Why don't more people play RIFT?

[Deleted]

I tried but stopped at level 5 or so.

[ro9ue]

I am no great fan of World of Warcraft. However, WoW is not an "EQ clone". They took many elements of EQ and modernized them, but the watershed of going from EQ/AC to WoW was great a jump as it was going from text MUDs to EQ. Which is what EQ was-- just one evolutionary step above a MUD.

Original EQ was as crude and clunky as the MUDs were of the era.

WoW may not be the most respectable MMO from a gameplay POV [gameplay is not opinion]. Though make no mistake, WoW is an important MMO all it's own. It has all but defined and dominated the genre in total since release.

That is not an EQ clone.

That is a watershed.

Yeah I agree with all of that. I think we are just all waiting for the next very large step in the genre... if there is any. EQ broke major ground when it was released. WoW was a huuuuge leap in a good direction. GW2 was like two small steps forward, but there hasn't been anything yet that just felt so much better to play that it was worth abandoning a 9 year investment in my WoW account.

I liked Rift, but upon hitting 50 you realize it's essentially the same end game as WoW: reps and point grinding for gear. When someone has the balls to change that end-game treadmill I think we'll see a new titan.

Maybe I'm just waiting for something that's never coming though. When you look at the original FPS games, I mean like Wolfenstein, and compare it to new FPS games, the only core difference is graphics. It's essentially the same stuff. So who knows, maybe EQ broke ground for a new genre, WoW polished it and all we will see in future MMOs is better graphics.

[thatguy181]

I play both WoW and Rift. I do my best to keep my MMO count to two

Primarily I play WoW simply because that's where my friends/guildies are. It may seem like a silly thing. But these are my friends, my guildies, my online family... Most of us have been together since EQ. Where the group as a whole decides to go, I will follow and continue to keep their sorry butts alive until they learn to get out of the fire (OK, not really, I let them die in the fire and heal them if they're smart enough to get out, but still).

That being said, I love Rift and certaily agree that there are a lot of things about it that I find more fun/superior to WoW. I think it's a great game and if my guild decided to switch to Rift, I'd be ready and willing to help powerlevel the lot of them... But for now, my guild plays WoW, so WoW gets the majority of my time because I'd rather play with them than without.

[Zogarth]

I quit because leveling is god awful. Maybe raiding is good in it, but if leveling is a major pain in the ass, and to be honest i feel like i have had enough of useless grind levels in my mmo's.

[Deleted]

For me at least, RIFT feels like what WoW was before the introduction of WotLK; like if you took the devs from that time and stuck them with another game.

There's your answer from me. WoW got a lot better since TBC.

[probert]

I think Rift is a better game than WoW at this point, mechanically and graphically. The lore is a bit shallow, mainly because there's no prior backstory.

My biggest issue with Rift now is the ongoing subscription, and the lifestyle commitment needed for raid progression. I have a subscription right now, but don't really play because its a game where you need to login regularly and stay with the gear grind.

F2P and a promulgation of MMO competition certainly hurt Rift's competition for eyeballs. I'm also finding I'm playing more and more games with easy in/easy out game modes that don't require the dedicated commitment I had years ago with WoW -- MechWarrior Online, World of Tanks, Planetside 2, Guild Wars 2... you can play several days in a row, then walk away for a month and not lose progress.

Gear incrementalism as a carrot via regular drops of content I think are the biggest thing that have to go away in MMOs at this point. I want to play a game because the game is *fun*.

[Veyne]

Honestly, I want to love Rift. I really do. I've played it off and on since launch, and I've probably spent more time since launch theory crafting potential builds than I have actually playing the game. For a game all about souls, the game just seems to lack a soul of its own. The lore and characters are just... uninspiring. The world feels like an empty shell. There is no identity for your class. Armor looks the same across the board for each parent class. A Paladin looks exactly like a Reaver. A Chloromancer looks exactly like a Pyromancer. And there are so many possible builds that the developers had to do a whole lot of homogenizing between souls so much that radically different builds essentially play identically to others with different spell effects.

[Maxilian]

I haven't played, but i do think it looks really good (actually what i like the most is the housing :P) but if i ever leave WoW i will play GW2 just because my brother and some friends play it, i don't know anyone who play Rift :S

[l33t]

Rift is cool, but lets look in truth's face: everything Rift has, WoW has either (in terms of raiding, ofc). And if we look at the things aside of raiding, what do we see:
+ Rift has an ubercool character clothing options, Wardrobe in Rift is so much better that any similar option I've seen in any MMO.
+ Rift has support classes, which is superb and gives so much options for raiding comp.
+ Fishing in Rift is also very good, but...
- Raids are kinda boring, because we've seen all this tactics in WoW lots of times.
- PvP sucks. PvP in WoW sucks also, yes
- Almost NO lore
- Big empty world with almost no reason to do world events, which are designed in a way they are almost impossible to complete solo.
- Races are pretty much generic. Elves are humans with pointy ears, dwarves are little humans etc. In total it looks like clone attack when you're in a crowd. Just like SWToR. In fact, gamedevs nowadays are too lazy to make every race unique like in WoW, they make same model for everyone and just give a small diversity like ears. Bad design overall.
- Armor is also pretty much generic, mail set looks like cloth set and vice versa. Of course, there is a wardrobe, but... but.
- Soul system in general is a bad design also. While in theory it looks like you can make a tank with decent heal abilities, in reality you can't. And, thus it doesn't differ much in core from talent system in WoW. I'd love to have a possibility to create over time an ubercharacter who can do everything because of years of training and lots of souls spent, but in fact with fixed talent points number all I can is go to forums and select a maximum effective build for my preferred role/class. Which is, as you can see, just the same as WoW had for years.
And that is just it.

[Vulpei]

I bought Rift. I played it until I hit max level. I did all the dungeons on the way through. I did a couple of the raids (though they were buggy as hell at the time). And at the end, I thought, why am I playing this instead of WoW? It is the same game, but I have already put hundreds of hours into WoW and I have a good guild there, why would I waste that for the same game that has a worse aesthetic?

You can't pull away people from WoW by making the same game, people have invested too much. If you try to, you have to release at the same quality WoW currently is, as the people I was playing with left when we kept hitting bugs.

I have never seen anything Rift related that makes me want to give it another shot. Everything I have seen from the world events to new raids is coloured by the shit state the game launched in. It isn't dead to me, but I have absolutely no interest in it, purely because WoW was better in every way when I played it at launch

[Frozenbeef]

My main reasons for not playing rift full time over wow is

1. Performance issues, especially during rifts.
2. storm legion changed something about conquest and made it more about capturing extractors rather than slaughtering oath and dominion
3. pvp gear being useless in pve...the best pvp gear you can get has the same stats as the green/blue gear you level up in except with the exception of having more valour and vengeance -.- if you want to be able to do casual pve dailies/rifts you need a separate pve set as the pvp will do hardly any damage.
4. Some classes are just way overboard on the power scale...
5. Lack of story/ enemies...you have the 6 bloodstorm dragons and their minions and that is it..especially considering players have killed each dragon at least once it doesn't really leave the story up for much progression :s
7. unless you raid it's a very very very very very very long grind of stones :S


However there are lots of great thigns that keep me coming back once in a while...

[bergmann620]

The thing that keeps me coming back to WoW, that I've never felt in another MMO, is the combination of rock-solid control and resource management. I feel like they made some mistakes over the years when it comes to changes they've made to resource systems and rotation vs priority queue gameplay styles, but my characters feel like they are in a good place right now.

Rift, much like EQ2 or TOR, has a nice bit of content, and lots of good ideas, but character control and combat has just never felt as good.

Also, and I'm not sure where Rift is at this point, but... UI Customization! I've been hooked from the moment I installed Cosmos in like 2004.

[Rampant Rabbit]

I understand it's just my opinion and everyone is different... but to me RIFT is such a superior game to WoW and other MMOs. I know people still play SWTOR, yet RIFT is obviously superior - sans Hutball.

For me at least, RIFT feels like what WoW was before the introduction of WotLK; like if you took the devs from that time and stuck them with another game. The raiding feels superior, the graphics are better... player housing is there, etc. The one lacking area is PvP, but for raiders I am not sure why the transition isn't made onto RIFT. Content patches are much more plentiful in RIFT as well.

That's just your opinion man. Other people will have other opinions.

[bergmann620]

I liked Rift, but upon hitting 50 you realize it's essentially the same end game as WoW: reps and point grinding for gear. When someone has the balls to change that end-game treadmill I think we'll see a new titan.

Maybe you hit the nail on the head

[Lathais]

That term REALLY annoys me. At the end of the day... WoW is an EQ clone.

WoW made a lot of changes to the genre, originally for the better. Playing WoW did not feel like playing EQ, especially at end game. Playing Rift(or most other MMOs on the market today) does feel a lot like WoW. Saying WoW-clone sums that up in a lot less words.

[Volitar]

It was too similar to WoW for me to want to play it and the lack of addons really did it.

[Fencers]

how is gameplay not oppinion?

It's an absolute.

I programmed this game such that pressing the A button causes a character to jump. I have designed the game such that jumping atop turtle heads yields a shiny coin.

That is gameplay. It is locked. It is definite. It is a hard fact of design.

My game couldn't function otherwise as I outlined.

Do you like jumping? Y/N? That is opinion.

[Orange Joe]

I don't play rift for a few reasons.

Background story: I don't know much about it and can't really be ass to look it up. I know wow's from other games and having played it for longer.
Leveling takes way to long. I want to play end game not leveling.


My only 2 real grips about the game.

[MrHappy]

because of the state endgame content is in

[Deleted]

I really liked rift but sadly none of my friends did, so i left because it felt boring and lonely.
The Music in this game is few leagues higher than the wow music, really liked the dungeons how hard they were. They were a lot harder than tbc dungeons in start. I loved the soulsystem, the rifts were fun, but yeah in the end you stick with your peers.