Rift: Planes of Telara

Draegan_sl said:

From what I heard, they changed around when Hartsman came on board. Things I know the game was shooting for when the game was Heroes of Telara, or at least this is what I've heard and pieced together from different sources. This isn't gospel.:
1. There were no factions at all.
2. There were no classes. Essentially everyone could use any soul. Souls were "looted" items that you gained as you adventured. Kind of like a card collection game.
3. Dynamic content was essentially shit would take over zones, build cities and destroy environments. "rifts" would really fight each other. There was some crazy shit they could do.

What they ripped out:
1. Added factions, because, and I quote since I was at the press meeting, "People like factions and recognize them."
2. Took out real dynamic content because, and I quote since I was at the press meeting, "When someone told a friend some awesome happened 'over there,' and that friend logged on it was gone made for a disappointing game session."

They essentially took an interesting design doc and made it WOW with scripted rift events.

Sad.

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That's really depressing to read. Stuff like the features they gutted are the ideas that might eventually move the genre forward again after a decade of standing still.

The only thing I remember from Rift that really stuck with me was the open world rift raids + random pvp fights in the desert early in release. No idea what the area was called now but those fights were fun. It made the pvp meaningful and the pve more exciting. Then everyone realized it was a pointless waste of time because you got better loot pretty much anywhere else. Meh.

I agree that every game since WoW has been a disappointment. I can list the truly original MMOs I've played on one hand and none of them are current gen. EQ, Asherons Call (fucking awesome game in it's prime), DAOC, EVE, WoW....and that's it. There's a few others that are/were good time wasters but not games to really dedicate yourself to. I'm honestly kind of surprised WoW is still doing so incredibly well. Personally I can't even stomach the idea of clicking another yellow exclamation point. I've had my fill of WoW and it's clones. I also know I'm not the only person that won't touch new MMOs with a 10 foot pole until at least 30 days have passed since release and people are still excited. The few that I've given a shot (Warhammer, GW2, SWTOR) ended up being steaming piles of crap that I wish I hadn't spent money on.

Maybe someone will come along and figure it out. We shouldn't be stuck doing EQ raids with training wheels 15 years later.

edit: had to add DAOC to the list, realm pvp was fun for quite awhile. maybe just cause I played alb though haha

Not really funny. Plus the image is too big and the font/style is terrible.

Draegan_sl said:

Not really funny. Plus the image is too big and the font/style is terrible.

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Get with the times, man. The world loves pictures with silly captions and they absolutely must be shared with everybody

That would have been a MUCH more interesting game. I'd probably still be playing that game.

I suspect it also would have been a less popular game. I was only in a few guilds guardian side but most of those guys, easily the majority, WERE wow-burnouts that came to rift because they were tired the same old shit in WoW. Although I'm pretty sure some of them left because wow was too hard.

Jesus there were some bad players in those guilds.

Draegan_sl said:

Well to be fair, that described almost every WOW expansion that didn't have keys or artificially gated content.

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But see that's the whole point. When you already have a cushion of lets say, a few million subs, you can get away with stuff like that because most of those subs are going to stick with the game no matter what you churn out. When your starting from 0 (ala Rift) and churning out WoW knockoff xx.xx, you're going to bleed subs to the point of being irrelevant.

Draegan_sl said:

From what I heard, they changed around when Hartsman came on board. Things I know the game was shooting for when the game was Heroes of Telara, or at least this is what I've heard and pieced together from different sources. This isn't gospel.:
1. There were no factions at all.
2. There were no classes. Essentially everyone could use any soul. Souls were "looted" items that you gained as you adventured. Kind of like a card collection game.
3. Dynamic content was essentially shit would take over zones, build cities and destroy environments. "rifts" would really fight each other. There was some crazy shit they could do.

What they ripped out:
1. Added factions, because, and I quote since I was at the press meeting, "People like factions and recognize them."
2. Took out real dynamic content because, and I quote since I was at the press meeting, "When someone told a friend some awesome happened 'over there,' and that friend logged on it was gone made for a disappointing game session."

They essentially took an interesting design doc and made it WOW with scripted rift events.

Sad.

Click to expand...

Draegan: Every time I have read you saying something to this effect ( over on foh and here ) it kills me to think about... what could have been. I have thought often about those statements more specifically the Dynamic Content strip out...

why not make this
"When someone told a friend some awesome happened 'over there,' and that friend logged on it was gone made for a disappointing game session."

turn in to this:
My friend told me about this crazy event that happened in some village... so i went to village to check it out, and now it is run by goblins. WTF ??

maybe they couldn't build that but, shit they were nearly there but couldn't / wouldn't see it... Maybe RIFT will go somewhere good now that hartsman is gone ?

For what it's worth, a lot of the notoriety bumps from quests were increased. I believe they also introduced some lower tier faction rewards so that it's not capped faction or you don't get shit. Also, there is at least one thing to gain from PVP: the BIS trinket by a long shot. :b

I quit right before the you did but have been playing again recently. I do think the grind is dumb at times and the price for fun stuff like the carnival prizes is high considering how boring the mini-games can be, but I'm always hesitant about saying "a lot of people" will do something because of a post on the forums, considering the audience of people that actually posts on message boards (not to say that their complaints are unjustified mind you).

I never like the planar token grind. Inscribed sourcestone etc, back in the day. You either had to do raid rifts or just pray a few zone events popped off, but then you still needed a bunch.

Draegan_sl said:

I never like the planar token grind. Inscribed sourcestone etc, back in the day. You either had to do raid rifts or just pray a few zone events popped off, but then you still needed a bunch.

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At least for now, it's pretty easy, albeit boring to grind out the currency for that stuff thanks to cross-server events. I will scream if the costs for the next tier of gear are balanced around the idea that people will go out and farm every event on every server possible, though. At the moment I don't really need to farm the stuff since Expert dungeon gear is fine, though some IS-bought pieces are better.

Draegan_sl said:

What they ripped out:
1. Added factions, because, and I quote since I was at the press meeting, "People like factions and recognize them."
2. Took out real dynamic content because, and I quote since I was at the press meeting, "When someone told a friend some awesome happened 'over there,' and that friend logged on it was gone made for a disappointing game session."

They essentially took an interesting design doc and made it WOW with scripted rift events.

Sad.

Click to expand...

Ugh, were you standing there listening and suppressing the urge to just yell "Noooo you're gonna fuck it up, try something different!", I know reading that I would have been. Hard coded factions are ass, when we have a near perfect implementation in the original EQ, all those years ago based around reputation and the ability to change it through hard work and with consequences.

the problem is the project managers see all these metrics that convince them the best way to make money is to put in stuff that gets people to login frequently, but not play for long. So all the grind shit "seems" to work because everyone grinds grinds grinds when a new xpac/game launches, but what all the data points don't show is that people get more and more sick of it and eventually just say fuck-this-shit and stop playing. Some anyways, some ADHD people (like me) can grind shit for months at a time without batting an eye or feeling bad. R14 wow, R12 (whatever the top was) vanilla rift, never got around to grinding it out in TERA though.

On the flip side some of you have ridiculous ideas, many (most?) MMO players are essentially social rejects who are potheads, unemployed or housewives, 14 year old Timmys, bored always-at-home students, etc - the dregs of society. They have no ability or desire to improve, they just want the serotonin high of getting shiny stuff in a virtual world every so often. You have to design a game that appeals to the power player, the "normal" person who plays when they have free time and don't care about sub fees, and the gollums of the world who are the bread and butter of sub and microtransactions.

Sylverlokk_sl said:

Ugh, were you standing there listening and suppressing the urge to just yell "Noooo you're gonna fuck it up, try something different!", I know reading that I would have been. Hard coded factions are ass, when we have a near perfect implementation in the original EQ, all those years ago based around reputation and the ability to change it through hard work and with consequences.

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Well in their defense there was not a well made wow clone to date that launched. Everything else was crap, Rift was and is the only only clone that was good at launch and was successful. It just didn't live up to the potential imo.

Draegan_sl said:

I never like the planar token grind. Inscribed sourcestone etc, back in the day. You either had to do raid rifts or just pray a few zone events popped off, but then you still needed a bunch.

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My biggest complaints about being 60 so far is the sheer number of infinity stones you need for gear and the small amount of rep you get from the ashora/steppes dailies, like 1200-1500 a day, when the last tier needs 60k alone iirc?


also dps queue times for randoms are the worst ever.

Don't forget you can do instant adventures in those zones to get rep too.

RobXIII_sl said:

When the expansion hit, I gave it an honest try. 2 characters to 60, eventually, thanks to bugged storyline quests halting progression slowing me down, and 2+ week GM wait times.

I even did a few raids. I gave up on PvP though, there was literally nothing to gain from it, the stats on the gear was a complete joke even compared to dungeon gear.

Then they multiplied the grind: overpriced items, stupid slow faction gain (+75 instead of say +300 for quests). Conquest points actually doing a reverse treadmill and decaying if you take a break. It just adds up.

I quit right after Xmas, but still follow the boards. A lot of people were looking forward to the latest in game event(Carnival of the Ascended), but then some genius decided to make THAT super grindy as well. It'll probably be the last straw for a lot of people:

http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-gene...verprized.html

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I tried the same but the game was just as much junk as it was before if not worse. Raids had bugs left and right which combined with a bad population of watered down raiders was like driving to the GD make a wish to raid.