8.5
Hands On With Rift
At Rezzed some bright spark over at TheGameJar HQ thought it would be a mighty good idea to put me on MMORPG duty. Having never of played game in this genre before the mere suggestion of getting hands-on with one of these bad boys, let alone write about one, sent thousands of tiny puss-filled noob-pwning needles up my spine. The simple truth is I am scared to write about things I don’t understand, and given the well known ferocity of most online gamers being given this task was more than a little daunting. So, to put it out there, am I going to use the right terminology? – No. Why the hell was I just running around as a fox? – I have no buggering clue. And yes I did just use the arrow keys, not WASD.
Rift is a free to play (up to level 20) mythically themed MMORPG created by Trion Worlds, which has been out since around the beginning of the year. It centres on elemental realities, dragon-gods and two factions; the religious Guardians and the more culturally apt Defiants in their quests to overthrow the evil dragon Regulos, and his plan to gain the use of the elemental realities. Each faction therein has their own unique races and within that classes with four ‘callings’ each. Each calling starts with eight different ‘souls’ which branches out to two levels. Add to that over 12,000 weapons and I think we can all agree that it’s rather a large game jam-packed with a huge amount of personalisation.
Rift has a new expansion pack coming out at the end of the year that will “treble the size of the world” and raise the level cap from fifty to sixty. Gasp you should, as the original game is only one third of the updated size and has a level cap ten lower than sixty. Sadly at Rezzed the new expansion was not available to play, so you will just have to settle with a video of me being lead around like a toddler in a shopping trolly by a lovely man named Hergen Thaens, German Community Manager and all round good egg of Trion Worlds.
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