Very nice writeup, Isabelle. Good luck keeping that last nail in regarding the MMO = Grouping mindset. My position is the same as yours, but the players who absolutely need   to group just don't get it. During the Rift Head Start, seeing posts on the official forums demanding that people be forced to leave their Autogroup function on made it much easier for me to pass on committing to the game.

I've had some great experiences in MMORPGs over the past 9 years, but lately, they're just not there. Pity. I'm hoping that ArenaNet's design vision manages to change that.

You know, I almost broke down and ordered a copy of this last night, but came to my senses when I realized that anything worthwhile from this event is only going to drop from the big raids. No thanks. Rift marginalizes soloers pretty much the same as every other MMO. I'll just hang onto my money.

Big deal. This is a clear example of why game companies put so much focus on courting big guilds. No mega-guild speaks for the community, only the portion which absolutely has to follow some crowd like a bunch of silly sheep.

Catering to big guilds is a sure-fire way to alienate players who don't need to be part of the crowd. No wonder it's becoming a trend for people to play a game for the first month, then drop it.

Nice way to make people who aren't interested in being part of a guild feel like second-class citizens.

Originally posted by Aglaranna

Originally posted by AkuheiKoyi

Havn't started playing yet, but I'm thinking about buying 3 months of founders pricing when I do before months end.  It'll be something to do and help pass the time through July, and hopefully SW:TOR and/or GW2 launches won't be long after that.

Hmm...dunno if anyone has replied to you yet, but I think you are out of luck now. If I recall, you only had until Mar 15th to pick a payment plan that included Founder's Pricing. And now your only option is regular pricing. I could be wrong but that's how I remember it.

Oh, and I chose the 3-month plan, so will be staying for that at least. We'll see what's up after that, if anything has been changed (professions and pretty lackluster and apoth is borked) or been added at that time. If not, most likely that will end my sub there.

 The offer's been extended until the end of the month. I guess they didn't get the response they'd hoped for. I would point out, though, that, at three months, you're only saving a slim 3 bucks from the regular 3-month sub. Take a look on their pricing site and compare to see if giving Trion that much money up front is worth it for you.

It was developed for bloody consoles, that's where it was doomed. Sooner or later, these companies are going to have to figure out that you can't shovel console-centric gameplay at PC gamers and expect them to pay for it. Why don't these developers have the stones to release console-only MMORPGs? They want the PC gamer's money, but don't want to develop with them in mind.

Crash and burn.

Two things have dampened my enthusiasm for this title. First, I have strong doubts that Funcom can develop a game for the XBox without shortchanging the PC players. So far, mixing console and PC has proved to be a non-starter, especially for Funcom. The only reason I can think of that would make them stupid enough to try this again is Microsoft $$$.

The second turnoff is all the talk about teams. Groupers, of course, love having game mechanics that force others to play with them, but, as a confirmed soloist, I'm sick of shelling out a monthly subscription to develop content that I'll never see. Most games that focus on grouping wind up trying to draw back solo players when they can't maintain a decent player population.

I'm still watching to see how this all shakes out, but I'm not at all optimistic, as much as I'd like to see a decent game in this genre.

Whoopee. Another "grouping is more funner" design philosophy. Now, thanks to Rift, SWTOR, and now this, I'm going to be saving a lot of money not buying MMOs for the foreseeable future. I'm done paying for content that I'll never see. At least with Guild Wars 2, they're not going to be charging me a monthly rate to play.

Grouping is only fun for people who like it. There are those who won't do it no matter how much developers do to drive them into it. We'll just stop playing...and paying!

Originally posted by Loke666

Originally posted by watchawatcha

uninspired is usually backed up with facts.  I could call WoW uninspired because it took EQ UI and 3D modeling and stole the IP from Warhammer.  I wouldn't though because I don't think that would be fair to WoW.  That's probably what he was getting at.

Wows IP is far from Warhammer. Wows world is cute, no rotgut drunks lying in their own vomit on the streets, no mutants hiding in every shadow, no weird slanesh cults doing perverse rituals. You surely have not played the warhammer RPG game, possibole some Bloodbowl to speak like that.

As for Rift being uninspired, some parts of it is uninspired. A lot of the quests and the layout of the citites really feels like a hasty work.

Other part of it shows hard work however so I would't call the entire game uninspired. So you are kinda both right or wrong.

 Loke, now you're making me pine for the Warhammer game that could have been.

Incidentally, I said that I found Rift uninspired, based upon my own experience. Others' mileage may vary, but that doesn't invalidate my own perception, nor should it. It was a subjective comment.

Originally posted by felore

"uninspired" caused me to stop reading people these days

And somehow, because you seeming have a different perception, it negates mine? "People these days" indeed.

Note: Punctuation is your friend.

Rift, for me, turned out to be rather uninspired and is nowhere near the experience that WoW was at release. Playing on the last day of the "Head Start" (aka: server load testing), I found myself missing the Azeroth I remembered, but Ghostcrawler and Cataclysm have pretty much burned that bridge. That got me thinking. Blizzard doesn't seem to interested in asking, so I'll ask it here. If you've stopped playing World of Warcraft, what one thing would it take to make you consider jumping in the barrel again?

For me, it would be the announcement that Greg Street has been removed from the WoW development team. How about you?

Okay, Bill, we get it. You like Rift, that much can be gleaned from your past few columns. To me, you come off a bit starry-eyed over the whole thing, lacking critical objectivity. The take-away I'm getting from these sometimes gushing "impressions" is that Rift is "okay", but I'm not getting the sense that it's something people are looking forward to playing for any extended period of time. Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but I always thought that one purpose of a subscription-based MMORPG was a persistent world that people wanted to come back to month after month. I don't get that feeling with Rift.

I know that "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" is a popular admonition from people who become "fans" of something, but people rely on writers for sites like this to step out of themselves a bit and offer a more criitcal analysis for a product that is requiring such an investment in time, money, and emotion.

If anything, Rift is a step backwards. The developers pared off a number of features that players have come to expect in modern MMOs, either believing that they were unnecessary or trying to slide by on the cheap. Not surprising, I suppose, since most of the development team who have experience have worked on games that are largely considered failures.

 It boggles my mind at how enthusiastic people have become about a game that really offers less of an experience than what is currently available. I expect that many of them will wake to a "morning after" revelation within a couple of weeks of playing Rift.

I would be willing to cut Trion more slack if they weren't so busy hyping the hell out of this thing. I've yet to hear much about what they plan to do after launch. Given what I've seen, I can see the developers with their fingers in the wind, ready to make the same kneejerk reactions to forum rumblings that I saw during my time in the betas. They really don't seem to have a clear idea where they plan to take Rift.

I can't see Rift being much more than a 30-day wonder. At first blush, it's interesting enough, that is, until you start discovering that the game is very linear and you quickly find yourself on the well-worn rotation of quests, rifts, and instances. Crafting, which could have given people more to do has been pretty well gutted, I'm guessing so that you'll be pushed to farm Favor (or whatever they're calling Reputation) to get the more interesting recipes. Apothecaries, at present, are a joke.

Rolling alts is tedious as well, especially knowing that you'll be playing the same content over and over. What the game gains in being technologically sound is far overshadowed by the sense that Trion has really very little in the way of creative talent. Rift is for playing "toons" that you'll likely not become attached to. Telara wears thin very quickly.

So far, I'm not sure if my code registered or not. What a messy registration setup!

Rift is fine for those who enjoy being in a group and absolutely "need" to have an MMO to play. After WoW drove me away when it became "World of Ghostcrawlercraft", I threw myself into Rift's betas and have been consistently underwhelmed. Trying hard to find reasons to buy a game is never a good sign.

Trion's scrambling hard right now to sell boxes, but I see the signs that Rift will have one brief, shining moment, then will burn out quickly. There's very little here to sustain a game long term and that's borne out by the sheer number of people who have commented that Rift will keep them occupied for a month or so. That's not very promising.

Originally posted by mastersomrat

Solo is great.  That being said... All MMO are better played in groups.

 This is subjective. For me, grouping is more trouble than it's worth. That said, after playing to level 30 in the betas, as a soloist, I had more of the same tired second-class-citizen feeling.

A big reason that the queues are better under control is that they tweaked the AFK detection. Apparently, a lot of players were leaving the game logged in for hours at a time while going to work, school, etc. The wait that they were trying to avoid for themselves they were helping create for others. Now, apparently, the game is supposed to boot them out after a certain time.

Truthfully, I'm not sure I would have predicted that behavior, but at least Trion got right on it.

Everybody and their dog was a registered account user, thanks to last week's marketing blitz, better known as "Open Beta". Anybody playing right now can still cancel their pre-order (except for the saps who bought direct download). I doubt Trion will be quite so enthusiastic about their 30 and 60-day sub numbers.