Why did Rift fail?

Hateyou · Dec 2, 2013

Nija_sl said:
I didn't play because I played a Bard in beta and they nerfed the everloving shit out of that class before launch. Over-reaction like that really puts me off.

I didn't play until release day, and was so excited to play a rogue that could dps or tank or bard, I like well done bards. This bard was the fucking worst and it really was just so disappointing. Tanking was fun as hell as a rogue but no one was very good at it so most people wouldn't even give you a shot. It was fun when they did and you surprised them/got comments though.

That didn't make up for how utterly terrible the bard was in this game though. For shame Trion

Grim1 · Dec 2, 2013

Depends on what you call failure. It was, and is a financial success, much more so than the vast majority of mmos. Especially since TRION managed their costs much better than EA did with Star Wars.

shabushabu · Dec 2, 2013

Its sad when we judge games based on "how well they managed their $$" and now hot good the damn game was. I liked RIFT, just felt there was not enough of it.

Grim1 · Dec 2, 2013

Well, the kind of failure you are talking about is subjective though. ALL mmos have failed on that metric. I don't like WoW, so by your rules it is a failure. But I would never call it that.

But the question of why we don't play Rift is a good one. For me it's because it's just like all the others.

an accordion_sl · Dec 2, 2013

Draegan_sl said:
Out of that whole post you saying "exact same bag system" made me laugh. Damn trion for copying their bag system!

Only mentioned it because it was one of the first things I noticed during alpha. There's really no justification for doing the exact same system as WoW other than "because WoW did it". There are so many better ways to go about inventory management, but they took the lazy path, just like the majority of the game.

shabushabu · Dec 2, 2013

Grim1_sl said:
Well, the kind of failure you are talking about is subjective though. ALL mmos have failed on that metric. I don't like WoW, so by your rules it is a failure. But I would never call it that.

But the question of why we don't play Rift is a good one. For me it's because it's just like all the others.

I agree that is the question we should be asking ! This is such a troll i feel but I am going to download and run around a bit. So whoever started this, ya got me.

Vulg · Dec 2, 2013

I can only speak to my own reasons for quitting a few months after release:

- Game engine was mediocre at best; first time I rode my CE turtle it felt like I was gliding over the landscape
- A couple of macros completely trivialized my 'rotation'
- Nothing innovative enough to hook me in long term (i.e. instance/raid encounters were tired, game systems were tired etc.)

Rogosh · Dec 2, 2013

Big W Powah!_sl said:
Rift failed for the same reason Vanguard failed; At the last minute, they went back on their shit and made it a quest-grind WoW clone. Rift in beta, while the core systems were the same, as much more about fighting off invading planar forces. I did all of like 4 quests outside the tutorial in Rift beta, the rest I went rift/invasion hopping.

Little Timmy Casual bitched about not being able to complete his quests and Hartsman & Co. caved. Fuck them for it. I don't know about rift in its current state, but seriously, fuck Trion for what it became on release day. I know Scott used to frequent these boards, and probably still lurks. To him I say; This isn't a shot at you or your company directly, just a passionate fan disappointed in what happened. I had huge hopes, and was let down. So much so I barely made level 30. I can safely say that Rift had the biggest potential of the games released recently.

Completely agree, as someone who raided heavily in Rift and did its pvp grind to rank 8 and then rank 50, the game had alot of promise up through Hammerknell. It fell apart after the fact as they kept adding more and more dailies. I would love for a game to go away from this trend of daily quests and quest hubs. Rift during beta was fun as shit, briarcliff pvp and rift hopping made the game great.

Itzena_sl · Dec 2, 2013

sunhillow_sl said:
A few things: I am in the middle when it comes to difficulty. I played EQ at release and I never felt I deserved any loot other than what was won (Eternal Wrath SKs, I'm looking at you) but I hated waiting hours for a rare to spawn just to get a key piece. With that said, I do appreciate some of the relaxed mechanics that have been adopted. I don't have as much free time as I used to. I didn't play Rift at release, I was too absorbed in WoW at that moment. But now I am having a lot of fun with this game that I somehow missed on realese. So ...

What happened? The game has great graphics, it seems to cater to the WoW crowd and EQ2 crowd (my wife loves player housing). Was it not like its current state on release? It has rare nameds, collection nodes, random world events, housing and the main story is well written.

I'm not a schill I am just genuinely curious. It seems like whoever developed this game hit all the high marks* but was unable to attract enough players to maintain a monthly fee. What gives?

* EQ was my first MMO so I am only judging things by what the market has become, not what it was when I started MMOs.

It was a TBC-era WoW clone launched during Cataclysm. The jury will note exhibit A, the hurriedly-patched-in dungeon finder tool, which was only added when the playerbase collectively went "Nope, not gonna spam a LFG channel. Fix this shit or we walk".

For further evidence, see the stupid level of tuning for instances (again hurriedly nerfed to acceptable levels) and so on.

Jais · Dec 2, 2013

Didn't Rift have like 7 dungeons and the most linear lvling/quest path ever? Think I quit pretty quickly after getting lvl 50.

Ancallagon · Dec 2, 2013

Jais_sl said:
Didn't Rift have like 7 dungeons and the most linear lvling/quest path ever? Think I quit pretty quickly after getting lvl 50.

That was a big part of the lack of staying power for me - the dungeons were good (great at start with the difficulty imo), but the leveling path was so linear, up until the last two zones, which you could sorta skip one or the other. I'm a bit of an alt-o-holic, and with only four classes I was like "Sweet, this'll be easy to get one of each to 50 and be able to play with all the awesome souls and whatnot!" Nope. Never got more than one class to max cause it was ridiculously repetitive.

bixxby · Dec 2, 2013

Here is rift for me: Hit cap in like 10-20 days. Farm some dungeons. Oh hey, this is literally Warcraft that runs like shit, and my entire dps rotation is pressing 1 and 2 until my wrist hurts. Fuck that, and fuck them. Game is/was/always will be a shitabyss.

Jx3 · Dec 2, 2013

Big thing for me was the repetitiveness of it. I liked the game, bought the game when it came out and it just seemed like WoW lite. I have a lot of time invested in WoW, why play something thats the same thing but runs shittier?

Noodleface · Dec 2, 2013

I liked the thought of Rift but hated the execution. I thought the graphics were nice, setting seemed cool, had an interesting back story, but that's it. When you got down to it, it was WoW again. Literally almost everything from WoW was copied. The cherry on top for me was the class system. They tried to do something different, and I understand and appreciate that, but in the end it was a bunch of min-max builds just like in WoW.

Also, I hate the idea of four base classes and then expanding. It reminded me of launch EQ2 and it made me angry. Just start out with 16 or whatever classes and do that, don't do all this multi-layer convoluted shit. If the classes were split correctly I probably would've given it more of a chance.. just seemed lame.

Pinadil · Dec 2, 2013

I was another casualty of Hammerknell, though I can't define what made it so tedious. In the open world, I really enjoyed that you could climb all the terrain and be rewarded with puzzles or hard to reach artifact collections. Has any other game had ground spawn collections like Rift? It really scratched my OCD.

Kedwyn · Dec 2, 2013

Failed for me because it was what? A hard core weekend to max? Then another day to get gear and we started raiding whatever it was called and had most of it killed inside the head start week. All that was left was a horrendous faction grind for minimal rewards and world PVP which was laughable.

Add to that it was mostly a straight copy for WoW in many areas and why was I paying to play this again?

The class system, its only unique addition, got so watered down over development it just wasn't worth playing for it.

Pyros · Dec 2, 2013

Personally I think the biggest failure was splitting people in factions and in classes. Factions is the usual wow shit it's pointless as fuck and just half your potential community only to alleviate server load in the starting weeks(for wow the initial idea was somewhat different but pretty sure that's why they do it now in games) and classes splitting kinda ruined the system of souls and shit. No classes, quest obtained souls(and by quest I don't mean collecting bear asses), add new souls every now and then, I think I'd have played longer that way. And yeah was mentionned, too many token grind systems.

Troll_sl · Dec 2, 2013

The world was boring. The new gameplay ideas were boring. It was boring.

Dandai · Dec 3, 2013

I played Rift pretty hardcore for the first 10 or so months of release. I absolutely loved the difficulty of the heroic dungeons at release. You needed to play with quality players, and you quickly identified who those people were. I've still got friends I chat with that I met running heroics in Rift. Also, I was at the world first Akylios kill (Voodoo) and really enjoyed the difficulty of Hammerknell.

The raid/dungeon devs asked us to help them test their new 10 man raid (the fire one, I don't remember the name), and it was alright, but this was the first raid in 4-5 months. It dawned on me that there wasn't going to be another HK for a long, long time. When they added Ember Isle and expanded the AA system, I just couldn't fathom enjoying 6 more months of HK and grinding the ridiculously expensive (at the time) AAs.

I always told myself I'd go back and check out the expansion, but everything I read said they essentially doubled down on the Ember Isle experience, so I passed on even reinstalling the game.

Araysar · Dec 3, 2013

Rift and Ever Jane should combine forces.

Why did Rift fail?

Not Great, Not Terrible

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