Over the last few weeks I have been doing a series of posts highlighting some of those cool features of the game that make it so worth playing.  To date they have all been tangible features, that you can interact with.  Today we are going to delve a bit into the esoteric, and as such this post will probably have a gratuitous usage of screenshots.  Originally I had set aside fifteen shots for this, but I will be trying to pair down a bit.  Some of the images are used with permission from jensketch.com (because I don’t play Guardian side).

Episode 06:  The Atmosphere

In past articles I have covered a good number of features that show you why, rift is a game that is extremely polished and well thought out.  Problem is, these features alone do not add up to what makes a game enjoyable.  The reason why you get drawn into a game for any length of time is the environment.  You ask yourself if the world you are being drawn into believable and is the central conflict and its characters compelling.

Basically what makes or breaks a game is it’s atmosphere, and the world of Telara has it to spare.  Whether you start Defiant or Guardian you are drawn into a world at war, and into the heat of the battle.  You are dipped in conflict from the moment you set foot out the door, and ushered into a world torn asunder by factional warfare and a battle with elemental planes themselves.

There have been many games that have presented you a bleak, body strewn landscape.  Warhammer is a perfect example of this as it draws the player into a world of constant attacks between the forces of order and chaos.  Problem is, you see this world, so decimated that you have no clue why anyone would be willing to spill blood over it.  With Rift the player is given an apocalyptic vision of a possible future, only to be whisked away into the past where we the player can see exactly what there is worth saving.

A World of Beauty

The world of rift is a truly beautiful place.  Even at low resolution, you can see that there has been some amazing work done on trying to bring about unique looking settings.  At high and ultra settings, the world is just breath taking.  As I have played various MMO titles, there have been many “ooooo” moments.  The very first of these that I can remember is coming out of the mist, in Butcherblock Mountains and seeing the Statue atop Kaladim in Everquest.

With each new game, there have been more of these.  I sit back, take a screenshot and move on.  My rift’s screenshot folder has grown exponentially as I have leveled because each and every zone in Telara has two or three of these breathtaking moments.  Above is a picture I took, when I first entered Stonefield from Freemarch.  The sky had darkened, and it had just began to rain, but you could still see the strong shadows on the rocky faces.  I stopped leveling, stopped paying attention to questing, and just sat there for a moment enjoying the view.

I tend to power quest my way through zones, and in other games have been able to ignore much of the scenery in my push for the goal.  In rift however, I just cannot help but stop and smell the roses from time to time. Part of what has made this world so compelling is the fact that each zone is unique.  In games like wow, you have prefab objects that get reused over and over.  In rift, the architecture, the trees, the caves, and the landscape feel custom fit just for each area.  Each board on the bridge in the above image, feels as though it were placed by hand, and is unique looking from the other bridges in Crimson Gorge (of which there are many).

A World of Danger

One of the things that had been missing from MMO games for so long, that I did not even realize I was missing, was a sense of fear.  In games like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot I used to tread into unexplored areas with a sense of dread.  In the case of those games, I thought at the time, it was due to the stiff death penalties imposed on its players.  So when the modern crop of MMOs heralded by World of Warcraft arrived, with easy death penalties, I was happy at the time.

What I am coming to realize now, is that those early games had a certain zone design ethic that lead to uneasiness in its players.  You know that you had to be extremely careful as you hunted mobs, both in the dungeons and the outside world because one too many would mean a certain death.  Rift has carried over this same old school ethic into it’s content.  As you move through the outside world, you have to have the same care as you would pulling a dungeon.

On top of this, the dungeons themselves have a creepy natural feel to them.  You can almost feel the dust being disturbed under your feet as your party explores them.  The above image is from the end of Iron Tomb, the entry level Defiant dungeon in Freemarch.  Notice how each of the surfaces exudes texture, as they are filled with careful carvings and decorations placed there once upon a time to honor the dead.  Having run numerous other dungeons, I have yet to see any of the assets in Iron Tomb show up elsewhere.  Each zone feels like it was crafted just for its purpose.

A World of Substance

One of the arguments I have seen on the WoW Fan sites, is that because Rift has shied away from the slapstick humor and blatant pop culture parody, that it lacks a “soul”.  I think the exact opposite is true, like the titles that influenced Blizzard, Trion takes it’s game world very seriously and to me it exudes soul.  So many times in an MMO you do things that seem to have no purpose.  If you are asked to go to a town and rescue the villagers, it is often times from generic cartoon thugs.

From the very start of the game you are immersed in a diverse tree of factions, each with their own methods, goals and objectives.  To the best of my knowledge, Rift has no nameless faceless meaningless cartoon thugs. The world is besieged by the Dragon Cults, who collectively seek to spread the influence of the dragons they champion.  In other games, where the dragons represent elemental aspects, they are often times benevolent forces that shape mankind.  In the world of Telara, the Dragons are cruel selfish creatures that want to seize control of the world for their own means.

In Freemarch you are introduced into this conflict first with the Endless Court.  This group of cultists worship Regulos the Destroyer, the dragon of death.  The Endless Court harness the power of death to bear against you a multitude of undead abominations.  As you move through the zone you begin to encounter the Abyssals, a cult waging warfare on Freemarch from the depths of the Lake of Solace.  This group is devoted to the water dragon Akylios, and with it brings an unspeakable legion of deepspawn and water elementals.

On the Guardian side, in Silverwood you have two central conflicts, that of the Aelfwar and the Wanton.  House Aelfwar are a xenophobic group splinter cell of High Elves devoted to Greenscale, the Dragon of life.  Lead by Prince Hylas, they seek to destroy civilization and remake the world in a primordial jungle.  Diametrically opposed to the Aelfwar, are The Wanton.  These monstrous humanoids, namely goblins and dragonians, worship Maelforge, the dragon of fire and revel in senseless violence and brutality.  The Wanton will not be satisfied until every person has been slain, every forest burned, and every village ransacked all in a carnal sacrifice to their dragon god.

So each time I read one of the complaints that this game lacks soul, I keep asking myself.  Are these players playing the same game I have been?  I came to Rift with a pretty open mind, because quite honestly I wasn’t expecting much from it.  I sat on a beta key for six months, and finally the discussions started to make me curious enough to download the 8 gig client on my crappy DSL connection.  Going into it, expecting nothing, I was shocked and amazed by the vibrant and polished world I found.

Thing is a few months down the road, and a month into the live release I am still amazed by the world of Telara.  Trion has shown a level of attentiveness to its players that I have not seen ever during my tenure of playing MMOs.  Since release we have seen 10 hot fixes, 2 patches, with the first major content patch set to roll out this Wednesday.  This level of dedication, to the game and to the world they have created truly is, why you should be playing rift.

Instead of my customary cut & paste introduction to the concept of WYSBPR, today I thought I would throw out a thank you to Aenerb a friend of mine from my guild Eye of the Manastorm on the Shadefallen server.  When he submitted my series of posts to the reddit rift feed, I doubt he realized that it would actually grow legs and run (and I honestly didn’t even know about the reddit feed in the first place).  Yesterday my readership went from an average of 60-90 unique readers a day to over 700.  Reminds me of the few times I got featured on wow insider, certainly skews the analytics a bit.

Episode 05:  The User Interface

For some time I had been a wow tourist.  As a new game came out, I would wander off and play it in alpha, beta, and very rarely release but always return home to wow.  The very first make or break component of any of these games was the user interface.  If the UI felt obtrusive, and difficult to manage it was not long before I quit playing.  The ones I have played for any length of time (WoW, Everquest II, Warhammer Online) all had one thing in common, a UI that was easily modifiable by the player.

Above is an image of the default Rift user interface elements.  I created a new character for the purpose of screenshots, so no worries folks I have not gone to the dark side and swapped factions.  For the most part, the above is also the source of the majority of “it’s just like wow” complaints, because visually the UI elements do look a lot like WoW and LoTRO went out and had a lovechild.  All the stock modern MMO constructs are there, the mini-map, the hotbar, the floating chat window, the bag bar, and for some reason all games seem to top-left dock the player fames.

Breaking The Mold

Personally I have never liked the stock MMO layout.  The unit frames for example seem completely foreign for them to be in the upper left corner.  When you are playing an MMO all of the action seems to happen at your character, so to me, having them player and target frames in the center of the screen makes more logical sense.  Less time spent looking away from your character, less lag in your reactions.  As a result I have very specific desires for what my UI should look like.  While it seems horribly wrong I will illustrate the point with what my raid interface looked like in wow before I quit raiding and left the game.

To get things the way I wanted them in wow, was doable, but it meant I had to run over 50 different add-ons to get the various effects I wanted.  Each time a major patch would come out, it meant the long and annoying process of figuring out exactly what was broken, finding updates and dealing with the fact that your UI settings seemed to get corrupted on a regular basis.  On top of that there was always the fact that anytime you attempted to get support, the immediate first response was to blame any add-ons you were using.

I am very happy to say the era of the add-on is finally behind me.  In Rift I was able to very quickly, a few moments after starting the game move things around and change the UI to look the way I wanted it to without any external modification.  If you look at the two screenshots, the layout is pretty similar.  All the key elements I wanted from WoW add-ons are here, and overall I feel like the effect is much cleaner.  Granted the screenshot above is pretty busy considering we were working on an invasion boss.

Making It Happen

Above is a picture of the ‘Edit Layout” interface inside of Rift.  Since I am keyboard oriented I acces it by hitting escape to bring up the options menu, and then choosing the “Edit Layout” option.   This places the game into a mode where you can move components of your user interface around.  The concept is pretty simple, each UI element has a bounding box drawn around it, and you can drag them around the screen to place them where you like.

This is by no means a brand new concept to the MMO world.  I can remember while playing Warhammer Online thinking their UI layout editor was extremely elegant.  Rift however goes one step further.  One of the big problems with moving things from their default places, is that as the windows grow, they often overlap and cover up necessary parts of other windows.  Rift has solved this by allowing users to dock windows together. 

If you notice above some of the windows show a thick golden highlight alone one or more of the edges.  This denotes that these windows have been docked together.  For example if you move the window labeled “Group Portrait 1” in the above image, it will also move all the other group portraits and pet portraits keeping the group enact.  This means as your windows grow, your initial UI design stays neatly together.

While you cannot see it in this image, in addition to docking windows together, you can dock elements to the edges of the screen.  When you drag a window close to the edge, a green highlighted edge will appear.  This means that window will be docked to that edge of the screen.  Currently you can only dock a window to one edge at a time, but the nice feature of doing this means as you change resolutions, your layout will remain roughly the same.

Going Even Further

One of the biggest frustrations that comes with running with a non-stock layout in most games is figuring out a way to replicate your design to other characters.  In WoW, you had to go through the process of copying LUA files from one character directory to another.  In other games, I never actually found a way and just had to try my best to replicate things by hand.  Trion thought ahead and included an elegant way of doing this out of the box.

Again being keyboard oriented, I usually access the options menu by hitting the escape key.  From this menu choose the Import option, as shown in the above montage image, which will bring up the import settings interface.  On the left side of the screen is a listing of all your characters with some pertinent information about them and on the left a series of checkboxes.  This will let you import key bindings, ui layout, macros, chat settings, game settings, and misc settings from the target character to your currently logged in character.  When you hit the import button you are given a prompt, also shown, that warns you any changes will be permanent.

Now if we return to my dwarven placeholder, you can see that I have applied the UI settings from my warrior Belghast, and the UI layout has changed to match my preferences.  Several minutes of awkward cut and paste work done in seconds with a nice clean UI.  One of the weird things to get used to with Rift is the fact that, ALL of your primary settings are stored with your account information on the server.  I’ve never played a game in the past that had done this, so it was equal parts shocking and awesome when I logged in for the first time from my laptop and everything about Belghast was set up the way I wanted it.  The only glitch however was that my laptop and desktop run at different resolutions.  So as a result I use different UI scaling settings on each machine. 

After a few minutes of digging around I found a simple and elegant solution for this.  Rift has a pair of commands, /exportui <filename> and /importui <filename>, that help to bridge this gap between my systems.  Doing an exportui, dumps all of your user interface settings to a file on your hard drive, and doing the importui command refreshes those settings from the file.  So when I log into my desktop I type /importui desktop, and when I log into my laptop I type /importui laptop to quickly scale things to fit either machine.

The Future

One of the neat benefits of this system, might not be apparent at first.  Since these commands dump and import your settings from a file on your file system, it will allow you to trade UI layouts with your friends.  Currently there is not much that can be done in the UI that could not be replicated quickly by another user.  However since they have already added additional features to the user interface since release, I can see at some point the level of customization will allow users to create a very unique look and feel they might want to share.

Without a doubt, this is the most robust user interface in an MMO to date.  No other MMO ever comes close to letting its users have this much control over their environment without installing third party modifications.  Currently Trion has hinted that add-ons might be something for the future, but with an interface this well designed I am not sure exactly what can be improved upon.  If they do choose to do add-ons, it would be nice to see them plug-in cleanly into the existing interface, instead of replace it. 

I can imagine a time where the user might be able to browse in game a list of available third party add-ons and snap them in without having to hit external sources.  An internal “app store” would allow Trion to assure the quality of the add-ons, and keep them from doing anything terribly exploitative.  This way add-ons that do more than re-organize data, can be nipped in the bud before actually having an effect on the community.  As a reformed add-on junkie, it is my hope that Rift stays clean and free of “make or break” third party features.