MMORPG Archives - Page 269 of 411 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Open World Dungeons

October 27, 2015 by Belghast

Throwback Zones

One of my favorite aspects of Destiny is the patrol zones. I can quite literally spend multiple hours in a given night roaming around on one of the planets or the dreadnought just doing “stuff”. I guess in some way they remind me of the way that dungeons used to be designed during the early days of MMOs. Back in Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot all of the dungeons you encountered were these wide open places that had no predetermined path through them. Players tended to carve them up into smaller sub dungeons, that were focused around getting to a specific spawn… and I remember spending many an hour with a group of friends essentially leveling our characters by hanging out in these dungeons. This is precisely what the patrol zones feel like… an almost dungeon experience with so many little offshoots and places you can disappear into if you know where you are going. I realize that essentially all of the Patrol zones are big loops, but there are several places where you can get off the beaten path, and honestly end up with relatively pristine hunting grounds if you just know where to look for them.

One of my favorite examples is on Venus, there is this place with a fairly rapid spawn Vex major Minotaur. On the days when you have the Vex Major/Ultra duty this area becomes heavily camped with players fighting over the ability to kill all of the yellow health Vex that spawn there. However if you just got a bit farther and get off the beaten path there is an area that is completely ignored that happens to have three praetorian spawns… aka major Minotaurs. I feel like the game rewards exploration and willingness to muck through dungeon like areas to see what is at the end of the path. What makes patrol so interesting to me is that you can visit most of the areas you can find in the strikes and missions that happen on that same planet, just if you make the effort to go there. I also love that Patrol mode tends to reward you richly with engram drops for your diligence and time spent wandering around looking for interesting bits. The dreadnought is this concept on overdrive, because there are so many hidden nooks and crannies filled with chests for you to find. At some point I am going to write up a blog post that explains all of the hidden goodies that I know of on the Dreadnought.

Halloween Is Everywhere

As strange as it might sound… there is in fact a Halloween event happening in Destiny. Doing actions while wearing a paper mache mask gives you candy… and when you fill up a candy bag you can turn it in for a loot box that will drop masks and candy… which acts as a short term buff. The only problem is… that this shit takes up inventory space.. and last night I actually ended up having an exotic shard mailed to me because apparently I had filled up the very spartan 20 slots of material space. If you manage to get a legendary mask, those can be kept past the event. However if you find a blue mask that you really like there is a way to save those as well upgrading them to legendary by using materials gained through disassembling other masks. On my first bag opened I got a legendary Speaker mask, which honestly is good enough for me. The masks are equippable head slot items… but have no stats so essentially by wearing one you are losing stats. There are a series of quests you can complete by wearing masks while doing activities out in the world. I am doubtful if I will actually complete any of them.

Other than that I had a night full of farming Vanguard Strikes, and managed to pull six exotics throughout the night. They broke out like this… 2 Helms, 2 Arms, 1 Chestpiece and 1 Primary weapon. Sadly the primary weapon was Last Word that I already had… and honestly is no longer that good of a hand cannon any longer. At the very least there is never a reason why I would use it over Hawkmoon. Engrams are so amazing when they drop… but so disappointing when they turn into something that you have no interest in. There are so many primaries that I really really want… like the Zhalo Supercell for example but the likelihood that I will actually pull one of them is pretty slim. I pulled a ton of engrams… so many that I had fifteen items waiting for me in my mailbox at the end of the night and that was after disassembling dozens of items that dropped while running the strikes. I did manage to raise my light level by one as well as picked up a few things that I thought were interesting like the unique legendary arms from the bond brothers. I also managed to level my defender a bit… which I am still finding relatively miserable to play as. Pretty much anything that is not “Super Hammer Bros” is going to be a let down at this point.

Week In Gaming 10/25/2015

October 25, 2015 by Belghast

The Sickly Bel

This week was an odd one in that I managed to catch some flu-like chest crud. I felt pretty awful most of last weekend, and then struggled to exist Monday and ended up coming home halfway through Tuesday. I chained Wednesday as well, and found myself in that place where I wanted to play something… but anything seemed to require too much concentration. This was after all the week I had early access to Star Wars Fallen Empire, and I did exactly none of the content. I poked my head in a few times to attempt to play my Sith Sorcerer and failed miserably at it. I have a few comments to make about my experiences, but the majority of my gaming time was spent playing Destiny. Apparently that game is largely muscle memory, and I can play it without having to think too much about it.

SWTOR: Fallen Empire

As I said in the intro, this week was the early launch of Fallen Empire the massively game changing expansion for Star Wars the Old Republic… and I barely touched it. I did pop in enough to get sorted out how some of the new systems work. Namely the way companions now exist as being independent of the abilities they use. This means if you no longer have to deal with companions you cannot stand just because they fill the role you want. As a result I swapped to using Andronikos Revel on my Sorcerer, because he loves it when I shock the shit out of NPCs that are not giving me my way. Similarly I would probably never run with a companion that is not Vette on my Sith Warrior, or always run with Kira Carsen on my Jedi Guardian. There is seriously nothing cooler than running around with Kira and feeling like a Jedi strike force, and having her also be a healer… just icing on the cake. As you can tell this is a super important change for me, and I am damned happy to see it go in.

Other than that the other big change for me is the fact that the NPCs are actually labelled as to what type of quest they give you. For example in the above image you can clearly see that this NPC is going to give you the Belsavis planetary quest. This makes it easy to ignore things like the non-soloable heroic quests or flashpoint quests you are not quite ready for… to keep them from cluttering your logs. The other big thing that I noticed was the way that the level scaling works. It seems like when you land on a planet you are scaled to the maximum level for that area, somewhat like Final Fantasy XIV scales dungeons. This means you can overlevel content… but just barely making it a bit easier if you wait for awhile to do a quest rather than doing it when it is on level. However there is never a point where content ever becomes useless to you, which means you can easily go back and farm early content if you are struggling a bit to progress forward. The loss of 12x class experience however means that pretty much to stay current you are always going to have to do your class quests as well as the main planetary story arc. In any case I think the expansion content is going to be enjoyable… if I ever actually play it.

All-Saints Wake

I don’t have a lot to talk about when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV this week, but I did poke my head back in for a few hours. This week was the release of the All-Saints Wake event that serves as Halloween for the game. As we talked about last night, holidays in Final Fantasy XIV are largely the tale of incompetent villains and in this case it is a repeat appearance of the Impresario the mastermind behind the Continental Circus. Over the years we have learned that this is really a group of voidsent that are trying to cause mayhem each year, and we the player finds new ways to thwart them. As cute as the story line is… the reason why you do holidays in games is to get stuff. This year we get the purple outfit that my character is showing off above, a new Pumpkin Butler minion, and for the first time this year an actual mount. We get to ride around Eorzea on a flying broom… that actually does fly if you have unlocked flight in a given zone. The thing I love about Final Fantasy XIV holiday events is that they are adorable, provide awesome rewards… and end up taking only a few minutes to complete rather than being a grindy mess that brings out the worst in players. If you are subbed you should definitely check it out, because while the quest is more enjoyable if you have done the previous years… it is still fairly easy to follow without that ancestral knowledge.

Devilian

I have some issues with this game, but since I am now in alpha/beta/whatever phase it is and the NDA has dropped I thought I would talk a bit about it this morning. My number one issue is the gender locked classes and the fact that they have very specific styles to them. The Berserker is a guts clone, the Shadow Hunter is a bare chested Bishi-elven alucard like character, the Evoker is spilling out of her dress, and the Cannoneer is a Loli. Out of those options… there is exactly one I can stomach playing as, which is the Berserker. The thing is…. all of these design decisions unfortunately have nothing to do with Trion Worlds which is the company bringing the game to non-Korean markets. As fraught as the classes are… the game is actually rather enjoyable once you get past its slightly odd control scheme. By all looks it is a Diablo clone, but it controls vastly different… and honestly reminds me a bit more of the way skill shots in League of Legends feel. You use your mouse for character facing and then use your number keys to fire off abilities. You can bind an attack to your left mouse button, and I am probably going to do that with my basic attack to make it feel more Diablo-like. What I have seen of the combat is kinda interesting, and the dungeons are really enjoyable. I am just struggling to get past the art direction decisions, because honestly… they make me really sad. This could be a really great game, if it didn’t have gender locked classes and the art design did not seem to be from a thirteen year olds “tee hee hee boobs” mindset. It will be interesting to see if I am still piddling with it by the time the next beta comes around or if I have decided that the game is simply “not for me”.

Destiny

Magical glow of an Exotic Engram… only to be dashed moments later when you find out its a damned helmet.

This week has been almost entirely devoted to Destiny. As I said before this was the game that I could play without having to apply much thought to it. A good chunk of the week was spent working on my Hunter who is now I believe 270ish light level, and all of the way through the TKK content. I cheated a bit and jump started the character to level 25 using the item I got from purchasing the Taken King. I have to say if they want to sell something on the cash shop… I would absolutely buy a second one of these. Going from 25 to 40 was not that bad, but I am just not looking forward to taking my Warlock from 1-25 to get there. This week has also been the resurgence of my appreciation of Auto Rifles. I completely the third Gunsmith faction quest and it ended up giving me an exotic rifle called the Fabian Strategy. This thing is just a blast to use and I love the way it sounds and feels as I rip through mobs. This has also caused me to dust off the auto rifles I had in my vault and I found a few others that I really like, one of which my hunter is currently using.

The other key activity for this week has been running level 36 strikes in an effort to get exotic engrams with three of coins. I found out today that I could be just doing level 20s, but honestly I kinda enjoy the slight effort the 36s provide. They go so much quicker than the heroics, but don’t feel like I am simply steamrolling them in quite the way that the level 20s do. Essentially my pattern has been to run strikes using coins until I get an exotic, then take a break for a bit and do something else. I am also attempting to keep both characters up to date on bounties each day, and my regular farming runs on the dreadnought manage to pay off big time… as I had more than enough Hadium Flakes to get my Hunter his sword almost immediately. The big chore is still trying to increase my light levels, and the most 290 grind is extremely slow. That said it still feels enjoyable because I am seeing a ton of drops in the process. Even though half of the things are going to turn out to be something I cannot use… it still feels good to see drops. Its like the game is giving me hope… even though moments later it is just going to dash them once again when I find out the exotic is another damned helmet.

MMOS Worth Playing: Lord of the Rings Online

October 23, 2015 by Belghast

The Underdogs

This is the third week of my MMOs Worth Playing series, and at some point I am probably going to stop doing this introduction. My focus on the games I pick is to try and choose some of the awesome titles out there that may or may not be getting as much love as I think they deserve. No one needs to do a post on the reasons why you should be playing World of Warcraft, because there are tons of sites currently covering WoW. However there are a bunch of games that slip under the radar for one reason or another, and my goal is to pick some of those and talk about the things that interest me about the game. So far I have covered The Secret World and Rift, and this week I am digging up a title that I have not spent nearly as much time as I would have liked playing. I feel like I missed the boat with this title, and at this point there is just too much content for me to ever hope to catch up. I am talking about Lord of the Rings Online, which honestly is a quiet juggernaut of available content and things to do.

The Hook

Shortly after posting my last write-up, someone asked me what the hook for Lord of the Rings Online was… and honestly if that title does not inspire magical tingly feelings down your spine then more than likely this is not a game for you. The hook of this game is and will always be that you get to wander around in the Middle Earth Setting from the Tolkien novels. That is perhaps the first distinction I should make. While this game draws some on the visual styling of the movies… it is very much a product of the literary source. As a result you are going to see more of the world than you ever saw in the movies. For example the movies cut out the entire Tom Bombadil/Barrow Downs section of the books… and here you get to experience them in all their glory. The Barrow Downs area was seriously one of my favorite parts of the early game, and exploring the tombs felt just like reading about the Barrow Wights for the first time. Rolling up on Weather Top, or Rivendell is just amazing… because here is this thing that you already know so much about… that you are seeing fleshed out and made far more real.

The biggest take away from the setting that I can give you is that it is huge, and feels more like a real world than most MMOs do. There are all sorts of little things that draw you into the world. When you ride past this or that stand of trees… it might scare a flock of birds to take to the air.. making it feel like this living breathing world that you get to explore. Travel is one of the frustrations most people have with this game, in that the it requires you to memorize a series of routes that remind me quite a bit of the way travel in Dark Age of Camelot felt. That said this also makes the world feel like something that actual people are living in… because people are messy and chaotic and pretty much buck order. Think of your own surroundings… is it actually laid out in a manner that is consistent from town to town? The amount of distance that you have to cross ends up slowing your gameplay down, and putting you in a mode where you are really enjoying the setting as much as you are the game. There are so many little nuggets of detail scattered through the land that you can only see if you are not passing over them at irrational speeds.

Completionists Dream

In many ways this game was doomed at launch by being thrown in a bucket of “WoW Clones” because honestly… the interface does feel extremely similar to the World of Warcraft standard. However the game has always felt like a bit of a throwback to an earlier time, and a much less arcade gameplay experience. The game has one of the more intricate and rewarding crafting systems, and I found wandering the countryside looking for nodes to harvest a pretty enjoyable use of an afternoon. Where the game gets really intricate however is the “Deed” system, which I realize is a proper use of the word… but for some reason I always think of housing. Essentially every action that you can take in the game more than likely has some sort of a deed associated with it. These deeds however are largely invisible to the user until they go to a specific area or do a specific thing. From there it starts a completion bar explaining what you need to do to complete the deed which then appears in your log.

What makes this system interesting is that they are for all sorts of tasks. They might involve you exploring an area and finding specific landmarks on the map and clicking on each of them, or they might involve you doing specific combat attacks a number of times. Some of them involve you taking down a fixed number of mobs of a specific type. Equally varied are the rewards. This game is huge on handing out titles for damned near everything, which makes it really interesting as you roam the country side. There are far fewer “Hand of Adal” type titles, and more intimate and custom ones. I for example tend to rock the “Enemy of the Dead” title gained from slaying members of “The Dead” type… namely undead, wights and the sort which are one of the ancestral enemies of “man”. The important bit from deeds is the ones that unlock your Class Traits.

This game is full of systems within systems, and the Traits are a talent point type system that falls into three categories: Class, Racial and Virtues. Class traits tend to increase the effectiveness of your class abilities. Virtues are pure stat increases, and the type of stats increased vary based on the virtue you are choosing. Finally the Racial traits are this odd mix of abilities and stat boosts that are designed to take the place of “racial bonuses” in most other games. The end result makes them feel far more fleshed out, and gives every race in the game a specific flavor other than their visual characteristics. The gotcha here is that in order to progress you really need to be paying attention to your deeds, because these traits end up giving you a huge boost to your effectiveness. In theory you could probably level through the game without doing any… but it would be highly unlikely that you could actually complete any of the end game or likely even dungeon content without some focusing through these abilities.

The Pricing Model

Turbine with Lord of the Rings was one of the very first successful and even viable free to play pricing models. It is a mixture of stick and carrot that no other game seems to have completely replicated. Completely free to play characters are extremely limited in what they can do. They are limited in their chat functionality, and the amount of money they can earn… and most importantly for me the number of bag slots they have access to. All of the rich systems in the game are essentially on an adhoc basis forcing you to purchase wardrobe access, auction slots, and individual trait slots. One of the interesting things about this system is that you transition from free to play status to “premium” the moment you purchase anything from the turbine store. This unlocks a bunch of things including increasing your bag slots to five, and this essentially stays unlocked for the life of your account. This means that once you have actually bought any of the unlocks it greatly upgrades your account making it pretty damned playable. Granted when I have played this game actively I usually subscribe, but over the last few weeks I have been poking my head in to take screenshots and found the game play pretty viable in freemium mode.

The downside however is that I consider the Turbine store to be one of the more expensive to actually purchase anything on. Horses are essentially $20 regardless of how you chop it by the time you factor in the mount and the actual riding skill. Compare this to Rift where you can pick up a basic mount for only a few dollars worth of in store currency. This was one of the first, but unfortunately it has not really taken into account the fact that other models are out there and are more equitable to the player. They do however run a lot of store sales, and unlike most games you can actually earn turbine points by completing content in game. Granted you are awarded them five to ten at a time.. and you need 2000 or so to unlock most of the things people would be interested in like new classes. It does however give players the option to grind out content to earn cash shop currency to purchase things like trait unlocks and extra inventory and vault storage. I file this system in the realm of not optimal but not nearly as “anti player” as the SWTOR free to play model.

The Community

The game is extremely rich and interesting… but in truth you are not going to be playing Lord of the Rings Online for the game itself. You are going to be playing this game for the amazing story that allows you to play a character in the background of this world as you mirror the events of the Fellowship. It is like playing Star Wars but playing Wedge Antilles instead of Luke Skywalker. You are doing super important things, but you aren’t ever going to get the kind of broad credit and fame that the stars of the show are getting. This ends up making the quests feel all the more rich because you know a bit of back story already, and they are filling in details of the setting and giving you insider information on the world. Even more importantly than this however… is that you will be playing Lord of the Rings online for the community. Now I am a huge fan of communities that are active and vibrant and I tend to be drawn towards role-playing environments… even though I am not myself much of a role-player. I currently play on the Landroval server and I have to say it is pretty amazing.

This game has spent so much time on providing settings for the players to interact and mingle, and has quite possibly one of the coolest sub systems I have seen in any system. There are instruments in game that can actually be played by the characters, or you can read in midi sequences from text files that then get interpreted with the in game instruments. This allows the players to do really interesting things… like hold concerts and places like the Prancing Pony Inn in Bree are a hotbed of folks showing off. I rolled in last night and saw the band from the first image above performing in a corner of the Inn. Outside there is a full concert stage, and normally there is another group set up there playing songs for the passers by. There is never a moment in any of the hubs where there is not some role-playing going on, and people have always been super open to answering questions from new comers. In terms of friendliness I would put Landroval up there with Antonia Bayle in EQ2 and Entity in Wildstar, and that is saying a lot. I have also heard that the Windfola server was pretty amazing… but unfortunately I believe it was a casualty of the server merges. It seems like about half of the people I knew from Windfola are now on Landroval… and another batch ended up moving to Arkenstone. I have a feeling that honestly whatever server you end up on, is going to be a great place to land. The game is well worth a download and giving it some time to explore. The biggest word of advice I will give you however is to take it slow. This game is a much more gradual game than players are used to these days, and if given the proper amount of time to allow yourself to wander and inhabit the world… I have a feeling you will greatly enjoy your experience.

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.