Crone
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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I guess I'm one of the few that never appreciated wows humor and it sure as shit didn't make quest grinding any better.
Rift: Planes of Telara
- Thread starter Zantox_sl
- Start date
Ambiturner
Ssraeszha Raider
- 16,040
- 19,501
So I just got Rift: Storm Legion and 30 days for free thanks to a promotion Raptr(http://raptr.com) is having. If you play the game for more than 12 hours or have a steam account that has logged more than that amount, you can get all kinds of free things(shoulders/helm/expac/game time).
Is Storm Legion worth it?
I want to play Rift but not if it's dying(I did like it quite a bit).
Is Storm Legion worth it?
I want to play Rift but not if it's dying(I did like it quite a bit).
Well shit that's disappointing. :/ It's the only game since FF11 that made me feel as if the world was an actual world.
As a person who's got a lot of time into this game, I wouldn't. With the expansion, they managed to turn a good game into a shitty grind fest. It's just not fun. There's not as much to do at max level as there was previous to the expansion, which is stupid.
It's like they took everything good they did with rift original, and threw it away and went with grinds foreverything. Reputation grinds, double rep grinds in some cases, and other grinds. They nerfed gear badges and pvp gain significantly via different methods to make those grinds even worse too.
There was even a way to do old dungeons at lvl 60, where you could get maybe 1 PA point every 3-4 runs via old dungeon badges. They decided this was way too OP and nerfed the shit out of old dungeon badges, now the old dungeons are ghost towns, just a stupid decision all around. Repeat this kind of decision making all over the place.
They added a new feature like a invasion/defense thing forgot what it's called, they had mobs spawning at an insane rate out of these invasion/defend events at release which was awesome and a lot of fun. They significantly decreased the spawn rate to horribly boring because some people, god forbid, were using it to level up.
Even their content updates have been mediocre and infrequent since the expansion release, definitely not worth $15 a month. If you've been subscribed since November and paid for the expansion, that's $130 you've spent for the expansion plus a couple shitty patches.
They had some great ideas that made it a unique game that was better than WoW in many aspects, but they threw all those unique good things away and decided rep grinds and harder treadmills were the best thing to implement. This kind of decision making fits with their company strategy though, leveraging their rift original success on 3 new unproven mmos and failing horribly.
I wonder if Scott was forced out or left voluntarily? Its easy to assume that he probably resisted or disagreed with these changes, but then again, he was at the helm for the development of Storm Legion..
At any rate, excessive rep/badge/point/honor/etc grind is the easiest way to kill an otherwise good game. For shame.
At any rate, excessive rep/badge/point/honor/etc grind is the easiest way to kill an otherwise good game. For shame.
This.
Rift pre-SL was a great niche MMO to tool around in every couple of months.
Rift post-SL is a blatant cash-grab and bore-fest. It's like Trion went out of their way to ruin their own game.
Scott was party to a lot of the decisions that made rift a bad game. Making him into some white knight who tried to resist is pretty laughable. It is pretty clear what he likes in games if you watch how he handled EQ2 and then rift. Both games suffered from many of the same problems. Rift obviously is a far better game than EQ2 and scott is a far better designer than the original devs but he definitely isn't the golden child.
The game always seemed to lack a real cohesive vision. I really enjoyed the launch and first 6 months up until I burned out on Hammerknell, which IMO was the point where they started designing just to slow people down and not trying to make the game actually fun.
bixxby
Molten Core Raider
- 2,750
- 47
ehhhhhh, rift is a much, much shittier wow. EQ2 at least had feeling like a different game going for it.
Not trying to white knight Scott, just questioning what his role was into turning the game for the worse. I myself never bought Storm Legion, though I did enjoy launch + 4 or 5 months for what it was. I always thought it was a shame that Trion's very capable dynamic server technology was so underutilized and instead the game relied so heavily on traditional grind mechanics, a design choice they seem to have embraced with even more zeal since the xpac it seems.
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As someone who hit the expansion long and hard, I agree with the above posts. It was a bit neat at first, but I just couldn't believe how *grindy* they made it. Just a few case in points:
They took faction grinds to a new level. Daily quests would normally give say 250 or 500 a turn in, now do 75.
Puzzles pre expansion were an awesome sidetrack to do! Not so much in the expansion. I spent probably 30 hours in one zone alone trying to get all the artifacts just to allow me to do the puzzle. Never finished it.
PvP gear turned super grindy, and the stats were worse than dungeon gear. (To be honest here, I don't know how to balance meaningful gear progression while keeping pvp fair).
Raids were buggy as shit and remained that way. I remember wiping like 20 times on the last boss of the tower...thingy... 10 man zone. Turns out her 'fire' graphics you need to stay out of were bugged, and stayed that way for months.
They took faction grinds to a new level. Daily quests would normally give say 250 or 500 a turn in, now do 75.
Puzzles pre expansion were an awesome sidetrack to do! Not so much in the expansion. I spent probably 30 hours in one zone alone trying to get all the artifacts just to allow me to do the puzzle. Never finished it.
PvP gear turned super grindy, and the stats were worse than dungeon gear. (To be honest here, I don't know how to balance meaningful gear progression while keeping pvp fair).
Raids were buggy as shit and remained that way. I remember wiping like 20 times on the last boss of the tower...thingy... 10 man zone. Turns out her 'fire' graphics you need to stay out of were bugged, and stayed that way for months.
notafunhater
N00b
- 226
- 0
Echoing the above. Vanilla Rift was fun. SL was interesting . . . until you hit 60. Then it was just grind, grind, and more grind, and if you didn't hit it all early you got shafted after they nerfed everything. Counting my lucky stars that I didn't buy the year sub with everyone else. I know a bunch of people that did and are on the hook for 6-8 months of already paid time.
And the road to 60 is only mildly interesting. It feels longer than it needs to be, and as a Cleric I felt like I didn't really get any fun new abilities while leveling up. In fact, some of the abilities I unlocked were just replacements for abilities I already had (though the older abilities were repurposed in a later patch, thankfully). I enjoyed the new continents at first too; they felt more "real" than most of the old world stuff (excluding Ember Isle, which is just fantastically designed), and while I still feel that's true it doesn't make them good. It basically feels like someone took the rock-equivalent of SpeedTree and swept over the new continents a few times, which made traversal a complete pain until they removed fall damage and added some more ports. Travel is bearable now, but you're still left with the grind. It's a game I'll go back to every now and then, but don't play it with the idea of committing to it unless you have a lot of friends already playing.
That's how the game was for me BEFORE SL. I came back every few months to play for a month or so, or until I got bored, etc. Now, I'll never step foot in Telara unless it's a free weekend, but even then, I have no desire to ever play again.
And yeah, played a cleric hard and seeing the changes and "bug fixes" they made to the calling was fucking retarded. Defiler is so fucking lame after the "fix". Also, wtf with warriors getting a ranged class? Why not do something interesting, like Herald of Xotli from AoC...
Class design was always the game's weakness imo, except for the mage classes and vanilla Clerics.
Ninja edit: The class system is a good one, but the actual class design is very dull and seems like they didn't feel like putting the effort into making many synergies.
Ninja edit: The class system is a good one, but the actual class design is very dull and seems like they didn't feel like putting the effort into making many synergies.
Caeden
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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- 11,961
Rift felt very bland to me. I think I hit 50 and quit. I played a warrior and I recall just spamming literally two buttons which were macros. They always seemed on the precipice of cool and bloat. I only got a cleric about halfway up before quitting but I remember that being a lot more fun.
I think I was the only warrior in a guild full of old EQ'ers going OMG BARDS! It was me and four ukulele's versus the world!
I think I was the only warrior in a guild full of old EQ'ers going OMG BARDS! It was me and four ukulele's versus the world!