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MMOs Worth Playing: Rift

October 16, 2015October 16, 2015 by Belghast

Why This Series

Happy Friday and welcome to the second part of my “MMOs Worth Playing” series where at the end of the week I try and talk about an MMO that I think is very much worth playing. I thought this morning I would go into some of my thought processes as to why I am doing this. Lately there has been a lot of angst floating around about various games and the state of them, and while I can very much get riled up just like the next person there is a thought that goes through my head. Life is far too short to spend your leisure time playing something that makes you unhappy. There was a time when if you wanted to play an MMO you were pretty much shackled to one of a handful of games in order to get your fix. However now there are tons of really fun games out there, so it quite honestly would serve most people well to pop around and play several of them to see if any are a better fit. The other part of this is the fact that we really have no major new AAA MMOs looming on the horizon. It feels like the era of big releases is over, and instead we have a bunch of existing MMOs that are continuing to make awesome content. Popping back into an existing MMO to see how it has progressed is a great experience, because there is almost always a huge mountain of content waiting for you to explore.

For the Ascended

Rift holds a special place in my heart because it was the the game that first truly pulled me away from World of Warcraft. There were a lot of games that were heralded as the “WoW Killer” and for a time for me at least, it absolutely was. If there is a feature you have always wanted in an MMO, chances are Rift has it. But it was more than just cloning features of other games, it also finally figured out how to do public events in a manner that felt both epic and beneficial in the form of Rifts and Invasions that spawn from them. For a bit about the game setting I am going to draw directly from an early tidbit from the lore team.

Of all the worlds in the universe, only Telara was constructed entirely of sourcestone at an unprecedented nexus of the elemental planes. Elemental energies that come into contact with sourcestone become tangible, and Telara, so heavily influenced by every element, boasts incredible diversity and wealth. Telara’s resources are capable of providing its people endless prosperity, if only they could share the wealth and keep the world safe from those who would plunder it. Though Telara always knew its share of strife, the Blood Storm and the rifts brought entire new plateaus of horror, leading to the edge of oblivion.

Telara is a world that is constantly sieged by forces outside of itself. Over the years this has taken the form of the elemental dragons, and even gone so far as to seeing parts of these planes of existence merging into Telara itself as the various denizens of these alternate realities set up footholds like that of Hammerknell. The storytelling gets a little esoteric at times, but essentially you are thrust into this conflict on the brink of destruction. Most games set up an artificial narrative of good versus evil, and this has pretty much become the standard trope for MMOs. Rift however does something slightly different and gives you a conflict that feels very real and tangible to us… considering we too are constantly seeing the clash of Technology and Religion. The Defiant faction relies on very steampunk feeling technology to tame the wilds of Telara. The Guardian faction instead relies on the Vigil, a pantheon of gods that have long forsaken Telara but are now choosing to make their power known. You the player takes the role of an ascended, which essentially is vessel for the souls of past warriors that ultimately end up giving you your abilities. The opening scenes of the game take place on the eve of a final showdown with Regulos the Death Aspect, and you are sent back through time with the mission of trying to stop these events from unfolding.

Soul Keeper

The most central game play mechanic is that of the souls that you have access to. There were originally four callings in the game, and recently they added a fifth. These callings provide the basic feel for what would ultimately be your “class” in another game. Until the release of the Primalist these all had a clear division based on the armor type… Warrior was Heavy, Cleric was Chain, Rogue was Leather, and Mage was Cloth. The Primalist blends the lines a bit and uses Warrior like two handed weapons, but is a leather based calling. Inside of each of these callings is a number of souls, for the original Callings they each have 11 total souls… with 10 of them available for free and 1 each coming from the two expansions to the game. The Primalist class launched with 6 souls with more supposedly coming over the coming months. Souls are essentially what “WoW like” games would refer to as a Talent tree. The enjoyment of this game for me at least has always been that I get to mix and match any combination of these souls to craft a very personal feeling class out of it. Traditionally in Talent tree based games, there is a lot of “illusion of choice”, meaning that while you have lots of options there are really only a handful that are ever viable at a given time. While there are definitely flavor of the month builds in Rift, it seems like if you are dedicated enough to any given play style you can figure out a way to develop a character that has that feel.

The game has all sorts of trope that simply don’t exist in other games. Want to play a Mage Tank… Sure you can do that. Want to play a Warrior Healer… sure you can do that too. Want to play a brutal Smite Cleric… yup that is a thing too. The game gives you a template that allows you to carve out your own class. Any given “class” is a combination of three Soul trees, and when you slot a given soul it gives you certain abilities by default. You unlock additional abilities through spending points in that tree. You could quickly see how this might become tedious, especially given all of the options you have at your finger tips. It is absolutely possible to create a character with little to no synergy, and that does not play terribly well. To solve this the game gives you a series of templates that essentially direct you down a path that should be good for this or that… and as you hover over these pre-built templates they tell you the skill level of the class and what sorts of roles they can fill. Additionally the game has an extremely active player community, and unlike most games… there forums are actually a great place to find help and information. There are class guide forums that are an awesome place to start for looking at different specs and builds. I am not sure what the maximum is… but I have 8 different “roles” or specs that I can swap back and forth between freely allowing me to get super granular and create specific builds for very specific conditions.

Feature Rich

Calling this game feature rich is a bit of an understatement. Essentially if you can think of a feature that exists in any game… there is likely a version of this fine tuned and available inside of Rift. For the things that don’t exist the game has a fairly robust mod system… though honestly not quite as complete as say World of Warcraft or Wildstar. To keep players from “breaking” the game, you cannot override default features of the original game client. This means that a lot of things don’t integrate fully, but if you really want to use it… the mods are available. The game has quite possibly the best cosmetic gear system called “Wardrobes”. This allows the players to save up to fourty different outfits and change between them freely. Additionally the game uses an appearance collection system, freeing you from having to keep old gear just for the purpose of appearances. Additionally the dye system allows you to collect certain dyes and then apply them at will to any of your wardrobes, allowing you to change things up whenever the mood suits you without an additional cash sink. Similarly the game has an amazingly rich housing system in the form of pocket dimenions, allowing the players to customize area of the world. For example our guild house is the Stone Flask Tavern at Granite Falls in Stonefield, and Rae did some crazy stuff even making a hidden path up the waterfall with a little temple area up there. Essentially if you can dream it up, there are the tools inside of Rift to be able to create it, and the sorts of dimensions that are available are extremely wide and varied. The only negative is that there is no way to put resources in your dimension like you can in other games… so you can’t bank, auction, or craft there… which I realize is an effort to keep the capitol cities feeling vibrant.

The game also has one of the more robust mentoring systems allowing you to drop your level at will while wandering the world. This allows you to vary the difficulty level of a lot of the encounters, but more importantly allows you to hang out freely with your lower level friends without simply steamrolling the content for them. This mentoring system is also the core of one of the coolest features the game has called Instant Adventures. I talked a bit about this concept yesterday in my blog post, but essentially you can pop into game… join the Instant Adventure queue and you will be fed a series of objectives for you and a group of players to complete. What is awesome about this is it is a revisiting of a lot of quest objectives from a given area, but each sequence of objectives generally reaches a crescendo in the form of some sort of mini boss. While doing this you are racking up planar currency and loot bags that usually contain nice relevant level gear. When one sequence finishes you are teleported to a new area and the process begins again. If an area becomes active with a planar invasion, then the instant adventure suddenly shifts purpose to defeating that. It has been one of my favorite leveling means to go through early content, because you are constantly doing something… and at any point you can hop off the train and go do something a little less frantic. It does a great job of breaking up the monotony of following quest chains, and like dungeons just gives you another way to mix things up a bit.

Monetization

This is always the specter looming over a free to play game, is how exactly is it itemized and is it honestly playable for free… or do you really need to subscribe to enjoy it. This is always a difficult question for me to answer since I never actually play these games in free to play mode. From what I understand… if you play this game for free you get access to all 65 levels worth of content, the original four callings, and ten souls per calling. Instead of penalizing the players… Rift took the path of rewarding them for becoming “patrons” because once a game goes free to play.. that is after all what it becomes… a patronage system. As a Patron you get all sorts of perks, and don’t have to worry about any limitations to the number of dungeons you can run a day or anything of the sort. You also get a number of extremely generous boosts to experience, gold gain, as well as daily and weekly rewards that guarantee you at least one cash shop lockbox for free. The only thing that keeps it from being a perfect free to play implementation however is that you gain no monthly stipend of shop currency like you do in other games. With no way of gaining the shop currency in game, it ends up actually making the prices on items feel more reasonable since the game is not having to dilute the price to make up for the fact that players can grind out the currency in game.

Like most cash shops, there are tons of chase items that offer rare and limited time things that you can only acquire through lockboxes. Having these items that you want appear only in lockboxes can be an extremely frustrating proposition, especially if RNGesus is not on your side. To combat this not they offer these super limited time sales that allow you to buy the various mounts outright, and if you regularly watch the Friday twitch stream they often times give away these goodies as well there. So while there are a lot of trappings of the normal insidiousness of a cash shop… I feel like for the most part it is fair, and in truth you can largely ignore it completely. Honestly I would say this is one of the few games that you can literally play without spending a dime and be completely happy doing so. I’ve been subscribed off and on since the release of Rift in 2011… but there are also times where I have played this game for free here and there before picking back up my patronage. I can say I noticed zero difference in the game other than the fact that I was obviously missing my experience boost buffs. The game felt the same, and played the same… and that is just about as high of praise as I can give for a free to play experience. If you’ve never played Rift, you owe it to yourself to give it a try… especially since it can be played completely for free. It is either going to click with you or not, but in any case there is a lot to experience… and I have to say I really enjoy the early leveling experience especially. Storm Legion and Nightmare Tides… is admittedly a bit of a slog, but I keep thinking I must be missing some path that I should be taking there. In any case… I said a bunch of stuff about Rift, and I still definitely burn a candle for this game. Join me next Friday as I talk about another game.

MMOs Worth Playing: The Secret World

October 15, 2015October 9, 2015 by Belghast

The Games Pusher

I need a new mmo in my life

— Z (@zerena_hoofs) October 7, 2015

One of my friends coined the term “Games Pusher” to represent the force I have when it comes to getting people to try a game. She said she called me a drug dealer in the nicest possible way, but the term has stuck in my head. It is true, I get super excited about games and enjoy trying to introduce people to ones they are not currently playing. The thing is… originally I thought this was just me vying to get more people to join me in the game I am currently playing. However I feel like there are dozens of MMOs that are really good and that people should play all of them at least for a bit. So we zoom to earlier this week when a friend of mine… one @zerena_hoofs made the innocuous comment that “I need a new mmo in my life”. At which point I ended up flooding her with suggestions. I jokingly said that I could keep it up for hours… and in truth I really could. While I generally suck at sticking with “columns” I always have the desire to spawn them. This time the idea is to do a short run of posts each Friday talking about the awesome things relating to one MMO that is “worth playing”. Since it is October, I thought I would start things off with the most Halloweeny of all MMOs… The Secret World.

The Plot

The game is set essentially in an alternate reality version of our own world, and with that comes a lot of pop culture references. When your character is awoken to your own latent abilities by a mysterious bee flying into your mouth while you are sleeping, you are recruited by one of three different secret organizations. It seems while the world “slept” there has been a secret cold war going on between three ancient powers: The Knights Templar, The Illuminati and a mysterious and relatively unknown organization called Dragon. Each organization has its own agendas… for the Templar based in London it tends to be to keep the order. For the Illuminati based in New York it is all about hoarding knowledge and making a profit. For Dragon based on Seoul it is about sowing the seeds of chaos throughout the world. This secret back and forth between these clandestine entities would have remained like this for continued centuries were it not for the fact that something is changing. A darkness is bubbling up from the bowels of the earth in the form of “The Filth” which is this black ichor that infects anyone who touches it with a sort of deliberate madness. Now each organization is trying to get to the bottom of what is going on, while at the same time protecting their own assets and vying for supremacy over the other orders.

The game relies upon urban legends and myths to weave a tapestry of strange happenings throughout the world. One moment you are investigating a small town in New England overrun by Lovecraftian horrors and zombies, and the next you might be uncovering a lost city in the Egyptian desert forgotten to time and filled with its own unknown dangers. All the while you are trying to sort out what is happening to the world and what you and your chosen order can do to fix it. What makes all of this work is the fact that this game has some of the best writing I have seen in any game, MMO or not. The quests are interesting and actually require some pretty damned devious puzzle to solve. There was one quest in Egypt that I remember vividly that actually provided data that you had to decode that was included in a number of real world encoding mechanisms. Only after decrypting all of them could you get the clue needed to solve the riddle. To make life easier on you, the game provides an in game browser and Funcom operates a number of “fake” websites for people and corporations in game that contain clues that are needed to solve certain quests.

The Mechanics

The game claims to not have levels or classes but in truth… neither of these are absolutely correct. What the game offers is a free form character creation system, but that freedom is actually fairly dangerous. You can in theory build a character that is so screwed up that you cannot actually function in the game. The game provides a few specific templates for each of the professions and earning all of the abilities for this template gets you a nifty costume. These also serve as relatively functional builds for you to work towards, that will hopefully prevent the problems of absolute freedom. The challenge here is the fact that there is no “respec” or skills reset system. Doing things in the world gains you ability points and skill points, each with their own uses. Ability points are spent learning new abilities in several different weapon based trees, and Skill points are used to level your ability to equip higher tiers of gear. In its most basic form a “build” is a combination of up to seven active abilities on your hotbar, and up to seven passive abilities that hopefully interact with the actives you chose. Later in the game they introduced new weapons that also take up space, but those won’t unlock until you have completed a quest.

The game itself feels almost like a card building game like Magic the Gathering or the Guild Wars 1 skill system… where you are trying to build a “deck” of abilities that interact in interesting ways together. For example you might have a passive that does something really interesting when you push an enemy into a “hindered” state, and then you would want to use that with abilities on your hotbar that trigger that hindered state. What makes this extremely interesting is the fact that you can swap your abilities at any time out in the world, and when we were running dungeons we often found ourselves swapping around what specifically we were using to better synergize with what other players were bringing to the table. The biggest problem is that the game takes a lot of careful research to play well. One of our challenges was the fact that we each had a specific idea of what we wanted our character to be… and some of those options simply were not viable when you got to the hardest content. I have not played the game in some time, but one of the challenges was that there were certain required abilities and not every weapon tree could provide those.

The Style

One of the best aspects of the game for me personally, were the awesome cosmetic gear options. I am a huge fan of transmogging or whatever a given game calls it, and if my character looks awesome I feel awesome about playing it. One of the coolest things that The Secret World has going for it, is that essentially all visible gear is cosmetic by nature, and you can swap between looks freely while you are out in the field. All items you pick up go into a dressing room and you can swap bits whenever you feel like it. The actually “gear” that gives you statistics are your weapons and a number of talismans… necklaces, bracelets, rings etc… that are other than your weapon non-visible gear. To make weapons cosmetic as well, they give you the ability to create a weapon mold that can chance the appearance of an item. Combined this gives players extreme freedom in expressing their characters… but sadly that means that the majority of players are going to be women running around with as little clothing on as humanly possible. The above screenshot is one of my favorites, because my friend Tam and I essentially both arrived at super similar looks while doing a mission completely accidentally. We jokingly dubbed this our Blues Brothers pose.

Another great thing about the game is that it is truly a mega server experience. There are “servers” but they really don’t actually matter. All of the characters span all of the servers, and you can group freely with anyone regardless of faction. This means that there is never a situation where two friends playing this game won’t be able to play together. The only negative is that Cabals themselves aka Guilds… don’t span multiple factions. I’ve spent most of my time playing for the Templar, but I know just as many diehard Illuminati and Dragon players. The only problem is with the Cabals not spanning factions, it made it mildly frustrating for the folks who didn’t want to play Templar, since the guild was in that faction. The workaround is that the game supports social channels and we used them prolifically when we were playing actively. Another really cool thing about the game is that it has an extremely devoted and active role-playing population. If you wander around London you are going to find pockets of players acting out their characters, and that adds a certain depth to the environment.

Expansion

The growth of the game comes in the form of comic book like “Issues” where a batch of content is released with a common theme. To date there have been twelve issues spanning from July 2012 to August 2015, each with their own themes and usually their own comic book cover to go along with it.

Issue 1: Carter Unleashed
Issue 2: Digging Deeper
Issue 3: The Cat God
Issue 4: Big Trouble in the Big Apple
Issue 5: The Vanishing of Tyler Freeborn
Issue 6: Last Train to Cairo
Issue 7: A Dream to Kill
Issue 8: The Venetian Agenda
Sidestories: Further Analysis
Issue 9: The Black Signal
Sidestories: Love & Loathing
Sidestories: The Last Pagan
Issue 10: Nightmares in the Dream Palace
Issue 11: Reaping the Wind
Issue 12: To the Dark Tower Below

Monetization for this game comes primarily in the form of purchasing these issues, and in the various cosmetic items that you can purchase only through the store. They have a number of really cool themed outfits that you can pick up, and for subscribers they give you a unique batch of items each month. I purchased a lifetime subscription when the game was released that converted when the game went free to play to one that gives me access to all the subscription content, and a stipend of cash shop currency each month to spend. While we call this game “Free to Play” it is in truth “Buy to Play” meaning you have to purchase the base game in order to do anything. From there to get these new stand alone issues you have to purchase them one by one. Right now on Steam the game is running $29.99 but quite often it goes on sale for as little as $10. Similarly there is an ultimate version available for $59.99 that includes all of the content as well as a custom costume and some other consumables. I fully expect that as we get closer to Halloween we will see both of these versions get discounted heavily. The long and short is.. this is one of the most enjoyable questing experiences I have ever had in any game. The story content is amazingly well written and the quests themselves are extremely inventive. That said occasionally the solutions are insanely difficult to figure out. Thankfully there are plenty of awesome guide sides out there like Unfair.co for if you find yourself stuck. This is one of those games that I think everyone should try, just be willing to devote some effort into sorting out just what kind of character you want to build. Once you get into the game world however… it becomes extremely infectious… just like the Filth.