So, as someone who is very gunshy of MMOs, can you guys tell me if this has the potential to really compete with WoW? This isn't a troll post by the way, I'm just honestly curious. I suspect most of you have played multiple MMOs and are therefore veterans at the genre. My wife is pretty much addicted to WoW, I can't play it for longer than a month without getting sick of it again.
Things I do not like: gear progression is the entire (only) point of WoW. Everyone is a hero. Everyone is "epic." Is this game pretty much the same idea?
I admit to liking the idea of the Rifts, as that sounds really fun, but does it get repetitive? Or are they exciting and interesting enough that they're more fun than typical quests?
Thanks.
I honestly think it could compete with WoW given time. The game is incredibly polished for a launch-day product, and I've encountered only one bug so far which was more amusing than anything, my friend's head vanished. Only his head. He road around with no head for an hour before it fixed itself (by swapping helmets and then swapping back). I'm not sure what you mean about 'everyone being a hero' but at least in Rift the storyline tells you WHY you are so epic. You're an ascended being either granted power and brought back from the dead by the gods (Guardian) or revived in a tank and forcibly 'ascended' through super science (Defiant).
Gear does play a large part in the game, as with any MMO, but I think the class system blows WoW's out of the water.
The rifts are interesting. Last night an event happened in Freemarch, the Defiant starter zone. Keep in mind this is the newbie area... the powers of the plane of death revived an ancient being called the Iron Tyrant and his forces started marching across the zone. They would reach a quest hub, shatter the wardstone and set up their own foodhold from which to spawn more soldiers and they moves across the zone battling players and NPC's. When this all happened, it went from midday sun to night-dark sky without stars, and you could see rifts forming all across the zone. Huge iron golems were marching on the city, some of the enemies had ridiculous amounts of health (750k compared to a player's ~2000 at level 19-20) and the only way to stop more from spawning was to close death rifts and bring back 'shadestone' to the planar capacitors in the two major city areas to charge them. Once charged, these cut off the supply of reinforcements and allowed people to deal with the army that had already come through. We did eventually win, though one of the capacitors was wiped out by a golem and it was a close thing. Everyone involved got special rewards based on their contribution (which includes healing and buffing) and the darkness cleared.
After an hour or so we'd retaken all of the quest hubs by destroying the footholds as well, and it was mostly normal again though a LOT of rifts still remained to be closed when I logged out.