gigapixels, on 08 January 2011 - 01:57, said:
Got into the last beta, but given that it was right between Christmas and the New Year I didn't have time to play it. They let me in again though, and I just got through playing about an hour of it.
It's WoW. With a different look.
I'm not complaining, as I love WoW. But it really is almost exactly the same. The only difference is the class customization... Though one could argue that the classes are all available in WoW as the separate talent trees. For example, the mage lets you choose between Chloromancer (balance druid), Pyromancer (fire mage), Warlock (description sounded like an affliction warlock), Necromancer (demonology warlock), Stormcaller (elemental shaman/frost mage mix), etc. So while it seems like there are a lot of options, it's really just splitting it differently. Instead of 10 classes with 3 specializations each, you have 4 classes with 8 specializations each (3 can be active at a time, I believe).
Once again, this is not a complaint, just an observation.
And being able to mix and match so much isn't necessarily a good thing. You end up with abilities that are duplicates (or otherwise extremely close). For example, I made a rogue and went with Assassination first, and then Blade Dancer. Both had a finishing move (yes, it uses combo points, just like WoW's rogue) that did exactly the same thing, except one did slightly less damage. Why? Why not make them a bit different? Perhaps give me a DoT or something on one of them, something that gives me a reason to use both. Instead I had one that I took off my action bar as soon as I realized it was completely useless.
All in all, it seems pretty cool, but I don't really see too much to differentiate it from WoW, other than the look. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. But what are they going to do to pull in players?
This is all just from an hour or so of playing. Maybe end-game content or PvP are different than WoW; I'm not sure yet.
I don't think it's so much as relying on innovation to drawn players in, as much as offer an alternative to WoW, as in "do you want to play WoW, or do you want to play Rift?" Both are very similar, it's like "do you want to play Call of Duty, or Battlefield?". Both games are shooters, but offer slightly different takes on the genre. Rift is attempting to combine the public quest things from Warhammer (i can't recall the name) with the raids/instances of WoW. The soul system in Rift is like taking the class combination system from Guild Wars and mixing it with World of Warcraft talent system in which you get to mix and match various talent trees from WoW and make a custom class. An individual may find themselves drawn to one or the other, in the way that someone might compare a Zune and an iPod. Both are very alike, but it's apples or oranges. People that don't want WoW itself, but want a game like it can try Rift, and vice-versa. I am honestly hoping that this game does well, because if it can offer a strong alternative to WoW it can get some healthy competition going (which, sadly, no other game on the market seems to offer WoW).
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gigapixels
