Rift Beta.. comments and screenshots

[sicness]

You're right, eventually it will boil down to Raiding, dailies and so on. I suspect that that is the fate of all MMORPGs until someone reinvents the genre. But for a while Rift will be fresh, and given how promising it looks that could be a good while. It's a gamble I know but to have an MMO so well developed at launch, well let's just say I am optomistic. Only time will tell.

ArthurDent posted this which he found on the Rift forums, and it explains it quite well I think how a lot of people feel:

I'm trying to feel optimistic about it as much as I can, but the more I see that they tried to make so many aspects of it like WoW instead of doing their own thing it really concerns me. No MMO has ever done it to this level, furthermore going out of their way to obviously make it seem like they want to compete with WoW. There's a reason they haven't though, it's not necessarily the smartest move in the world. I hope it does well, even if I'm not interested in it at all, as I'm a huge MMO fan in general and would love to see another 1 million subs contender to not only have Blizzard step up their game plan a bit but all other MMOs as well. I just can't get myself past the fact that they seem to have squandered so much that they could have done with this game in order to appeal to WoW players. So far it looks like a great game, but thinking about what it could be if they just ignored WoW completely really disappoints me.

I'm going to keep track of this game for a while, even after it's initial release to see how it does and see how much interest I could actually have in it. If raiding is as amazing as they're making it out to be then I'll force myself to level through the questing content that I can't stand to get past 20 in and try my luck with end game content. But I'll probably end up waiting a month or so after it's release until deciding that.

[Hakto]

http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/pos...g-And-You.html


The more we see of Trion’s upcoming MMO RIFT , the more intrigued we become. Our resident MMO connoisseur Leah Jackson is particularly excited about the game, and is now even more so after having spent some time checking out Rift’s end game raiding system. I can’t say I blame her, though, because the raid balancing is rather unique and is designed specifically to push players to work together:

"The more people who are helping, the harder the encounter becomes. The way the developers have combated griefing and ninjalooting is that only the people in the group that opened the Rift will receive proper loot, whereas the helpers will just receive some tokens and cash. It’s a refreshingly original concept that lends itself to a lot of cooperative play, as well as a fun end game experience."



So it doesn't matter how many people help.. it'll just increase in difficulty to cover it... They can participate.. but it doesn;t seem to be able to be exploited or griefed.

Have you considered a 10 man guild combating this 'instanced' Rift.

They battle through the waves of minions and demi bosses, faltering but never wilting.

Finally after what seems days of endless battle, they have the giant beast on his knees and they prepare to deliver the death blow that will vault their little band of souls into the annuls of history.

Suddenly a horde of guardians flank the little band of defiants and slay them from the flanks.

The above is one of the issues I have with this 10 man concept.

10 man guilds are generally smaller, sometimes more casual than larger guilds and while the concept of an outdoor type boss for the smaller raids may be appealing, you can bet your bottom dollar opposing pvp based guilds will do all they can to grief these raids.

I watched the video of gm super power showing us the first raid zones.

I've seen many a comment that people are going to Rift because they are tired of recycled content and the boring recycled encounters that they get in wow.

So off you go level to 50 and fight your way through many dungeons to finally earn the right to face your first end boss.

What do you find?

A dragon, that breathes fire, cleaves and tail swipes, summons adds (many whelps handle it) then at approx 60% takes off into the air to fight you from above and summons more adds (Onyxia casts Deep Breath).

You are indeed correct, this is all very new and refreshing and nothing like we've ever seen before.

[sicness]

Hakto, from my observations it's mostly the actual way they intend to implement this content rather than the encounter design that people are finding so intriguing. Which I can't say I completely agree with but I do understand because it's different than what most people have seen before, such as bosses scaling with the amount of people who are actually attacking him. We'll just have to see if it's worth implementing in that manner, unfortunately though we'll have to wait a good month or so into the game to find out I imagine.

[Deleted]

http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/pos...g-And-You.html


The more we see of Trion’s upcoming MMO RIFT , the more intrigued we become. Our resident MMO connoisseur Leah Jackson is particularly excited about the game, and is now even more so after having spent some time checking out Rift’s end game raiding system. I can’t say I blame her, though, because the raid balancing is rather unique and is designed specifically to push players to work together:

"The more people who are helping, the harder the encounter becomes. The way the developers have combated griefing and ninjalooting is that only the people in the group that opened the Rift will receive proper loot, whereas the helpers will just receive some tokens and cash. It’s a refreshingly original concept that lends itself to a lot of cooperative play, as well as a fun end game experience."



So it doesn't matter how many people help.. it'll just increase in difficulty to cover it... They can participate.. but it doesn;t seem to be able to be exploited or griefed.

Well, i see a lot of grieving potential there, if the scaling of the bosses is to strong with the number of players. And if the scaling is to weak, then it seems that it can easily be exploited or outnumberd.
I don't really think that it will work out as they think.

[AuthurDent]

A dragon, that breathes fire, cleaves and tail swipes, summons adds (many whelps handle it) then at approx 60% takes off into the air to fight you from above and summons more adds (Onyxia casts Deep Breath).

You are indeed correct, this is all very new and refreshing and nothing like we've ever seen before.

You DO know you just described Nefarion Fight right? an end raid boss designed 7 years into WoW's lifetime? And in "The Great Cataclysm" no less? LOL

Of COURSE there are a LOT of similarities... but we're not bored of the MMO genre.. we are bored with WoW's perspective of it.

Then there are plenty of differences.. which you are full aware of but want to simply deny. No need to rehash them again and again.

Bottom line is...

The new sneak peak video came out... and the Trolls are coming out of the woodwork because they see something exciting... and have to go back to Azeroth and pretend they are paying attention. Have fun. Look we get it you wanna stick with WoW.. Awesome.. we're so happy that you can enjoy it.

But we have better things to entertain ourselves with now. And in a few short days.. you won't have any threads to Troll... and you can go back to the QQFest that is the WoW Forums

Oh in case you missed it...

http://www.g4tv.com/videos/51369/Rif...ne/?quality=hd

---------- Post added 2011-02-19 at 05:48 PM ----------

Well, i see a lot of grieving potential there, if the scaling of the bosses is to strong with the number of players. And if the scaling is to weak, then it seems that it can easily be exploited or outnumberd.
I don't really think that it will work out as they think.

You don't reckon they thought about that right? I mean it NEVER crossed their minds and they haven;t designed it in such a way that it is a positive experience and free of griefing?

[godofslack]

Almost sounds like you're talking sense! Quick, say something outrageous about how WoW will crush Rift [COLOR="red"]

I've never actually said WoW is better, or worse. Some of my problems with the game are recent changes, being the racials, the removal of rift supremacy (when rifts control the zone). Those are easy to fix, but the issues that make me question Rift, are the lack of any real creativity combat wise, the lack luster questing, lack of a dungeon finder, how gear is the same for every class, for example, all clerics use wisdom based mail, causing there to be a lack of individuality in players, the limited amount of "flightpaths", the overly linear questing experience, and the entire graphics style. It, in my opinion, falls into the same traps that Wrath (pre-ICC) did, which makes sense as most of the development probably happened at that time.

[The Jackal]

Keep in mind these are Death Rift's so the theme is the same this is me and a few others realizing we were about to get owned because we didn't have enough people. I quickly snapped a screen shot before the boss started to own all of us luz.

http://i51.tinypic.com/4jntps.jpg

full picture

Down below we are actually not doing that bad, usually different rift theme's will pop up however this one was a major invasions we manged to get the upper hand.



full picture down below

http://i52.tinypic.com/htxo5k.jpg

I will try to post one more SS of massive combat this time. Usually I post out of combat pictures because it's easier to see what's going on then if a group of people are huddled around next to each other.

[Rocketsurgeon]

I'm trying to feel optimistic about it as much as I can, but the more I see that they tried to make so many aspects of it like WoW instead of doing their own thing it really concerns me. No MMO has ever done it to this level, furthermore going out of their way to obviously make it seem like they want to compete with WoW...

Ignoring the whole "all MMOs are inherently similar" argument, how many other recent MMOs have you seen? Wasn't it Alganon that literally copied and pasted chunks of WoW's UI and mechanics? If I remember correctly, they even had things they took from WoW visible that weren't a part of their game, like keyrings next to bagslots when the keyring mechanic wasn't implemented.

[Hakto]

You DO know you just described Nefarion Fight right? an end raid boss designed 7 years into WoW's lifetime? And in "The Great Cataclysm" no less? LOL

Of COURSE there are a LOT of similarities... but we're not bored of the MMO genre.. we are bored with WoW's perspective of it.

Then there are plenty of differences.. which you are full aware of but want to simply deny. No need to rehash them again and again.

Bottom line is...

The new sneak peak video came out... and the Trolls are coming out of the woodwork because they see something exciting... and have to go back to Azeroth and pretend they are paying attention. Have fun. Look we get it you wanna stick with WoW.. Awesome.. we're so happy that you can enjoy it.

But we have better things to entertain ourselves with now. And in a few short days.. you won't have any threads to Troll... and you can go back to the QQFest that is the WoW Forums

Oh in case you missed it...

http://www.g4tv.com/videos/51369/Rif...ne/?quality=hd
You don't reckon they thought about that right? I mean it NEVER crossed their minds and they haven;t designed it in such a way that it is a positive experience and free of griefing?

First: that is the exact video I am referring to.

Second: my toon may be troll but that does not make my comments trolling, in fact as far as I am aware accusing someone of trolling is in fact trolling.

There are many factors to the Nefarion fight, asking me if I realise something about an encounter I have obviously defeated is rather moot.

Look we get you don't like wow, you've stated it many times.

I asked what is not recycled in the encounter Rift offers you. Never did I not claim that some of the content in Wow is not recycled: there is a difference in those two points you either missed or chose to ignore.

I am entitled to my opinion on Rift the same that you are, simply because my opinion is different to yours does not mean you can call me a troll.

I also posted an example of how a 10 man Rift group could easily be griefed, there is an obvious difficulty in balancing encounters that scale with the number of players. Let's consider a level 40 Rift: you have 15 level 40's then 30 level 25's decide to show up to watch and for the hell of it start casting spells hitting on the mobs etc.

The encounter now recognises 45 souls participating and scales the difficulty to compensate.

Unless the encounter AI is advanced enough to ignore the level 25's which I find unlikely, the poor 15 level 40s are about to get significantly griefed.

That is not even considering the pvp griefing.

As much as you continue to state that you are not wow bashing, more and more of your posts are about attempting to discredit anyone that does not share your own opinion and then there is your signature.

Can I suggest you keep your posts limited to what you like about Rift and why and cease and desist with starting flame wars when someone has a different view.

[Tarien]

I'm going to keep track of this game for a while, even after it's initial release to see how it does and see how much interest I could actually have in it. If raiding is as amazing as they're making it out to be then I'll force myself to level through the questing content that I can't stand to get past 20 in and try my luck with end game content. But I'll probably end up waiting a month or so after it's release until deciding that.

Ah you'll miss all the fun when the servers open for the first time

[Deleted]

The new sneak peak video came out... and the Trolls are coming out of the woodwork because they see something exciting... and have to go back to Azeroth and pretend they are paying attention. Have fun. Look we get it you wanna stick with WoW.. Awesome.. we're so happy that you can enjoy it.

But we have better things to entertain ourselves with now. And in a few short days.. you won't have any threads to Troll... and you can go back to the QQFest that is the WoW Forums

And that's the problem with you people. Always trying to tell everyone how boring and bad Wow is. Ofcourse you could say that's just a reaction to the Wow-fanboys trying to defend Wow by pointing out the flaws of Rift, but who started it?

[unkn0wnerr0r]

I'm trying to feel optimistic about it as much as I can, but the more I see that they tried to make so many aspects of it like WoW instead of doing their own thing it really concerns me. No MMO has ever done it to this level, furthermore going out of their way to obviously make it seem like they want to compete with WoW. There's a reason they haven't though, it's not necessarily the smartest move in the world. I hope it does well, even if I'm not interested in it at all, as I'm a huge MMO fan in general and would love to see another 1 million subs contender to not only have Blizzard step up their game plan a bit but all other MMOs as well. I just can't get myself past the fact that they seem to have squandered so much that they could have done with this game in order to appeal to WoW players. So far it looks like a great game, but thinking about what it could be if they just ignored WoW completely really disappoints me.

I'm going to keep track of this game for a while, even after it's initial release to see how it does and see how much interest I could actually have in it. If raiding is as amazing as they're making it out to be then I'll force myself to level through the questing content that I can't stand to get past 20 in and try my luck with end game content. But I'll probably end up waiting a month or so after it's release until deciding that.

The leveling is awesome. You don't feel like you are rushed just to participate in big events. In the screen shot I'm posting my gf is level 11 helping take down this guy and then helps finish off the battle for freemarch. Huge event, multiple raids going on. It was lots of fun.

[Helms]

images.mmorpg.com/images/galleries/full/082011/547874eb-4d1c-424f-b32f-30412cb2fd95.jpg

Since someone mentioned The D, figure I'd post what me and my buddy have been doing the last couple betas. Theres the link!

[Tarien]

I've never actually said WoW is better, or worse. Some of my problems with the game are recent changes, being the racials, the removal of rift supremacy (when rifts control the zone). Those are easy to fix, but the issues that make me question Rift, are the lack of any real creativity combat wise, the lack luster questing, lack of a dungeon finder, how gear is the same for every class, for example, all clerics use wisdom based mail, causing there to be a lack of individuality in players, the limited amount of "flightpaths", the overly linear questing experience, and the entire graphics style. It, in my opinion, falls into the same traps that Wrath (pre-ICC) did, which makes sense as most of the development probably happened at that time.

Its still early days. I see potential, I want a change of scenery, bubye WoW, hello Rift.

Not sure what you are talking about with some of your complaints. Trion are going to look at doing a LFD tool (but I hope its not cross server), clerics using wisdom mail is a blessing, who wants to have to farm two sets of gear? As for things like flightpaths, well, now you will see the world. I think WoW made you lazy

Some of the stuff I just don't agree with. I like the graphic style, I like the animations, I don't mind the question because I go rift chasing all the time and that breaks it up and hey its early days as I keep saying, maybe in 6yrs Rift will have awesome quests like Cataclysm does. As for linear questing... you've played WoW right?

I dunno. This thread is turning into a WoW vs Rift thread. Boring. Either play it or don't.

[unkn0wnerr0r]

First: that is the exact video I am referring to.

Second: my toon may be troll but that does not make my comments trolling, in fact as far as I am aware accusing someone of trolling is in fact trolling.

There are many factors to the Nefarion fight, asking me if I realise something about an encounter I have obviously defeated is rather moot.

Look we get you don't like wow, you've stated it many times.

I asked what is not recycled in the encounter Rift offers you. Never did I not claim that some of the content in Wow is not recycled: there is a difference in those two points you either missed or chose to ignore.

I am entitled to my opinion on Rift the same that you are, simply because my opinion is different to yours does not mean you can call me a troll.

I also posted an example of how a 10 man Rift group could easily be griefed, there is an obvious difficulty in balancing encounters that scale with the number of players. Let's consider a level 40 Rift: you have 15 level 40's then 30 level 25's decide to show up to watch and for the hell of it start casting spells hitting on the mobs etc.

The encounter now recognises 45 souls participating and scales the difficulty to compensate.

Unless the encounter AI is advanced enough to ignore the level 25's which I find unlikely, the poor 15 level 40s are about to get significantly griefed.

That is not even considering the pvp griefing.

As much as you continue to state that you are not wow bashing, more and more of your posts are about attempting to discredit anyone that does not share your own opinion and then there is your signature.

Can I suggest you keep your posts limited to what you like about Rift and why and cease and desist with starting flame wars when someone has a different view.

Actually it is designed so that the level 25's won't cause the problems. Have you actually played the game at all? The way it's designed is to allow lower level players to assist even if it's just healing. The rewards scale based off that. I don't understand how you can bash a game you haven't even played. If you had then you would know all of this already.

[The Jackal]

Have you considered a 10 man guild combating this 'instanced' Rift.

They battle through the waves of minions and demi bosses, faltering but never wilting.

Finally after what seems days of endless battle, they have the giant beast on his knees and they prepare to deliver the death blow that will vault their little band of souls into the annuls of history.

Suddenly a horde of guardians flank the little band of defiants and slay them from the flanks.

The above is one of the issues I have with this 10 man concept.

10 man guilds are generally smaller, sometimes more casual than larger guilds and while the concept of an outdoor type boss for the smaller raids may be appealing, you can bet your bottom dollar opposing pvp based guilds will do all they can to grief these raids.

I watched the video of gm super power showing us the first raid zones.

I've seen many a comment that people are going to Rift because they are tired of recycled content and the boring recycled encounters that they get in wow.

So off you go level to 50 and fight your way through many dungeons to finally earn the right to face your first end boss.

What do you find?

A dragon, that breathes fire, cleaves and tail swipes, summons adds (many whelps handle it) then at approx 60% takes off into the air to fight you from above and summons more adds (Onyxia casts Deep Breath).

You are indeed correct, this is all very new and refreshing and nothing like we've ever seen before.

I'm a little confused by this statement, are you making a general complaint that if you are playing on Defiant, and Guardians can come over and mess you up in the middle of your raid? well that's in wow words "working as intended" the same way Defiant can help you in you raid if they want. they promoted world pvp and they say out in the open. The other team it's quite possible for them to come over and flank you on your side. While I have not seen it happen yet, they promote this kinda thing because it's World PVP I don't really see the complaint in here. They even offered some videos on PVP where you can create rifts on the other faction side

I'm not sure you can compare onyxia raid boss to Rift raid boss. There are several different types of bosses that are new and unique. So what I'm gathering you are saying Onyxia is almost exactly or similar to one of the raid bosses you have seen in rift, in the 20 minute video therefore the game offers nothing new because of that single boss you have seen?

[AuthurDent]

Ha.. well here you guys are in Rift thread in the offtopic forum... Hakto.. you are the one coming here and bashing Rift's gaming/mechanics based on a video that skipped ALL of the fights mechanics. Trying to play down the draw it has for other people.

You don't see me posting anymore in the WoW forums here.. I don't give a ratz ass anymore... but apparently you , Yai and a few others are bored and jaded to the point that coming here and posting the same drivel about "It's nothing new.. it's not fun.. what are you guy thinking..."

We like it. We post why we like it for others who may be interested.. you are NOT interested.. and that's perfectly fine by me.

And as for the griefing... really? You have had a day to formulate how peeps can grief the 10 man Rift Raids... do you HONESTLY think that Trion hasn't been able to come up with that epiphany in the couple of years they have been developing this?

Wow man.. just wow.

[Rocketsurgeon]

images.mmorpg.com/images/galleries/full/082011/547874eb-4d1c-424f-b32f-30412cb2fd95.jpg

Since someone mentioned The D, figure I'd post what me and my buddy have been doing the last couple betas. Theres the link!

I'm glad I took the time to copy and paste that link Good times.

[Dammagia]

The game has 21 different classes. Its going to be unbalanced. Personally I'm fine with that up until the point where one class can literally do NOTHING to live through another. Other than that one class being more powerful than another is fine, its how vanilla WoW was. But what I'm saying is that giving everyone full access to 7 different specs(classes? what are we calling these things) is a bit over the top. Yes its freedom, and Yes its a nice feature, but I just like the idea of having a set in stone class (or classes) so we don't end up having a 1000 riftblade warriros running around while we have 2 paladins on the server.

I dunno, I like it, just don't know if it will work in the long run. So I'm glad its how it works, just a bitter sweet thing.

Actually, I think it is the best idea ever, it will save me rolling 7 different alts to get all the classes i want, now I can focus on 1 class and do whatever I want with it.

[Dethh]

http://www.g4tv.com/games/pc/63677/r...iding-Preview/

I don't know if this has been posted yet but this is a twenty minute video that should detail the end game events once you reach level 50. Promoted by G4TV, you may know them as the "channel for gamers" you will hear the RIFT developer talk about all different kinds of content, yes 10/20 man raids will be there. However 10 man raids will be unique on it's own.

I'm not trying persuade anyone who played 8 minutes and beta and (Omg this game sucks) I'm just trying to provide more detail to what this video game is about, and the important question (OMG You'll be bored of these in 2 weeks and be back in Warcraft) I cannot fully detail the way the video does. However after watching this video if you will believe that the game sucks that's your opinion, I won't try to change it.

However in this video does more then what this thread cannot, show the visuals with narrative

It has been posted and it looks bad, at least to me. 10 man content is extremely exploitable showing they don't care much for the 10 man raids which is going to be a higher % than 20 man raiders. If they keep this 10 man design it will fail IMO.