RIFT - First Impressions

Started playing RIFT yesterday - I got totally bored with WoW and anyways it was too demanding a game at end game. I just was not able to find the time required to raid.

So, after a lot of thought, I signed up for RIFT.

Initial thoughts on the game : Its a game which could have been great. Comparison's with WoW are of course going to happen.

A lot of people would have told you that its a polished game. I will differ. Its got more 'realistic' graphics than WoW. However, a lot of things that we think about when we think of WoW are missing.

Some things which I think should have been taken care by the devs are :

• All races of a faction start at the same place. I find this a put off. If you have 3 races per side,they should start of in different starting areas. 
• All the races look the same, with hardly a difference in how they look unless you are a dwarf. Sure there are hundreds of customizations on how you look, but once you start playing in the 3rd person perspective, they all don't matter. Contrast this with WoW where the orcs look totally different than the taureans than the undead.
• An element of fun is missing. All the quests, the feel etc is so serious. It gets boring. 

The good and the bad of the game has to be the soul system. Essentially what it means is that you have 3 talent trees, and you can choose which 3 trees to use out of 8 available. This is pretty cool as it allows for a lot of customizations. However, since this is thrown at you pretty early pretty fast, you end up confused. As you get each new tree, you get 2 new spells with each. The spells in the different trees overlap many times, and this is lame.

I initially started out with a Warrior class - as I was looking at end game kind of content, but got bored.

Rerolled as a mage - who got the souls of a Warlock , a Necromancer and a Chloromancer. So far, this is feeling  much better as to what I like playing.

More updates at the end of the month of playtime.