I will purchase the last piece of DPS gear for Yatalai with VP, and then I am done with that. I don’t have the energy to do the valor grind for tanking gear and instead will use any future VP for upgrades. With an ilevel of 509, I am chafing at the bit to be rid of my next to last piece of gear from T14, my Shoulderpads of Misshapen Life. I predict another week of me blowing two Mogu Runes on Iron Qon and Tortos in LFR to replace the shoulders, to get…gold. I have heard complaints about the loot system a lot, and because I have been a lucky beeyatch it’s never bothered me, but T15 is not very kind to me. Double-gold, all the time. Lame!

As I was valor-capped by yesterday, I decided to work on Raiding with Leashes some more. Gluth was a disappointment again, but I burned him down in no time. He was my only problem boss in my first solo Naxx attempts (aside from those two annoying guys before Thaddius), so I was pretty pleased with that. From there I decided I would try my luck with Blackwing Lair. According to forums, Razorgore is sooooo ez-mode, and everyone who can’t solo this a lesser player. Well, don’t let it be said I am that. Three wipes later, I started considering myself a lesser player. Most of the adds aggroed onto Razorgore, and when I hadn’t even cleared half of the eggs, he would die. Incidentally, so would I. Our raid leader Savitr was online, and confused about why the adds didn’t latch onto me. He recommended dismissing Razorgore instead of having it drop off. What can I say? That did the trick. Once I dismissed him, all of his friends ran over to me, I took control again, and once there were too many adds again, I dismissed again. Success!

Of course I’ll have to do it again next week, because neither Razorgore, nor Broodlord Lashlayer coughed up any pets. At least I got Chrominius!

I spent the rest of the day playing the little disc priest who could. She’s now level 57, and Outland is looming ever closer. As much as I love TBC it pains me to say that at the thought of Outland, I am bored already.

The Godmother won at WoW blog posts yesterday. Her post about attunements of old made me very nostalgic for them. It reminded me of the Onyxia chain for horde. It was a flipping pain in the arse, it was for sure. It was also one of the most satisfying experiences I had in the game. I fondly remember turning Rend’s head in to Thrall. I felt like a hero. I don’t feel like a hero today, even though Wrathion has me jumping through crazy hoops. Yet, I do not know if this same feeling can ever be brought back to a more modern WoW audience. We’ve all been spoiled by the game.

Two people, what to play?

I like board games. I really do. I love opening new boxes, and the prettier a game, the happier it makes me. Board game nights are always highlights for me. My SO LOVES board games. She’s excellent at just about any board game. The only board game she didn’t fully warm up to was Dominion, which is a shame, I like it a lot. If she could, my SO would play board games every night. Did I mention she’s good? She’s really good. This means for 2-player games, she usually dominates every game so hard that I find little enjoyment in them. She’s a top-notch programmer, her mind works completely different from mine. When it comes to games, she’s a Vulcan, cold logic, and the goal to crush her opponents.

So I come looking for help, Interwebz. If anyone who reads this knows any really cool 2-player games, please leave a comment. Somewhere out there must be the game where I won’t be crushed every single time I play with her. Right? We enjoy Kingdom Builder, but I don’t like it as a 2-player game. Qwirkle didn’t work at all, because she’s like a friggin’ computer when it comes to it. She actually wrote an AJAX-version with computer opponents and multiplayer support in her spare time. The Settlers of Catan card game is good, but it takes an eternity to play.

Must look harder. Last night we played Yahtzee, and that’s at least a game we can play without me wanting to flip tables.

Tonight we’re going to the circus. I haven’t been to the circus in like a million years. Seriously, since my childhood. I hope it’s going to be good. I am skipping raid night for it, so it better be good!

Rifting it up again

Last Updated on Tuesday, 5 June 2012 01:11 Written by Kadomi Tuesday, 5 June 2012 02:30

I am currently suffering from game ADD. Nothing can really hold my attention. I am puttering through Diablo 3 on nightmare but I have reached my saturation point with the game. I think I reached it when I killed the Butcher in nightmare and he dropped two blues. I don’t understand the game design decision where treasure pygmies and random elites are more fruitful than freaking act bosses. It really doesn’t help that the story the second time through feels even more boring than the first time round.

I have a sub for SWTOR but it doesn’t grab me at all. My SO and I score like 2 hours of gametime a week, which would explain why we’re level 31 and on Alderaan. I am still standing by my previous point that it’s the best duo experience I ever had in an MMO, but it decidedly lacks that punch, that sweet addictive gameplay that keeps you coming for more and more. I also still have a WoW sub that’s paid up til October but just thinking about WoW makes me yawn. I haven’t touched it since January. Of course, Mists of Pandaria is lurking in the future but it’s the first expansion I have no real interest in. Sure, it looks pretty in screenshots, but a themepark East Asia with pandas, pokemon and Farmville as the major draw is nothing that gets me excited at all.

And then there was Rift. I stopped playing that about a year ago, after loving it for the first three months. I mostly quit because the midlevels were dull, and I fell out of love with MMOs completely. It was the phase last year where I stopped playing MMOs completely, from May til October. Interestingly enough, that seems to be a phenomenon about former hardcore MMO players. You consume MMOs with a passion, live and breathe them, fall out of love with the genre, and then focus on single player games. Which I did all last summer. It was kinda glorious. Mr. Ezio Auditore and I had a lot of fun climbing towers, oh yeah.

But back to Rift. Last week they announced their first expansion pack, and the main features wowed me. Two new continents tripling the size of the game world. That’s a lot of new zones. A dual faction city called Tempest Bay. Ten new levels. A new soul for each calling, so that means new gameplay options as far as characters go. Seven new dungeons, three raids and a chronicle (Rift’s one or two player dungeons). More crafting, more collectables, more titles, and whoa, player and guild housing. Take that, Blizzard, other game companies actually implement stuff like that instead of stating that it’s likely never going to happen. I would have killed for a guild hall in WoW. Alas. That’s a lot of features. Features that I find more exciting than what’s coming towards us in MoP.

I have to give it to Trion, they know how to push out massive amounts of content for their game and seem to be the busy bees of the MMO world. Let’s just compare. Cataclysm was released in December 2010 and received three major content patches in the 1.5 years since then (Zandalari, Firelands and Dragon Soul). Rift was released in March 2011 and is currently at patch 1.8, with 1.9 already announced for the near future, and the expansion coming later this year. Eight major content patches. That’s a lot of content. Of course not all’s sunshine and roses. Trion has a habit of releasing patches with new rift events, which basically are new rift bosses, a new currency, and new dailies. All the same pattern, not that exciting. But that’s just me. Other features they added I find rock-solid. Chronicles, Instant Adventure, more raids, more quests, more zones, new rifts.

Much like Belghast and Sypster, I have taken the time over the weekend to go back, and have a look at Rift one year after I got bored of it. Changing my password scored me three days of gametime, and I added the authenticator to my new phone. Besides, Rift is F2P up to level 20, called Rift Lite. When I played Rift previously, I was a Defiant. I do like their game story much better than the Guardians, but I also decided that I didn’t have it in me to do Freemarch one more time. So Guardian I went, picking a dwarf mage. In character generation, you get the first change of the game. Instead of just choosing your calling and then picking souls while questing, without really having a clue, you select an archetype, a calling purpose, as Rift calls it. In the case of mages, the four suggested builds are Necromancer, Chloromancer, Firemage or War-Wizard. You get specific information about the different builds and your main role. I randomly picked War-Wizard which is a Stormcaller/Pyromancer/Elementalist build. You get specific hints how to play that build, in my case build Electrified stacks, which proc to use, and what your main nukes are. It’s definitely very newbie-friendly. Every time you level, you get a clear suggestion what you should pick, and you can study all of the suggestions in advance, if that’s what you want to do. Of course you can still buy additional roles and then assign souls any way you want to, without sticking to the premade builds.

Suggestions on how to spend your soul points

The full build as Rift suggests it

As I leveled my way through Silverwood, I was struck with how well-polished Rift feels. I also felt the absence of features I have come to love in other games, like voice acting, or GW2′s public questing, but no matter what, playing Rift felt very polished. Of course you can’t compare Silverwood a year later with the frantic pace of frequent invasions in Freemarch a year ago, but I never felt that the zone was devoid of other players. I ran into quite a few different people, closed rifts together with others, and puttered along nicely. The rifts are now all soloable, so even if you are by your lonesome self, you can still take out a rift yourself. You might not get to the bonus stage, but you can definitely close rifts. Also, if an invasion has taken over a place you need to go, you learn an ability to get NPC reinforcements to destroy enemy idols. I also liked the addition of a channel that announced where invasion events were happening, including which event (for completionists) and in what zone. I feel Trion has thought of everything that would make lowbie leveling a pain, and improved on it. There are more planar gates for easier travel. Of course I still had my pre-order mount from last year, so traveling was no issue anyhow.

Speaking of my mount, I found that my mailbox was chock-full of goodies, veteran rewards. Trion has a program where you get rewards for subscribing a month, three, six and 12 months. Consumables that increase experience and favor for 2 hours, special gear, and a very handy vendor I can summon, etc. I had gotten up to the six months rewards, and if I subbed for another six months, I would earn the 12 months rewards. It’s a nice incentive because yeah, who doesn’t like free stuff?

I tried the two new professions they added to the game, fishing and survival. Not sure why they didn’t call survival cooking, but it goes hand-in-hand with fishing. I liked what I have seen of the fishing so far. It’s pretty much the same mechanism as in WoW, with a few twists. First off, there’s shallow and deep water fishing. You don’t need to equip your fishing pole, you just use it. You get a cursor that changes color based on where you’re fishing. Red means that won’t work, blue means you are fishing in shallow water and yellow means you are fishing in deep water. Different catches in each area. When the fish splashes, you click to reel it in, but sometimes, it takes longer, and you might have to click again. I don’t know, it probably sounds stupid, but that way alone I felt the fishing was more interactive than WoW fishing which I usually spent reading on my Kindle. You can craft lures and such that will prevent fishing up any grey items and improving your catch. There are schools of fish, when your cursor turns green, you are fishing from the school. They contain rare fish. You can turn in the rare fish at an NPC, to earn reputation or stuff. What stuff, I don’t know, I didn’t have the patience yet to fish up enough rares. In Silverwood, the turn-in rate was 8 rare fish per reward. Survival gives you a way to make stuff with all the fish you catch. Also, you can fish up artifacts, and I mentioned before, how much I love those.

The game feels subtly changed. I don’t know what they did, but the graphics looked a lot prettier than I had them memorized. Riding through Silverwood was just a lot of pretty sights, from lovely forest, to swamp to areas infested with bad faeries. It’s not Guild Wars 2 pretty, but it’s definitely not a bad-looking game. Ultimately, I had a great time playing my mage. She felt powerful, but it wasn’t faceroll-easy, and closing rifts is still fun. Unlike Belghast, I can’t complain about the 1-29 chat, people in there were friendly and polite. For reference, I was playing on the German PvE shard with the highest population, Brutmutter. In fact, I liked it so much that I want to keep playing and am debating putting down money for a month. Yet as I am currently not working, I feel very hesitant about it, and am actually considering dropping SWTOR to go back to Rift for a while. Just to see if I will like it enough to bother with the expansion. From what I have heard, you have tons of endgame options now. It sounds fascinating. I just don’t know yet. I’ll keep you posted.

So, any passionate Rift players reading this? It would be interesting to hear from Rift players about an assessment of the game. I have always felt it’s like the underdog of the MMO world, and yet Trion work so hard that they deserve more recognition for their work.

P.S.: Trion, I am not too happy that you are using the below image as major advertisement for your game. It reminds me that I dislike your female character models as much as the light armor in Guild Wars 2. Disappointed. Again.

Rift Expansion: The No Real Armor Legion

The joys of exploration in Rift

Last Updated on Friday, 15 April 2011 03:24 Written by Kadomi Monday, 11 April 2011 05:46

am currently playing two MMOs, WoW for the raiding bits and the occasional heroic, and Rift, for leisurely leveling and exploring. I am a huge advocate of Rift. I know that its critics find it’s too much of a WoW clone, and sometimes I am astounded how much they really snipped out from the juggernaut. When I explain how my Riftstalker works, it usually goes like this: “Imagine you could tank as a rogue, and you can use Shadowstep to get AoE threat on mobs, and you have like Mage Blink, and if you are a Bahmi you have something like Warrior Heroic Leap, and then you can set a marker and have the Warlock Teleport, how’s that for mobility?” So, it’s all stuff that has been done before, but packed together into a fun mix that I enjoy playing. Seriously, Riftstalkers make WoW prot warrior mobility seem like a joke. You can be everywhere and just zoom around. Fun!

Initially, my favorite part of Rift were the public groups for invasion and rift content. When you are used to playing WoW, where you can solo from 1-85 without ever actually seeing another person outside of Orgrimmar, it seemed breathtaking to me that you can suddenly end up in a 40-man raid full of level 12 characters, taking down a zone boss. I am now in the dreaded mid-level zones, and rifts are still fun, but seem a bit more small scale now. Still, good stuff, but not my absolutely favorite part of Rift anymore.

My favorite is that Rift rewards exploration. I can’t even remember when I last explored in WoW. The on rails experience really doesn’t offer much exploration potential, outside of discovering all spots on the zone map to get the zone achievements. Rift has those as well, of course, but they have more, beyond that. I’ve only worked on the first four zones so far, but so far I have found achievements that are truly for the adventurous. So far I have gotten two basejump achievements, one for jumping down a very high waterfall into a very shallow pool below. That took a while, I tell you. I have discovered weird pilgrim spots where squirrels dance, and you can join in with them. I have found underwater lamps you have to light without drowning, to unearth treasures. The latter was part of the zone puzzles. Every zone has a puzzle you can solve, and completing them will reward you with a chest with a scaling reward of either rare or epic quality for your class.

Speaking of rewards, diving around in lakes or scaling particularly high mountains offers a chance of finding so called ‘Ancient Cairns’. These also contain rewards for your current level or close to, and are well worth finding.

As further incentive, the mountaintops and any remote areas that are hard to get to seem to be teeming with artifact spawns. Artifacts are what WoW’s archaelogy probably should have been. I tried archaeology and found it was a pretty horrifying grind. Artifacts are sparkly bits that you put into collections, much like you might know from Zynga games. Don’t run screaming now, it’s actually fun. You pick them up as you play through zones. Completing collections scores you a currency to buy fun stuff, like cosmetic hats or non-combat pets. For some collections you also get books full of game lore for the zones. They all have some thematic impact on your quest zones, and of course there’s more achievements for them. Nothing makes me happier than scaling steep mountains and finding tons of sparklies up there. I was so proud the first time I made the climb from Freemarch to Stonefield across the mountains. You get great views too.

This would be one of those cosmetic rewards, a hat called Headache Maker:

It’s a bit of a return of that sense of wonder, where nothing is as eerily familiar as stuff is in WoW. When the Cataclysm patch dropped, I went exploring as well, and it was fun, but it really didn’t last very long. Seeing all the changes was awesome, but now it’s gone back to feeling lifeless, static. WoW could definitely learn to create more world events, so that people get incentive to roam. So far, in Rift it lasts for me. Especially as I have many zones to go still. Lots of stuff to do. And that’s why I currently love playing Rift.