So, I hit the endgame in WoW and got bored again by all the PVE grinds and the fact that the PvP is still terrible. Found myself once more standing around in Orgrimmar for long periods doing nothing and browsing the web for any new MMOs on the horizon. And so I stumbled into Rift and I'm glad I did. I managed to get into the last few days of the open beta and was blown away. Stunning graphics, great gameplay and *very* polished and stable. I've become so jaded by endless mediocre MMO releases that I was surprised to find it gave me a feeling I've not had since my first days exploring DAOC and vanilla WoW. So I went with my gut feeling and subscribed. Currently in the headstart and really enjoying it.
Rift doesn't do anything particularly innovative, apart from a very flexible new class system that allows for all sorts of combinations. But what it does do is take all the best features from other MMOs and refines them, removes many of the annoyances and then adds its own dollop of graphical style and lore. I love the fae atmosphere of the early Guardian zones. People will compare it with WoW, but actually its ancestry appears to have more in common with DAOC, EQ and Warhammer. It has the graphics, UI and features of a modern MMO but has an old school atmosphere.
The public quests are a central part of the game. On one end of the scale you can join anyones public group to complete a quest and actually get boosted xps (so no kill stealing or queueing for quest npcs). At the other end of the scale there's huge public quests to battle the biggest of the rifts, which despite the huge numbers of mobs and players involved doesn't cause any lag (in itself a huge achievement). When an invasion by one of the eight enemy factions happens, the PVE world becomes very dynamic with quest hubs and even towns getting overrun by mobs. Players need to band together to beat the invasion back and there's incentives to do so. The game naturally draws players together without feeling forced and rewards you for doing so, but you can hop in and out of public groups as you wish.
Instances I've seen so far are very impressive and the PvP is a lot of fun. If you're on a PVE server you can do warfronts which are like Warhammer scenarios. Perhaps the PvP will become more hardcore as it inevitably does, but while everyone is a noob it's been great fun.
The class system is impressive. You choose a base class (warrior, rogue, cleric, mage) and then select up to three souls (talent trees) from a list of eight. Some souls are tanky, some healer, some dps, some crowd control. So you put together the type of toon that suits. You can have tanking clerics, healing rogues (bards) and mages, warriors with ranged attacks and even tanking rogues (I've seen rogues main tanking instances). It means there's no true cookie cutter specs, which makes PvP much less rock paper scissor as you can imagine. You can gain access to all eight souls per class via questing and then create multiple combos (roles) which you can switch between easily while in the field. It's like WoW's second spec, but on steroids.
I can't vouch for how the endgame will be, but everything else is so polished it shows promise. They seem to have got the core game right, which should mean less firefighting and more adding new content and features. Of course, it's a MMO and so some form of endgame grind is inevitable.
If anyone is thinking of giving it a try, it lauches on Friday I think, but you might still be able to pre-order and get in the headstart. I'm on the Argent PVE-RP server (as RP servers tend to have a maturer community), Guardian side (cos they have the only midget race), playing a dwarf bard called Cern. There's also PvP servers, but these function the same as in WoW so probably best avoided. They are talking about adding some RvR zones to all server types if players want it (and there's a lot who do). Hope so.
Perhaps catch you there?