Rift Beta 6
Another Rift beta test is in full swing this weekend. Things are going smoothly so far. They held a “bring down the servers” event to test their robustness and they never went down. This game is getting more polished every day.
I decided to try a new soul combination this week. I went for a Paladin/Beastmaster/Riftblade build this time. I am really liking it so far. The Paladin is a defensive tank, so the extra DPS the pet provides greatly helps in getting things dead. It really comes into play when battling multiple mobs.
Some of the skills I like are the Shield Bash-type. There is just something satisfying in watching my shield smash into an enemies face and hearing the resulting WHACK! I was also pleasantly surprised to find that a Paladin gets an instant cast complete heal spell early on in his career. It’s on a 10 minute cool down, but it can still be the difference between death or surviving getting ambushed by a group of bad guys.
This is the soul build I am working with: Paladin/Beastmaster/Riftlbade.
I have tried many different soul combinations and I liked the majority of them. It is going to be difficult to decide what my main character is going to be when the game goes live. One thing is for certain, I am very tired of seeing the newbie areas!
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Rift Beta 5
The latest beta test for Rift, the upcoming fantasy-based MMO, has come and gone. A larger amount of players were allowed in this time to test the latest offerings from Trion. If their impressions of the same are close to mine, then they had plenty to like.
There are two opposing sides in the land of Telara. One side is “good,” while the other is “evil,” but that all depends on the point of view. Be that as it may, your first decision upon logging into the game is to select which side you want to belong to: Guardian or Defiant. Each side gets three races to select from. Character customization is very nice and detailed.
One worry of mine is that each side only has one starting area, no matter which race you choose. My worry was well-founded because with the influx of new testers the starting areas were packed. It was a literal sea of blue player names. As to be expected, competition over quest mobs was intense. I eventually got through, but this is a definite foreshadowing of a bigger issue when the game launches in March.
One of my first sights in Rift
The world of Telara is a beautiful one. The graphics used are of a more “real world” style as opposed to World of Warcraft’s cartoon style. I have always preferred the life-like graphical style, so I was definitely pleasedwith what I saw. My computer was able to handle it very well. It has an AMD Quad Core processor with an ATI 5770 video card. I couldn’t max every setting out, but I could darn close to it and still get very good frame rates. The only time I experienced major slowdowns were during rift events.
Broken castle with a rift in the background
Speaking of rifts, they are a major feature of the game. The barrier between Telara and the planes has been weakened, which allow rifts to occur across the land. Rifts are unmistakable because they are large and can be seen from a long distance. Once a rift opens, bad guys pour out of it, and it is your job to take them out. Failure to close a rift can result in an attack force gaining a foothold in your area, which will rampage across the land, terrorizing everyone they come across. If you are successful in closing a rift, you are rewarded with various planar currency, experience, and items.
A rift looms ahead
Another big feature in the game is how the Soul system works. Souls are subtypes of your class. You can use three souls at a time. For example, if you chose to be a Warrior when you went through the character customization, then you can pick among various warrior soul types. You could choose to be a Paragon, or a Riftblade, or a Champion. Or you could be all three things at once. There are many different types of souls to choose from, each with different skills. As you level up, you get points to put into your souls, which allows for a large amount of combinations to play with. To me, this is the biggest reason this game is so interesting. The possibilities are virtually endless!
I found the game to be is very good shape for being in beta test. Not once did I find any glaring or game-breaking problems. The game client never crashed on me. Everything ran very well. They have some class issues to work out yet, but overall, the game is very polished. I have high hopes for this one.
So, that is a quick summary of my early days of testing Rift. I can’t wait to play in the next beta event, which will start on February 4th. I hope to see you there!
Read MoreTomorrow Never Dies. Or Does It?
I was reading an article over on MMOCrunch entitled Phantasy Star Goes Offline In Japan when one sentence caught my eye. The author asks the following question: “If the (MMO) world was to end tomorrow, what would you do?” I found that to be a very interesting topic. How would you react if the MMO that you love, that you have played for years, suddenly announced that it was closing up shop in the near future?
I think that for a great many people, their reaction would be summed up in two words: Complete Panic. If this were to happen to a large and very popular MMO, you can bet that the online forums and blogs would explode with a wide range of diatribe. Depending on the person, emotions would surely range from outrage, disbelief, sadness, and depression. In a way, a lifestyle would be coming to an end. What would you do to replace it?
I don’t have much of a frame of reference for such a happening. I have played many MMO’s, but none of them has gone offline for good. Several games have gone down the tubes, but I suppose my judgement in what games to play is better than I thought. Asheron’s Call is probably the biggest game that I know of that went under. Motor City Online would be another. I didn’t play either of those.
The only experience I can relate it with would be the end of a beta test. I have had some incredibly good times at the end of a couple of beta’s I was involved with. The end of the Everquest beta was one of the best gaming experiences of my life. It turned out to be very special. Multiple gods attacked all over the Everquest world and most people were too low a level to defeat them. Giant skeletons appeared in my home zone of Qeynos Hills and wreaked havoc. A large army of orcs attacked players at the Crushbone zone. Rumors ran wild with tales of amazing things happening in one zone and then another. Traveling wasn’t very fast back then, so it took some effort to try and see as much of the events as we could. It was an incredible experience.
What made the end of EQ beta so special was what my friends and I did at the very end. Several of us met up at the Freeport docks just before the servers went down. These are friends that I met playing the beta and I still play with or keep in touch with to this day. When the server shutdown timer started to count down, we decided to swim out to sea. We kept ourselves underwater and swam out as far as we could. As the last shutdown timer was announced, we all turned our characters and looked at one another. A couple seconds later the screen went black with a You Have Been Disconnected From The Server message. It was such a surreal moment. Little did I know that EQ would hold me for more than five years.
So what would I do if Sony announced that they would be shutting down Everquest? First, it would make me sad that such a wonderful game that brought me into the MMO world would be going away. I would travel all over the game world, taking screenshots of everything I could, so that I would have a record of my favorite places in the game.
In the end, I would find myself smiling as I recalled all the fun times I had playing the game with great friends. On the last day, when the last seconds are counting down, you can be sure to find me at the Freeport docks. I will jump into the water and swim. I will swim as far as I can. Until the screen fades to black.
–Wolfen