I’ve been playing Rift!!!

My favorite thing about Rift has to be the dynamic content…specifically the huge zone wide invasions.  I love the fact that a mass of random people will band together and work towards a common goal.  I’ve been playing Rift for a few months now and I still enjoy the sight of dozens of people galloping across the zone together, dishing out death to everything they see.

I play mostly on a PvP server.  Zone invasions can be pure madness.  Usually, both factions work together.  Sometimes, fights break out, resulting in crazy PvP battles involving masses of people.  Once the final invasion boss is dead, most of the time, a huge battle erupts.  It’s a lot of fun.

Trion (the developers) did a great job designing and creating the dynamic content for Rift.

My second favorite thing about Rift is the freedom to customize your own character.  The class/role system is extremely flexible and I love it.  In addition, each class can play different roles depending on the build (tank, dps, healer, support) and it only takes 2 seconds to swap.  It adds so much depth and flexibility.  If your group needs a tank or a healer, I can easily swap roles and fill the position.  Unlike other games with a lot of flexibility (i.e. Champions Online), respecs are very cheap.

It’s now been 3 months since Rift launched.  I think Trion can safely pat themselves on the back for a job well done.  The launch has been a huge success.  Unlike other triple-A MMORPG’s released in the past few years (like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online), Rift seems to be doing a good job holding on to their subscribers and attracting new gamers.  After a few months, Rift still has more than enough depth and content for most gamers.  And they are adding more at a breakneck speed, with monthly content patches.

To an MMORPG gamer, I wholeheartedly recommend Rift with very few reservations.  Rift does stick to a lot of tried and true MMORPG conventions like questing, the basic combat system and instanced PvP battlegrounds.  But the important thing is that it does it very well…polished and relatively bug-free, which is extremely rare for such a new game.  The major innovation, the dynamic content, makes a very real and tangible difference to the standard MMORPG gameplay.

As always, I’m alt-crazy.  I’m currently playing a 50 Defiant Warrior (Tank & DPS), 50 Guardian Cleric (Healer, DPS & Support), 30 Defiant Rogue and 30 Guardian Mage spread over 2 servers.  50 is the level cap.  Yes, it’s kinda interesting playing both factions on the same server, especially when it’s a PvP server.  I’m gearing up in the endgame expert dungeons, running with guildies or using the random LFG dungeon finder.  I’m having a great time.

For people looking to get into Rift, I highly recommend picking a populated server.  There is a huge difference between playing on a high versus low population server.  Check out Rift Shard Watch for some basic population information to help you pick a server.

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