Rift Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Hardcore Filter Problem

July 21, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. This weekend on the AggroChat podcast, Tam brought up a topic that sort of went in a bunch of different directions. The idea basically was a discussion around how he as a game designer, could build a communications system in an MMORPG that encouraged players to interact with each other. We know that forced voice chat does not work, and in the games that have open voice chat… the first thing I do is disable that option. We also know that pushing players of wildly different skill levels into the same content only leads to toxicity. We also know that across the board… MMORPGs are struggling. While Steam only represents a tiny slice of the FFXIV player base… it has seen a 78% drop in players since its all time peak in June of 2024. While again not representative of the totality of the player base… Steam does tend to allow for viewing trends and if it is happening there… it is usually also happening in the larger pool of stand alone client players.

I think one of the challenges of MMORPGs is that they are effectively being driven off a cliff by the most hardcore and as a result vocal player base. Here is a hard truth that we need to understand. If you use gaming forums, reddit, discord, or post about video games on social media… you are already among the most hardcore players in a given fandom. If you are regularly engaging in raid or other challenge content… you are further filtering your bias down to the needle point of the most serious of players, and they cannot survive with only your support. The challenge for developers is that as a whole, the feedback they have been getting is that the content needs to be harder in order to cater to the most dedicated players. However doing so… continues to push things out of bounds for the most casual players to a point where they feel like they can no longer justify that $15 per month in order to log in and do some busy work each day. When you lose casual players… you lose staff and money to make significant improvements to the game.

I think in part, Classic World of Warcraft has been so popular because it hearkens back to an earlier game design ethos. Molten Core and Blackwing Lair are masterpieces of zone design, and in both case… the fights were not actually that challenging. You needed 20%-30% of the raid that had a clue what was going on… and the rest could more or less be populated with warm bodies that were pushing buttons, and also getting to experience content they might not be able to otherwise. I started out as one of those warm bodies, and then eventually over the course of years of raiding developed the skills necessary to lead and function at a high enough level of get recruited into more hardcore groups. The thing is though… the golden age for me were those first raids. We had fun. It was a party atmosphere with comms filled with bad jokes and even worse stories… as we all fail-boated our way through the content to eventually get shiny loot. When these games got super serious focus time… they just stopped being all that enjoyable.

If a game exists in this mode, where it is being driven by the most dedicated players… eventually it starts to shrink in size and with it comes downsizing of the studios. You can look back at all of the games that I used to play fairly seriously… and eventually dipped out of because of cost cutting and lower frequency of content. I played the heck out of Destiny 1 and 2, and got frustrated when they started vaulting content… in part because they did not have the resources to keep updating it. I played the heck out of Rift but eventually bailed because it could not consistently keep a player base interested in the game in order to do much of anything. Wildstar was amazing… but its raid content was way the hell too complicated for most players and the casual content while great… just did not have enough meat on its bones to keep people engaged. Both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV were driven by decade long story arcs… and both began to flounder a bit when they lacked the story chops to keep people coming back for more.

In truth… I shifted my focus away from MMORPGs and began devoting the majority of my time to ARPGs where I could group up with friends if I wanted to… but the majority of my time was spent soloing. Other games have similarly become way more solo focused, like Elder Scrolls Online which churns through regularly story content updates… all of which can be completed in their entirety without the help of other players. We’ve lost this whole era where doing group content was a heck of a lot of fun, and I believe it is in large part because the players driving the narrative are the players craving challenge in their games. This also coincides with the birth of Streamer culture, and the focus on showing off how good you are at games in a public manner. If you are not doing something on the hardest of hardcore difficulty modes… then you are wasting your time… or at least that has become the prevailing public sentiment. However none of this takes into account the fun factor. Players who get their satisfaction by doing the sweatiest content ever… are a minority in the total player pie.

What you don’t hear publicly talked about is the number of players who bounce because they realize that none of the content is actually designed for them. The majority of folks don’t storm out the front door raging about how bad the game is. Instead they simply slip out a side door, cancel their subscription, uninstall the game… and then gravitate towards games that are giving them a better experience for their limited game time. There is a reason why Gacha games have seen this massive rise in popularity over the years, because they really hone in on the feeling of giving the players power… without actually increasing the difficulty terribly much. It is very easy to busily chase a bunch of objectives and feel like you are doing important things… regardless of whether or not the game is largely playing itself. They feel just connected enough so that you know you have friends who are also playing… but unfortunately there is no real meaningful multiplayer experiences.

I feel like for the most part Guild Wars 2 has done a pretty good job of catering content correctly, however there are still numerous cases where they drank the hardcore Kool-Aid and it shows. With the most recently expansion Janthir Wilds, they introduced a zone meta that is quite honestly… not capable of being completed without a large number of ringers in zone participating. As a result it is pretty rare that you actually find a group doing it, and succeeding at it. Similarly Dragon’s End to this day still fails more often than not. Contrast this with old classics like Tequatl, Octovine, or Chak Gerent that pretty much succeed damned near 100% of the time… and have full zones of players showing up every time they are run. The events that are being completed are just better designed, and it does not matter how much the “hardcores” turn their nose up at them… the participation proves it. People will come out of the woodwork for something that is chill, fun, and rewarding… and honestly does not ask that much of them.

Ultimately my theory is that MMORPGs have been struggling and shrinking… because they have been listening to the wrong voices. They lost sight of the inclusive content design that made their best zones great… and have leaned into chasing and ever shrinking piece of the player-base. World of Warcraft was a game changer. The number of people that I knew that had never really played another game seriously before that… was pretty freaking massive. However as the content kept getting more and more finely focused… the folks who did it for fun and did not have the time to devote to all of the prep work… quietly faded away. Essentially there are two paths to take… either you make it so that class design exists in a way that the difference between the most hardcore player and the most brain dead casual is about 10% efficiency… or you make the content designed in a way that you only need about 20% of the player base to be really paying attention to complete it. The best content tends to follow that second path. I am not saying do not put the double mythic extra plus hardcore content into your game… but make it for bragging rights only, and in no way connected to the flow of necessarily content.

Granted take everything I just said with a grain of salt. The fact that I have a gaming blog… already puts me on the narrow end of the “cares about games” spectrum. However I am very much a burnt out ex-raider who used to take this shit super seriously… until I realized that I would just be happier if I did not give a fuck about passing arbitrary skill checks in the games that I am playing. I mostly play ARPGs like Path of Exile and Last Epoch, where I only have to care about myself and my actions in order to complete them, and that reset on a regular enough basis that I can ignore a season/league if my devotion is elsewhere. That said… the whole conversation this weekend… did make me miss those glory days of raiding and a lot of the nonsense that used to happen on voice chat. To some extent I am getting some of this back with my small group shenanigans in Guild Wars 2, and I hope maybe we gather enough mass to be able to do some strikes at some point. I miss us progressing through Binding Coil in FFXIV and quite honestly… that was the last time when raiding with a large-ish group of people was super enjoyable for me. I had a blast learning the Arcadion with the release of Dawntrail, but that was pretty short lived.

Mostly I think we would be better of if games were designed to allow more casual players… to ride all the rides. I think the bar for entry for a lot of content has just gotten too high in order to keep the masses engaged anymore. That is the problem with the MMORPG design model… you need everyone bought in for them to succeed. We’ve spent the last decade filtering out who can reasonably play them… and they are going to keep shrinking unless that line of thinking changes. I say this as someone who has only one foot left in the genre… and could probably happily cancel the few subscriptions I have remaining without seriously impacting my enjoyment. If I am almost out the door… someone who is already well into the more serious end of the community… you’ve got problems.

Games of the Decade: 2011

December 9, 2019 by Belghast

On Friday I started a new series where I talk about the games from the last decade that specifically had an effect on me. The original plan was to do a bunch of single posts, but after some back and forth I decided upon the format of posting games from a specific year. One of the interesting things about this journey is that I am realizing just how fallible my memory is. There is no way I would have ever said that Rift, Skyrim and SWTOR all came out in the same year… but I would have been very wrong. This was seemingly a year of significant changes.

Rift

Rift released in March of 2011 and on paper appeared to be everything that I had ever wanted in an MMORPG. It was an game with a techno-fantasy setting that allowed me to multi-class builds until my heart was content. More importantly it gave me the ability to have a tank with Charge AND Death Grip! I cannot underscore how important that last bit was to my early enjoyment of this game. I rolled a Bahmi Warrior which placed me on the side of the Defiant, aka the Red Team. The central conflict in World of Warcraft was often presented in terms of Good vs Evil, and your definition of that depended greatly upon the side of the fence you started on. Rift on the other hand focused on a debate between Religion and Technology, with me firmly throwing in on the side of technology.

Rift released at a time when it felt like Blizzard was not listening to the players, and in contrast the fledgling Trion Worlds was constantly engaging with the community greatly increasing the appeal. I changed my own religion at the time of being a World of Warcraft site to being all in on Rift, heralding it as the WoW Killer and true savior of MMORPG gaming. I can’t say for certain why I wandered away from the game, but I think in part it was due to the fact that a large chunk of my gaming circle didn’t quite set down the roots that I did. Without a viable raid, we were limited to doing the hardest version of the Rifts, which got old pretty quickly. The release of another game on this list ultimately signaled the closing of my renaissance with the game. It however has been something that I have returned to time and time again and while I am not actively playing it at the moment, remains an extremely important part of my gaming history.

Rage

Every so often a game is released that I absolutely love… and that apparently no one else did. One of those games was Rage, released by ID software in October. What it promised on paper was Doom meets Fallout… and what it delivered was something that felt like it had all of the potential in the world but never quite delivered on any of it. Rage was one of those games that I finished during act one, and I fully expected to open up a wider world… but instead got a credits roll. The few moments before the credit roll however were extremely compelling game play and presented a really interesting world, that I spent entirely too little time in. The follow up this past year took the wrong queues from how to make a sequel and I largely bounced off of it.

I think Rage would have done well, were it not for the horrific technical issues that I remember at the time. ID Software in the post Quake world is often times more of a game engine company than a game developer themselves, and in some ways Rage felt more like a tech demo than anything fully fleshed out. It was the first game to release on the Id Tech 5 engine, and reportedly at launch was a buggy mess. I remember it being a bit of a beast when it came to requirements, but I also managed to play it fairly successfully on the PC. I remember this game being poorly reviewed… but looking back it managed to get a 79 on meta critic… though maybe at the time we didn’t view that as a positive score. I replayed through this game a few years back and it still more or less holds up well.

The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim

My first foray into the world of the Elder Scrolls was with Daggerfall, and I played through it well after that game was gone from its prime. The first Elder Scrolls game that reeled me in with the genres possibility was Morrowind, and when Oblivion released I was completely hooked. By the time Skyrim was announced and ultimately released I was a ravening fanboy ready to consume more of this giant open world setting, and the game delivered on every possible dimension. It would be impossible to create a greatest games of the last decade list without Skyrim on it, especially now that it is pretty much available for every conceivable platform.

What I love about Skyrim is how I am able to just roam aimlessly through the world deciding my own path at all times. The game doesn’t rush me to make any decisions and allows me to carve my own path through the world. I remember on my first playing I went about 15 levels without ever finding the stones that allow you to effectively choose what sort of “class” you were going to play. In fact I pretty much went the opposite direction and it was a significant time before I finally made it to town. As soon as the shackles of the intro quest were removed… I was off doing my own thing figuring out my place in the world. It is for this reason that the game seems to have infinite replay-ability for me personally. Most of the times I pick it up I don’t get even vaguely close to finishing it, but it gives me a fun escape when I need it most.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I have such mixed feelings about Star Wars the Old Republic. On one hand it is one of the best roleplaying games to ever exist with some of the most interesting story content I have ever played through. On the other hand, it is a clone of a very specific era of World of Warcraft and by the time the game released felt somewhat dated and awkward. This would have made a very worthy sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, if they would have taken a single path and expanded upon it. However what you have is some of the best story-lines that Bioware has ever created trapped inside the husk of a very traditional MMORPG.

This era is also somewhat tainted by the fact that it was a grand experiment in guild building as I attempted to make lots of disparate groups of people mesh together, a problem that I consistently find myself in. This experiment however didn’t go so smoothly and saw the guild fracturing into two factions. In later years the game redeemed itself as the sort of expression of pure joy that I seem to find myself returning to anytime there is a Star Wars movie on the horizon. The more single player focus allows you to churn through the story and feel powerful doing so, more or less allowing you to skip over the bumpy bits. The Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne campaigns represent some of the best RPG goodness I have experienced in a long while. I would at a bare minimum suggest working your way through the original story-line on every single class, because there is interesting overlap and interplay between them. It was and continues to be a pretty phenomenal game-play experience, once you get past a few of the rough spots.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2011

I felt extremely off balance, having left a game I had been playing for the better part of several years and trying to find a new home. House Stalwart had been that home and as I ventured forth into post WoW territory I found a bunch of temporary housing but it really did take me a long time until I settled into a new family. It also begins the era I am in currently of never quite being able to fully commit to any game. I was super prolific when I was into Rift… and then not at all as I started to pull away from that game. During April I had 24 posts… and by the time you get to November I was down to a single post for that entire month. I found myself actively avoiding the concept of raiding, having effectively just had a “bad breakup” with World of Warcraft and raiding in that game.

So where were you in 2011? What were the games that you found important during that year? Drop me a comment below and let me know what I missed that really mattered to you personally.

Rift Prime Thoughts

January 24, 2018 by Belghast

The launch of Rift was a really special time for me. It was the first time that my “wow tourism” turned into something else. It was the first time that I really immersed myself wholeheartedly into another game and I loved it so much. At the time Rift was giving me everything I had said I wanted in an MMO and I chose to be a giant purple Bahmi warrior. We had a lot of great times in the game and while we didn’t really start to break into the raid scene until the release of slivers… we regularly had huge guild outings to open raid rifts which were an awful lot of fun. At that point it was just a lot of fun to grab some friends and chase rifts for awhile, and in truth I cannot really remember what caused us to initially fade away. For some players they never really grasped it in the first place as player fantasies turned out to be less than what they expected. Others shifted back to the familiar womb of Azeroth, but a group of us stayed true to the cause for quite some time. By the time the first expansion had rolled around however we were down to a shell of our former selves and a series of server mergers saw our little guild scattered. I personally had landed on my feet with another very active guild in the form of Machiavelli’s Cats helmed by fellow blogger Liore, and entered a sort of second golden age of Rift for me personally. I even managed to make my way into their raid rotation as I did my best impersonation of a dual wielding warrior. With the launch of Storm Legion saw a bunch of changes and a bunch of folks wander off, and before long I was once again left as a member of a dwindling guild. I made an attempt to rekindle the interests of my friends with a fresh start on Faeblight and the proper founding of House Stalwart in Rift, and it again worked for a time… but by three months down the line we were once again down to a handful of people actively playing. Essentially the core problem I have always seem to have with Rift is getting anyone other than myself interested in playing it for any length of time. No matter how solo at heart you happen to be… if you don’t have a guild core to organize around it is really hard to keep excited about logging in every day.

Recently Trion announced that they would be creating “Rift Prime” and it is not in fact shipping a temporal disturbance to your house in an hour or less. I realize I am super late to the party in talking about this… but I’ve been largely out of commission due to the flu so cut me some slack. The idea in theory is that they are trying to roll back time, to an era when the game was subscription based and not fueled by loot box purchases and store purchases. We don’t really have a ton to go on as to what specifically this means, but the full text of the blurb released on January 18th goes as follows.

Introducing RIFT Prime

In the Spring of 2018, we will launch a new server, RIFT Prime. We’ve paid a lot of attention in discussions with all of you and within the broader gaming community regarding business models in the MMO and games industry as a whole.

We have the opportunity to experiment with this fresh RIFT server using an oft-requested subscription model and progressively unlocked content. Our goal for RIFT Prime is to provide the experience that many of you have requested: no lockboxes, a significantly reduced store with more of the current store-based items obtained through gameplay (or removed entirely) – plus the excitement of sequential progression through RIFT’s content with monthly milestones and achievements.

So we know whatever it is will be happening in Spring… which is one of those super squishy definitions as far as time goes. It promises a return to a subscription only server, which admittedly is a huge boon as far as I am concerned. During the early days of Rift the community was something I cared about and I regularly volunteered for groups forming up in public channels. With the introduction of the free to play players… I more or less stopped watching public channels because they were full of nothing that I cared to see. I like the idea of starting over again with the core of vanilla Rift and building back out from there. A good portion of my struggle to stay connected myself is that there is just so much competing wrong information that you have to sift through in order to find what is actual good advise. We are lacking the Rift equivalent of Icy Veins to use as a sanity check to see if you are in fact speccing your characters in a reasonable manner. I think rolling back the sands of time might help this a bit, especially if prime sees its own forum infrastructure to support the initiative. Sure I would miss all of the toys I have accumulated over the years, but I also think having a reason to start fresh without having to deal with the baggage and friction of a free to play experience would be positive.

There are two problems I foresee and I am going to talk a little bit about them. Firstly how vanilla are we actually talking? I never again want to return to an era when the “faction as fiction” patch has not been applied. One of the best things to happen in Rift was the fall of the faction wall and I want to be able to run Guardian and Defiant together freely based on user choice. Secondly… if they build it will the people come back? I can be as interested as possible, but if no core upwelling of players want to come back and play… then my own journey through the game will be truncated as well without a guild base to build out upon. I’ve not had the best luck with guild projects lately, and I am not sure if I even have the energy in me to try and organize anything for the purpose of Rift. Destiny 2 was a colossal mess that never quite materialized into any semblance of regular group activities, but admittedly a lot of the problem there was the complete and total lack of guild chat. I still love Rift and I have so many fond memories of the game, but always run into issues each time I attempt to play the modern incarnation. At some point I left the tracks and never quite figured out how to re-rail myself. If I could find an active community to do this thing with me… then maybe just maybe it would work. However similar nostalgic based trips into other games have been short lived in the past, and even the third resurgence of Rift myself was us trying to do a similar “fresh start” that only wound up lasting three or four months. At this point however I am willing to give it a shot. If I am actively playing a game I am already in the mindset where I want to subscribe in order to support it… so flipping that switch is a no-brainier for me personally. The real question however is… will I have anyone else joining me in that madness?

A Warm Blanket

August 1, 2017 by Belghast

Today marks the beginning of the whole “Daily Creative Thing” business and while you might have been expecting something from me… unfortunately you can’t really expect me to get up and do creativity by six in the morning. Sitting down and writing out a blog post is challenging enough. I am however planning on making something happen today or tonight depending upon when the muse hits me. The other big thing going on today is that it is my Nineteenth wedding anniversary, and while I am not entirely certain what we are doing to mark the occasion yet I am sure we will come up with something. In truth what it will probably mean is that my wife and I go out to dinner, and then wander around hitting the various stores and checking to see if they have started marking down their back to school stuff yet. “School Supply Season” is like Christmas for my wife, and while this is not exactly the normal thing for people to get excited about… it is for a teacher. I’ve spent many an hour over the years scrounging for one last folder or ruler or package of gluesticks for her classroom.

Work is still madness and I am still finding myself deep in the throes of turtle mode. Honestly more than anything what happens during these times is I resort to comfort gaming. I end up dusting off a game that I had not been playing that much and spend a significant chunk of time roaming around its world. Lately that has meant an awful lot of Rift because much like Phantasy Star Online yesterday… I carry a significant torch for this game as well. In honor of the occasion I decided to vary up my default wardrobe a bit from what I had been running around in the first screenshot… to what I am now running around in… which is honestly mostly just some dye and swapping a few pieces. I never managed to hit the “Prophecy of” level cap and I’ve just been working my way through any of the content that I had left to do in various zones. So far the thing that I am liking the most about the content is the way that each zone has this major event that takes place at the very end of the zone that ties up a bunch of loose threads from various quests and packages it neatly in this really epic fight. In many ways Rift feels like a game from a different time, and this has both good and bad aspects to it. The bad is it feels much slower than other MMOs and the time to kill and time to level can feel a little grating at times. However on the good side this is also this same thing that makes it feel familiar and lived in… and something that I can return to over and over to wear it like a blanket. The main problem that I have with Rift that ultimately causes me to wander away is that I don’t have my social infrastructure here. My circle of friends that I record the podcast and game on a nightly basis with… have moved on past this game and will likely never return. At this point I think I am just too set in my ways to branch out and build new communities, and I also know that I will soon return to the fold and wander away from the game myself.

Another game I have been playing a not insignificant amount of is Fallout 4. This runs pretty damned smoothly on the laptop and it has been a recent go to for when I want to wander around a world and explore a bit. In the theme of carrying torches for games… I have loved Fallout since I saved up my pennies to buy the first game when it released back in 1997. I was going to college at the time and not really buying many games, but still made a beeline to Walmart to pick it up once I knew they had it in stock. Side note… that was literally the only place in town that sold PC games and was before the mass expansion of Game Stop. At that point Software Etc and Babbages still existed as separate entities as well as Comp USA and the unrelated Circuit City and Computer City. When the games made the tradition to the open world format I was skeptical but quickly got on board thanks to my love of the Elder Scrolls games. Now the modern Fallout games serve as this familiar touchstone that I can keep returning to anytime I need solace. I’ve started countless games of Fallout 3 and New Vegas and it seems like now I am carrying that tradition over into Fallout 4 as well. My default play mode tends to be to wander towards a corner of the map and do whatever happens to be there. I am not really big for following larger quests in this game, and I likely would have never actually beaten it were it not for the fact that we chose this as a game club game… and I felt obligated to do so. Gaming in general for me is not ever really about beating the game… but more about existing in that game world for a period of time. The game world of choice is determined by whatever mood I happen to be in. Fallout for me tends to be for when I am in a slower paced mood and want to wander around aimlessly dispensing frontier justice on the raiders.