Tales of the Aggronaut

Ten MMO Must Haves

July 1, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I got up roughly 15 minutes before the alarm went off… and decided to that rather than be groggy later… I would go ahead and get up and around. Right now I am kind of questioning that decision, since the bed seems like a really amazing idea. I had a really spastic yesterday as I never could really decide on a game to play. Since Final Fantasy beta was closed by the time I got up and around I ended up cycling through Everquest, Rift, Vanguard, and Defiance never quite sticking in any of them. As a result I don’t have much excitement to talk about… and I am nowhere near finished with my second part of How To Rift… so I am going off in a completely different direction.

Ten MMO Must Haves

Basically over the years I have noticed several features that I expect most MMOs to have, and when they are not there it greatly harms my enjoyment for the long run. I keep cycling back to the ones that do have most of the list. Granted this is in no way a complete list, as I am sure there are things I have omitted for the sake of a clean number, but these are definitely all things I would prefer to see in an upcoming title. These are not necessarily in order of importance… but more the order in which I thought of them.

1 – Random Events

Nothing breaks up the monotony of questing and killing mobs like a random army invading the countryside. I have always liked when random things happen in games, I even like random loot so long as it is not something I need to progress forwards. In the post Rift MMO world, I feel like random things happening in your world is an absolute must have. When it is missing, the game feels extremely stale to me. When it is done well, you forget what you are doing and follow along the flow of what is happening in a specific zone. This should be events chosen from a long list of potential ones… not the same event happening over and over like in Guild Wars 2. Their implementation did not serve to make the world feel alive, but instead made it feel even more like a carnival ride resetting itself every so often.

2 – Passive Grouping

I should be able to help other players out, and they help me without having to worry about whether or not I tagged the mob first. Grouping should be something you do to hang out with people, not something you feel obligated to do constantly just to get through game content. I feel as though simply touching a mob should give me credit for whatever that mob is required for. Rift and Guild Wars definitely do this extremely well… but when I go back to a game that does not have it… I become a kill stealing asshole. I just forget that mob tagging is an actual thing that is still in games. If you do not have passive mob tagging… you are bad and should feel bad.

3 – Puzzles and Collectibles

I have the tendencies in me to power level myself to the cap and then get bored feeling there is nothing left to do. If your game has little puzzles and collectible bits it helps to make me stop and smell the roses. I feel for other players this becomes a meta game all in itself. These systems all seem relatively simple to implement, but it seems like there is a greater return on investment as far as gluing a player to your game. Rift and GW2 both have amazing examples of puzzles, and EQ2 has probably the most extensive collection system I have seen in a game. I greatly prefer there to be something for me to always be on the lookout for, that offers interesting gameplay and forces me to stop quest grinding.

4 – Moveable UI Elements

This one is huge to me. Essentially I will if given the option set my UI to look the same from game to game. I like certain windows in certain locations because it helps me not have to think about where things are. When you play lots of different MMOs this becomes something extremely important. Additionally I find myself setting up all my hotbars the same… 0 is the interrupt key, 7 is my combo point dump, 5 is charge/deathgrip, etc. As a result I really hate your game when you force me to play with your idea of how the UI should look. No matter how much research you have put into your UI, it is not ideal for everyone… and as a result you should never force players into your chosen UI design box. Make the windows unlock able and moveable either through the default UI like Rift or through Addons like WoW.

5 – Map with User Defined Waypoints

This is another big one for me. Navigating your world should be easy for the players. I should be able to open my map, click a point that I want to travel to and then get some kind of directions as to how to get there. This can be as simple as an Icon on the edge of the mini-map showing you the direction of your destination, or as complex as some sort of golden path or arrow pointing the way. Additionally it would be really amazing if your system allowed player defined permanent waypoints. That way we could actively mark whenever we found something cool in your world. TSW does an amazing job of this.. and I have tons of little markers scattered through all my maps pointing to nifty things I found. This is definitely something all games should emulate.

6 – Sortable/Searchable Bank and Inventory

First off let me say.. that the concept of physical bags with limited storage is something no one should ever do again. I greatly prefer one big inventory space because usually with that comes the ability to sort, filter, and search the contents of your inventory. Rift does an interesting hybrid model, in that they still have physical bags, but they have a sort and search functionality that makes up for the fact of having to juggle multiple containers rather than just one. Trying to find things in your bags should not be considered a meta game… and you should help players out so they have to spend as little time doing this as possible. There have been times I have logged into EQ2… looked at the state of my bags and logged out immediately because I did not want to spend the next 30 minutes clearing them out. That game is the worst case scenario… but I have had similar happen in many other games as well. Make your inventory system help the player rather than hinder them.

7 – Sell All Junk Button

If your game drops junk items from mobs aka “Greys” and you do not have a sell all junk button… you are a horrible person and should be drug out into the street and shot. Nothing is more frustrating than going through your inventory and having to manually sell a bunch of trash items that have no real purpose for existing other than to give you some cash. Better yet, don’t even drop the trash items and give us additional gold instead. I think the running theme of the last two should be that Inventory Maintenance is not a fun meta game. No one enjoys it, and all it does is make the player feel like they have just completely wasted their time. I am completely fine with getting additional cash in lieu of junk, but if you do have junk… for the love of god make a sell all crap button.

8 – AOE Looting

Thank you Rift for creating this construct… and thank you modern MMO developers for having the common sense to say “damn, why didn’t we have this” and adding it to your games. Nothing is more annoying than trying to select that one corpse from a pile of corpses that still has loot on it. My OCD will not let me go without searching all the bodies… it is like I knew that if I missed one… that would be the one that dropped some rare epic item. Again this is a cousin of the whole inventory maintenance is not a fun meta game… neither is looting. Better yet… all corpse interactions should be AOE as well… where the hell is my AOE skinning. The first company to give me AOE skinning, herbing, and mining of corpses… will be a god in my eyes.

9 – Full Character Appearance System

Now when I say this… I am not talking about Transmogrification. I could go on an hour long rant about how horrible that system is and how it is a half assed version of the good appearance systems. What I am talking about is additional sets of character doll slots that allow you to directly override the appearance of an item with another item. Rift has probably the best implementation overall right now, since you can have something like 12 wardrobe slots with ready to switch to outfits on the fly. The only gotcha there is due to their own constraints they had to implement a shitty “transmog” like system for doing the weapons. Players should never have to run back to a vendor to change their appearance… stop making them do busy work. I would love to see developers emulate the way the system works in EQ2, because you can literally change your appearance to anything in the game… no class restrictions.

10 – Facial Hair

I had a few other items I considered putting on the list… but honestly to me personally this one has to be here. If your game does not have the ability for me to give my character a nice beard, especially a moustache and goatee combo… I will hate your character creator and likely not play your game. I have no clue why this is so important to me… but it is. Namely I have seen the lack of facial hair in the Asian MMOs… but I struggled to find a look I could stomach in Guild Wars 2 as well. Additionally I cannot stand the “pretty boy” appearance that some games have… but I won’t go into that right now. Please for the love of god when you design your character creator… make Facial Hair a slider… not something that is attached to another attribute like hairstyle.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it… my ten must haves for a modern MMO. Like I said, I am sure that it is not a complete list at all… and as soon as I post this… I will think of another 10 things that should have been on the list. These however are the things that immediately came to mind when being frustrated with MMOs that do not have them. I would be curious to hear about what your list is, and whether or not I have hit your key frustration points. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope I manage to stay fully conscious all day long since I got up so early.

Sense of Humor

June 30, 2013 by Belghast

Be warned… this is one of those mornings when I just don’t really feel like doing a blog post. It isn’t necessarily that I don’t want to write… it is that I don’t feel like I have anything really exciting to share with the world. But several months ago I made a commitment to blog every morning or evening, and I have not dropped that promise yet. Though quite honestly the timing of the evening posts has been a bit odd and something I need to work on.

Searching for Something

Most of yesterday was spent in some fashion roaming around town. At first I was on a mission to hit a bunch of used bookstores, namely the largest ones here in town looking for something I could not quite describe. Essentially I am doing a lot of pre-writing for my attempt on NaNoWriMo this year. I am one of those people that I don’t feel like I can write about something, without knowing more about the world itself. The world I have built in my head is extremely intricate and as a result I am having to do quite a bit of research.

The only problem is I cannot put my finger on exactly what I am looking for. I have been searching for ethnic folk tales, lore, and even role-playing game books that are set in non-European/American settings. I feel like in those two realms I have a fairly firm grasp on the classical lore, mythology and cast of creatures. Where I am really lacking is China and the countries of the former USSR. Additionally I could definitely use some more information on the creatures of the African continent. I know some of it, but not nearly the clarity I would like.

Essentially I am trying to build political struggles, kingdoms and relationships between various groups of magical creatures. I have a lot of things in place, but I want more resolution and granularity of who lives where and controls what. The irony about this whole thing is… that the story I will likely weave through this world will only touch a tiny tiny bit of it. But I feel like I need to know what the topography of the world is like before i can populate any part of it with characters.

This is also why I am getting started this far ahead of November, trying to weave together a world that makes sense to me. One of the things I hate about a novel is when it feels like there was no master plan to the world, or that when a big reveal happens. it is a massive let down because it doesn’t make much sense. Since this is a hang-up of mine… I feel like I have to build the world first and then write about it. I thought that maybe I might stumble onto a collected book of folklore or something like that, but at the end of the day I pretty much came up empty. I got one very thin children’s book that collected some non-traditional mythology… that will mostly be a point of reference as I look up all of the tales it mentions online.

Sense of Humor

The one overarching thing about Final Fantasy is that at no point can you really take yourself too seriously. For a good chunk of yesterday when I was not out and about searching for whatever I was looking for… I ran around looking like this. This is one of the few times I wished I was colorblind… this was all bought off the same vendor mind you. Not sure how a red horned helm, green hauberk, pink gloves and white/yellow pants go together… but man is it colorful. That is the thing that makes Final Fantasy so different that most of western games, is that it is over the top absurd at times… in the character designs, the bosses and monsters, and even the dialog.

To some extent this makes the game play more enjoyable because you are unable to get completely focused in on the mission at hand. I find I have done a lot of “stopping to smell the roses” in this game so far as I haphazardly roam around the countryside looking for whatever I happen to need for a quest. There are a ton of intricate systems in this game, and most of them are not well explained to the player. I stumbled onto a hunting system that seems to involve you killing a certain number of mobs with a “cheese wheel” icon on their head. These are lumped into ranges and there is some kind of reward for completing a difficulty tier.

Additionally I figured out that the “Golden Pretzel” Icon I kept seeing is actually anytime you are gaining experience. This is no lie… I seriously kept trying to figure out how I could spend all those pretzels I was gaining. Upon second look… I am guessing it is probably a golden cherry blossom or something of the sort. But to me it looks like a pretzel.. and the advance dialog icon still looks like an ice cream cone. I can tell this game as a whole was not designed for western eyes. Like I am sure not everyone sees a pretzel when they look at that icon, that for someone else it would make a lot more sense.

Story Quests

One of the other cool things I stumbled onto was what I am calling Story Quests for lack of a proper term. Essentially every so often you will get a quest that involves you going to investigate something. When you do it will launch into a short cut scene, and then usually a pretty epic battle that is sometimes assisted by NPCs joining your fight. From what I understand these are unique to your class, so that the ones I am getting are for marauders alone. They remind me a lot of the SWTOR class storyline in that you have an opening cinematic/dialog the fight itself and then a resolution cinematic/dialog after it is over.

Some of the battles like the one above are just absolutely insane. Essentially me and the party of NPCs had to deal with wave after wave of giant crabs, each wave including smaller mobs and big boss mobs. From what I can tell the secret seems to be.. focus on the smaller adds and let the NPCs deal with the big guys for you. Once they have solid aggro and you have finished off the trash waves, you can help them burn down the big guys. I’ve done three of these so far, and that seems to be the rule for each. How you can generally tell is if the boss type mob is a significant number of levels higher than the trash mobs.

Wrapping Up

So far I am still enjoying myself playing the beta. I still feel like there is a ton that I just do not quite understand yet… but overall that has not prevented me from enjoying the game as a whole. This is one of those games that is deceptively simple at face value, but seems to have a ton of different and intricate systems once you get engaged with it. This should help to keep players hooked on the title for the long haul. I did not experience the 1.0 version of Final Fantasy XIV but the 2.0 version seems like it is something that western audiences will really enjoy. I hope you all have a great weekend, as right now I am cutting this off and going to go play some more.

Chocobo Nostalgia

June 29, 2013June 29, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people, or at least I am trying to view the world as happy people. In the process of waking up, and I have just munched on a wonderful sausage roll. My wife is back safely from her trip, so honestly it is a pretty good day. Later on we are going to go out used bookstore shopping… essentially I am looking for reference material for my process leading up to a run on NaNoWriMo. I am doing a lot of pre-writing and world building to give myself a base to build a story upon. Nonetheless it should be a pretty leisurely welcome back to town activity, since we are both bibliophiles.

Chocobo Nostalgia

Last night I got the opportunity to play Final Fantasy XIV a Realm Reborn for the first time. I went into this process a little sceptical based on the horror stories I had heard about Final Fantasy XI and the original revision of this game. However Square Enix has spent lots of money and many years making the title over for this relaunch and it shows. I have an odd relationship with the Final Fantasy franchise. These are among some of my favorite games, but something happened along the way.

After Final Fantasy IX it seems like they change the style of gameplay. They went from lots of open world exploration to mostly “on rails” action sequences blended between a ton of cut scenes. I have never been a huge fan of the whole “interactive movie” experience… I want to play a game… not watch it. So as a result I have fallen fairly out of love with Final Fantasy and the vast majority of JRPGs. However recently I have been replaying my favorite games in the series… namely Final Fantasy 4,5 and 6.

Final Fantasy XIV seems to be a call back to this noslagic area of the game, and I am completely fine with that. The setting is magical and steampunky at the same time… and there is an ever present evil empire component to the storyline as told through the opening vignet. I had flashbacks to the opening sequence of Final Fantasy 6 as I saw the same magitech walkers here. Additionally there are chocobo stables sprinked throughout the world and this really gives the overall feeling that you are back in the classic area of Final Fantasy.

The Character Creator

Character creation is an essential part of any game, in that can you create something you want to play. Normally I have this problem with asian mmos… for whatever reason I can never create a character I like the appearance of. I have never really gone in for the “pretty boy” appearance that they all seem to want to give you. Final Fantasy however strikes a good blend between that standard and the rough and tumble western ideal. Essentially you can choose between playing humans, elves, gnome like Lalafel, big ogre-like race, and finally the mi’quote the cat people.

Oddly enough after playing with the character creator a bit I found that I really liked the appearance of the Mi’quote so I ended up rolling a cat person. I am not really sure how to quantify it, but they feel far less like a “gag” race than this concept normally is. I felt like I could make a really interesting looking character that felt roguish and tough in spite of the fact that it has a tail. Essentially they are more “Thundercat” and less Popori from TERA, and since I have always dug the Thundercats… it works for me.

The big improvement of this game and their character creation over most of the Asian MMOs is that they have facial hair. This probably is not a big deal to most of the population… but for me… all of my characters have facial hair. One of the biggest problems i have with Dragon’s Prophet for example, is that I had to choose between one of two looks… Handlebar Moustache or Unruly Man from the North. There should always be steps between, and all games should have a nice clean moustache and goatee combo. To developers out there… the fastest way for me to not like your game… is to not have a facial hair slider.

The Combat

I had done some research ahead of coming into the game, and at the suggestion of friends that know my play style tastes… they suggested that I play a Maurader. It is essentially a semi-defensive two handed wielding warrior. I only managed to get through level 8 last night but I had several things in my arsenal at that point: a standard strike, a sunder armor type attack, a cool short term defensive buff that has an animation similar to “Shell”, a damage over time ability, and an ability that causes the next attack to heal me. Essentially all the trappings of the ideal high survival off-tank. I will be curious to see if they become more tanky over time, but I am pleased to know it really does fit my play style.

Combat itself is deceptively simple, in that you could mash buttons and kill mobs relatively effectively. However there seems to be some form of a built in combo system.. so that pressing one button will highlight the next attack in sequence. Doing the attacks in sequence ends up dealing a very significant amount more damage. Essentially the rotation I started doing was opening with my damage over time, refreshing my defensive ability if it was down, hitting my main strike and then hitting the sunder to complete a short combo. By then I at most would need another basic strike to finish the mob off.

The other thing that feeds my bloodrage is the chain system. Essentially after killing two mobs in a row it starts a timer in the lower right hand corner of the screen. The game keeps track of every kill you make after the initial two, and at the end of the timer you are awarded bonus experience based on a multiple of the number of mobs you are able to kill in that timeframe. While I have not tested this out, I think this will mean that grouping and keeping up a chain will be a far more efficient way of leveling.

The Quests

This was admittedly the biggest barrier I had to the game at first. After slogging through a truly excessive amount of cutscene that is not skippable… and requires you to keep clicking the “ice cream cone” icon to progress the story… you are planted down in a port down and forced to run a ton of fed ex missions for the towns folk. The positive is that the dialog is extremely well written and often times laugh out loud funny. The negative is that there appears to be NO voice over at all.. and as a result the game feels extremely quiet. It is funny how we have gotten used to some measure of voice dialog feedback.

Some of the quests are actually interesting… like there is one where you have to try and cheer up a pirate captain… and it walks you through the usage of common emotes. So you have to /rally at one point to bolster her spirits. Additionally it is nice that all quest items seem to be instanced, in that everyone gets their own copy of whatever clickable item needs to be clicked for a certain quest. Again however, if your tolerance of fed ex style chores is minimal you will struggle with this phase of the game. However it does reward a ton of money for doing it.

What I found out after the fact from my friends is that you can essentially just leave town and immediately start doing combat quests. This is probably something I would opt for in the future… because after all the slogging through cut scenes… the last thing I really wanted to be doing was more cut scenes as I accepted all the townsfolk quests. Supposedly if you go out and start the combat quests, you catch up in level extremely quickly and there is really no need to ever do the work for the townsfolk other than to get money or as a way of touring the town.

The World

This is hands down the best part about the game… the world is completely gorgeous. Everything about it just screams careful art direction. The buildings are huge, the countryside rolling and open… this feels every bit the part of a modern Final Fantasy game where everything is pretty and filled with activity. Additionally it runs amazingly well on my laptop. All of these shots were taken last night as I played and I was getting roughly 60 frames per second the entire time. In certain ways the world reminds me of older MMOs, in that there are lots of little dungeons appearing all over the place… without actually declaring themselves dungeons.

There are so many things that exist just to exist and I have not found quests associated with them. The game definitely seems to lay things out in a way as to encouraging exploring your way across the countryside. Additionally I like that there are “revenge mobs” in the middle of leveling areas that you need to avoid. In an area with level 2 and 3 mobs for example, there are giant roaming level 13 grass ogres that you have to be aware of. Granted at this level they are non-aggro but I am sure that will not be the case eventually. I have to admit I have great nostalgia for the fear that the Sand Giants in Oasis of Marr induced in players… and I look forward to seeing this progress as I move through content.

The Rundown

Final Fantasy XIV feels like World of Warcraft got lucky with Final Fantasy XII… and this offspring was the result. Final Fantasy XII always felt like a single player MMO to me… and this game takes that concept, adds addditional people, fleshes it out and borrows a ton of polish from World of Warcraft. It has better written and more creative quests, but there is no real innovation in that department. If you hate WoW questing you will likely struggle here as well. It has extremely simple and satisfying combat, but again no real innovation. If you struggled with traditional MMO combat, you will also struggle here.

The real selling point of the game is that it proves an extremely polished final fantasy MMO experience. Everything about this world screams final fantasy, from the opening sequence, to the way everyone dresses, to the UI feedback sounds and orchestral fill… all proudly say this is a final fantasy game. If you always wished you could play a Final Fantasy game that was like World of Warcraft… bam you have your ideal title right here. I found it extremely enjoyable and pretty much as soon as I finish writing this review I will be booting back up the game and continuing my journey. This game is proof that you don’t always have to innovate to make something enjoyable.

How To Rift – Character Creation

June 27, 2013 by Belghast

Since the release of the Rift free to play conversion, I have had a large number of friends coming back to the game. Previously I did posted targeting the features that have been added into the game since release. This time around I will be targeting this series towards players just starting out in the game. I am going to try and assume as little prior games expertise as I can. Rift is a game full of extremely rich and complex systems, and this series of posts is an attempt to ease a new player into it.

Choosing a Faction

Rift at its core is a game about a world torn asunder by the violent planar tears opening across the continent and causing all manner of nasty things to spill into the world. You play the role of an ascended, essentially a being with a number of souls merged into one. The two primary factions of the game represent the struggle between religion and technology.

The Defiant chose to rely on themselves and their technology to contend with the planar upheaval. The Guardians on the other hand chose to rely on faith in the old pantheon of gods that have been long dormant. Once the decision of your faction dictated everything you did from that point on. However prior to the launch of Storm Legion Trion released a “Faction As Fiction” patch. This meant that both Guardian and Defiant players could group together freely, and be members of the same guilds.

This has made it so much easier for players to play whatever suits them the best, but still be able to play with their friends that chose the other faction. This also makes the first choice you have to make during character creation completely dependant on which ever race you want to play.

Choosing a Race

Essentially there are three Guardian Races and three Defiant. For the Guardians you have to choose from Dwarf, High Elf, and Mathosian. On the Defiant side you have the air elemental descended Bahmi, the Eth and the Kelari. Each has a very unique look to them, and dictates which character creation options you have. Also each has a unique set of racial abilities. Each has a racial elemental resistance, but it is such an insignificant amount that it is ultimately meaningless. However the active racial is extremely useful, however some of them sadly are far better than others. I will give you a quick rundown of each.

Dwarf Racial

Dwarven Breakfast – this is an extremely good health and mana heal. It causes the dwarf to regenerate 8% mana and health per second for 13 seconds. This has a 10 minute recast time, so while extremely useful it is a panic cooldown.

High Elf Racial

Angelic Flight – This ability essentially lets you target a spot on the ground and your character performs around dramatic flying lean with angel wings spread towards the target. If you are an explorer, this ability will allow you to get some places that will be much harder for others without the ability.

Mathosian Racial

Motivational Roar – This ability is one of the more interesting ones. Essentially it increases the run speed of the caster and his party by 30% for 10 seconds. It has a 2 minute cooldown and represents the only racial group ability.

Bahmi Racial

Mighty Leap – This is probably my favorite racial, and the reason why I have several Bahmi. It is a targeted flying leap that works essentially the same as the High Elf racial minus the wings animation. Excellent for getting to places that are hard to get to. I’ve used this so many times to explore new areas.

Eth Racial

Agility – This ability increases the casters movement speed by 50% for 15 seconds. The recast time is 2 minutes and essentially gives the player a burst sprint ability, or if your class already provides one a second sprint. This seems to be extremely popular among PVP types.

Kelari Racial

Camouflage – This is another one of those extremely unique abilities. When cast it turns the Kelari into a fox for 30 seconds. While in fox form it greatly lowers the Kelari’s aggro radius allowing them to slip past many mobs unnoticed. Recast time is 2 minutes, and it has the side effect of despawning your pets.

None of the racials are so overpowered that you will be forever harmed if you do not pick a specific one. My personal preference is for Mighty Leap or Angelic Flight… since it adds a lot of utility for getting to hard to reach places. If you are a serious raider type, I could see Dwarven Breakfast coming in extremely handy as it provides a fast health and mana regen that could be used mid fight. For PVP players it seems like Eth is the natural choice since being able to move quickly on demand… always seems to be the right answer. Unfortunately while the Mathosian racial is interesting, it seems horribly gimped when compared to the Eth one. Sure it is group wide, but the time is 5 seconds shorter and the total speed increase is 20% less.

Choosing a Calling

Calling represents what most other games all your Class, but I can see why they chose a new name. Rift as a whole has a much more flexible class system if you view it from a traditional standpoint. There are literally hundreds of combinations of classes all dependant on which set of souls you choose. However I will get into this later. The Calling is essentially choosing between playing a Warrior, Rogue, Mage and Cleric. Each has its own sets of souls and with them special combinations and benefits. I will give a quick rundown of each of the Callings.

The Warrior is your traditional plate wielding beat-em-up class. They specialize in melee combat and the class has the most melee damage and tanking configurations of any of the callings. If you want to be that big guy in even bigger armor this is likely the calling for you. Deviating from the traditional Warrior role, they have a soul called the Beast master that lets you be a plate wearing pet wielding melee class. If you pay for the Storm Legion souls, it also adds the ability to do significant range dps with the Tempest. It has just been leaked that in Rift 3.0 they will be adding a true healing class to the warrior with the Liberator soul.

The Cleric is a chain wearing warrior priest, and represents the class with the most healing options. Additionally they can be extremely potent tanks and both ranged and melee dps. It is a mana based class, and comes with all the constraints of having a limited pool of resources. However almost each soul gives you some way of regenerating this resource. As a Shaman you have the unique ability to giving splash healing to the allies around you while dealing significant amounts of damage. If you are the player that always plays a healer, and only really cares about playing a healer… then this is likely the class for you… as you will have the maximum number of potential healing configurations.

The rogue is your traditional leather armored scout class. They are a jack of all trades and probably support the most drastically varried playstyles. A Ranger/Marksman build can give you something very similar to a hunter or ranger pet class. The Riftstalker gives the class extremely potent tanking potential, and the Bard is the king of battlefield support. If you are the type of player that likes to do something different each time you play, then this calling might cure your altism. Additionally it has two of the most interesting classes I have played. Saboteur is essentially a mad bomber, in that you plant charges on your target and then with the use of a finish cause them to blow up. Often times a mob can go from full health to dead within seconds. If you choose to buy the Storm Legion souls it gives you the Tactician, which is an AOE support class that heals and damages enemies with its flamethrower.

The mage is your traditional cloth wearing glass canon with a few tweaks. They have the most options for pure casters of all the callings. However they have a few tricks up their sleeve. The chloromancer is an extremely potent main healer, and the Archon is an extremely powerful support soul. The Necromancer gives you amazing soloing power by adding in a series of typed pets covering all of the callings. With the addition of storm legion souls, you gain the Harbinger which is an unheard of Melee Mage… using powerful magic to conjure weapons and armor. It has been leaked that Rift 3.0 will add another role to the class allowing it to tank by using the Arbiter soul.

Choosing a Purpose

While the calling represents the general direction of your class, your purpose is essentially a template that represents what your class does. You are presented a screen with a number of preset purposes to choose from. Two things to remember… firstly the list shown on this screen is just a fragment of the total number of presets available and generally represent the easiest to play. Once you get into game, you can open your soul tree window and see other available purposes.

The second thing to remember.. this is just a suggestion… these are not fixed boundaries. You can literally mix any combination of three souls together. These combinations do not always work out, in fact certain souls work extremely poorly together. These purposes give you a few guaranteed to be good recipes you can work from. Each time you get points to spend, a blinking arrow will show you where to spend the points to keep following the purpose. At any point you can deviate from the plan if you so choose.

However if you are new to the game it is generally a good idea to follow one of the predetermined paths until you understand how the soul tree system works. The short list provided generally gives you a mixture of what has been determined are the most successful souls. For leveling I tend to stick to a purpose that gives me a pet like the Necromancer or Ranger… or a tanking purpose as these tend to give you the best survival. Melee DPS tends to be a bit squishy, and Ranged DPS generally involves a good deal of kiting around.

Choosing your Features

The last step before you are ready to get into the game is to choose your features and name your character. You can see above that Rift gives you a significant number of personalization choices. You can choose face shape, height, hair style and color, facial hair and markings. For the most part each race has mostly unique options for appearance so they end up looking distinct out on the battlefield. One thing to remember while you are picking your choices that they can almost all be changed inside of the game by going to the stylist.

In the past players have felt obligated to get everything 100% perfect the first time. This lead to spending an exorbitant amount of time on character creation, because you knew that once you hit create… you could never go back and tweak things. However with the addition of the free to play gem shop, you can even go so far as to change your race and gender in game with an extremely simple to use stylist interface. While I would not suggest changing your look on a whim, because it could get extremely expensive, extremely quickly… you are never completely chained to your original choices.

You’ve Created Your First Character!

There you go, now you have walked through all the decisions involved with creating your first character in Rift. Now the fun actually begins as you are teleported into the battle as either a Defiant or Guardian. I had initially intended to cover the user interface basics, but this post has ended up far larger than I thought it could possibly be. As a result I am going to cut things off here. In the coming days I will post a thorough rundown of the features of the user interface, including customization options. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the run down, if you make it in game, look me up on Belghast@Deepwood.