No company out there wants to release a game on the premise of people playing "a couple of months" then moving on. They need retention, keeping players engaged and interested. Playing for a month and then moving on to anticipating the "next big thing", players are actually creating the environment where less and less new games will be released. Current games are not competing with WoW 6 years ago, but most of them would come up short even if they could.

Rift has a lot of good points, but they have written off so many aspects of a good MMO as being unnecessary or of lesser importance, that the game feels shallow. Initially, I was going full out, buying a CE and a 6-month Founders sub. Then, after leveling several characters to the 15- 20 range, I really questioned whether I would even feel like playing after the first month. I find myself, as with Aion, AoC, and others, that I can skip this one and not feel like I've missed anything. The sparkle on Rift chips off pretty quickly.

One of the things I liked most about Star Wars Galaxies in the day was the fact that you could completely opt out, remain neutral, and go about your business. That was before the SWG devs decided that they were going to nudge players towards one side or another and that no one really wanted to play Uncle Owen. I'm pretty non-competitive unless you try to weasel in and steal something out from under me.

Frankly, I think that there would be less polarization if other companies would offer neutrality as a viable playstyle instead of forcing players at the outset to choose one of the now-traditional "two warring factions". WoW could have done this easily with the lore as it existed at release. Instead they helped create the "love it or hate it" view of PvP.

I think PvP. as it has developed, is a blight that ends up destroying a game from within. PvPers are never satisfied and their outcries inspire developers to beat the fun out of their games in a quest for the mythological "Balance".

Originally posted by Elikal

I can only agree with Teala, which is why I gave up posting on their forum long ago. Every time I had posted even something remotely critical, I was jumped on my an agressive fanboi mob. Alas moderators there do nothing for you if you are not among the fanbois.

 This is especially fun on the beta forums, where you're supposed to be providing feedback. Most of the time anymore, if I see something, I report it ingame and save myself the aggravation. I will, however, jump in when I see that people are spouting misinformation in a deliberate attempt to mislead others. There's a hell of a lot of that going on right now.

Rift does feel a lot like Aion to me, just with more booms. I'm still on the fence. It's been said to death that the Trion devs are responsive. That's true. They'll respond to a massive storm of player discontent, but I rather see a development team that's more proactive and doesn't make boneheaded kneejerk decisions in the first place.

Originally posted by jerlot65

To be honest I jsut read the title.  I just wish the OP could walk in dev's shoes and maybe wouldn't be so quick to bash people working very hard on a game.  If you want to critique the game, fine.  But bashing dev's who created a pretty solid game is ignorant.

 No more ignorant than this. Statements like yours are why developers think they have a pass when it comes to putting out content. There's no point saying, "Oh, we'll understand" because when it comes down to plunking down hard cash (unless someone else pays for it for you), developers have to deliver. Right now, everybody can afford to be a starry-eyed fan if they want to. Unless you were silly enough to pay for a digital download in advance so you could get a beta spot, you haven't spent a nickel on Rift. But when release has come and gone, others have reached level cap and are bored, and the new has rubbed off, people who spout sentiments like yours are off down the road in search of their next "true love".

This has happened over and over so many times since the release of World of Warcraft, that it's almost comical to see so many offer up blind faith in another group of devs (who may actually have worked on the last failed title) and another shiny new pastime offering a "next generation" experience. Get your head out of the clouds and hold these developers' feet to the fire and just maybe we'll eventually wind up with a game that's decent enough that people will support it after the free month is gone.

[mod edit]

 Don't start that old saw about the "real" content being in the levels you haven't seen yet. It's been used with every recent MMO and has been proven a myth every time. Say what you will. We don't have to be developers. We're more important because potential customers are the real experts! We know what works and what doesn't. Any development company that ignores that is on a fast track to obscurity.

I don't have a problem with similarities, but I do take issue the the massive number of shortcuts Trion has taken. I'm a believer in the philosophy that if you can't improve on what exists, don't waste the time, resources, or emotion on what you're doing.  Rift's design is the well-worn boxes within boxes concept. You are once again funneled through a chute to get from one stage of the game to the next. No deviation. The rifts are a side distraction, but little more and after you've played through a few of them you begin to see the sameness. After a while, you're saying, "Oh look, another water rift," as you pass by on your way to the next quest hub.

The souls system is pretty much an exploded version of the WoW specialization swapping system, You're not creating a character, you're developing a collection of specs that you can flip through on the fly. Personally, I had trouble figuring out what to do when I switched souls. You become a little good at everything and skilled at nothing.

The races are lackluster and playing them doesn't change that. I usually develop an attachment  to the characters I play, even in beta testing. In Rift, as in the latest incarnation of WoW, I found myself playing a "toon" in a world that I found hard to care about.

Originally posted by Totec

Originally posted by Loke666

Originally posted by deniter

I agree with Loke; MMOs in future are going to have more than one direction. WoW managed to combine FPS with traditional MMORPG and thus got gamers from both genres.

So, these new themepark games are, in fact, hybrids with some elements from each genre, and developers seem to believe it's the most lucrative design pattern for an MMO. But is it really? WoW started with no BG's, Arenas, PvP gear or honor points. The first wave of their clients were 'real MMO gamers' who were searching for a new game to play. When Blizzard started to develope the FPS part of WoW, these people were the first to become discontent, if not unhappy. I was one of them.

Of course we were naive and thought Blizzard made a mistake and they will fix things soon, but they didn't. It was part of their plan; to have both MMO and FPS gamers in WoW at the same time, both somewhat unhappy and arguing with each others on forums.

If you think a game design of an FPS and an MMORPG, they are so different from each others that one would think it's impossible to have both in one game. FPS has no levels, gear, skills; all are equal, while RPG wants a player to develope his character, gain powers that other players don't have yet, get money to buy stuff, etc.. So, how did WoW manage to keep it together? Answer: they didn't.

RPGs are all about the world where players live, die, fight, hunt food, catch fish, etc.. FPSs are for quick action with minimum down time. You can have different maps and stuff but basically it's the same battle every time.

Bottom line: It's time to try bigger or smaller molds in game design. The current standard is getting old-

Well said. As Dubya said: "The future will be better tomorrow". 

I think there is enough players to make a few real roleplaying games. But that doesn't mean that we wont see different types of MMOs, some deep other shallow, some hard other easy. If all devs aim to exactly the same players a lot will feel left out while all the games have to fight to get the same players.

We need new games, not old ones. And Wow is not new if you wonder, it is just slightly newer than EQ (well 5 1/2 if you want to be precise).

While I see your point. Don't you think that most of the MMO players that used to enjoy these RPG's that focused on the world have migrated to the newer generation of MMO's?  Are there still enough people that want this slower paced world to persuade game developers to make a game for them? Aren't most of them happy in their current theme park games? 

 While it's true most of us have migrated, you'll notice that we keep migrating. Nomads looking for a home that no longer exists. For me, Star Wars Galaxies was the pinnacle of persistent world development. Not that it wasn't without flaws, but if SOE had simply fixed what was broken instead of reaching for some unseen playerbase that never existed, they might well have set the standard instead of what we have now.

Most of us back in the day seized on to WoW because, in the beginning, it felt like a real world. But Blizzard, instead of building on that decided to spend their energies exploring the limits of how little they could produce, how far they could get from the original design, and still have people willing to pay for their product. The audience has been conditioned to be less discriminating.

Originally posted by Loke666

Originally posted by LordDraekon

Small wonder, considering that the "designer" most responsible for the horrid class changes in WoW has redefined the "Role" in role-playing to be the role players play within a group - Tank, Healer, DPS. No wonder the people who crafted characters are gradually being edged out the the "toon" operators. Pathetic.

I only heard a few morons use the term like that, do Blizzard really talk like that? 

 I wish I could find the actual quote, but when I read it, a big light when on for me! Greg Street is the one who decided to dump the individual class forums for the less well-defined Role forums. From that point on, whenever the world "role" is used, it is a direct reference to where you fit in the Trinity. The guy really doesn't understand much of anything beyond the numbers. It's no wonder Azeroth feels less and less like a world and more like a big chat lobby.

Small wonder, considering that the "designer" most responsible for the horrid class changes in WoW has redefined the "Role" in role-playing to be the role players play within a group - Tank, Healer, DPS. No wonder the people who crafted characters are gradually being edged out by the "toon" operators. Pathetic.

Say what you want about Raph Koster, but SWG was the pinnacle in community-building gameplay that didn't alienate anyone. I didn't craft much, but I kept a lot of crafters supplied with raw materials and never once felt like an outsider. If I needed something, I could sit in a cantina and browse craftsmen and inquire about commissioning whatever I needed.

The problem was that SOE kept trying to change the game by tacking more on instead of fixing what was broken. NGE killed it. Sony was wrong. Some of us liked being Uncle Owen.

Big deal. People in the business seem to like to slobber all over these groups, but some of us who have to share game worlds with them and their arrogance just wish they'd go away.

Before calling Rift anywhere close to being a sandbox, I'd suggest finding out what a real sandbox game is. Rift is all box, no sand.

As long as you've got player hubs offered up as quest targets, you've got a buffet of entertainment for those that enjoy making other people miserable. Trion has a bad case of developer multiple-personality disorder and doesn't seem to know just what Rift is beyond a mishmash of shiny features.

Rift is nothing more than another linear mind-numbing slog to maximum level (50 in this case) where you will run dungeons and warfronts until you start running out of people to play with because they've quietly slipped away to do something else. Frankly, the game feels a lot like Aion and the soul-swapping is little more than a gimmicky way of switching specs.

Save your high praise until the first sixty days have passed and the people who paid for a 6-month Founders subscription start lamenting wasting the money. This development team, despite all their own hype, doesn't have what it takes to pull this off.

Blizzard is suffering from an overdose of hubris and a real lack of creative talent. With every other MMO release trying to copy WoW, they've run out of places to copy ideas from. The game is rotting from the inside outward.

I'm not altogether sure that Trion is able to handle this. In reviewing various press releases from 2009 to now, there seems to be a disconnect on just what exactly the game's primary focus is. Developer statements even contradict one another. Scott had some pretty decent aspirations when he was Lead Developer for EQ2 and those didn't pan out. I have to wonder if the same thing is happening here. Hiring too many designers with their own agendas can quickly alienate your customer base. Trion keeps changing their core focus.

Also, I'm not encouraged by the sheer number of people who are saying that they'll buy this game, but likely won't stay for any significant length of time. Is this good? Is Trion content with creating a "filler" game?

Jon, you didn't mention Microsoft's nordic-flavored Mythica. I was disappointed when they backed out on that one. Ultima X was another one that had a high spot on my watch list.

Originally posted by Xasapis

Originally posted by Crynswind

...

Tera it's too easy,there are people at lvl 40+ after 3 days.

From my understanding, Korean players retained their beta test characters, thus the huge leap in levels.

 Beta characters have not been wiped. That said, though, those levels have been attained by people playing in five events, a few days each. People will be at level cap within the first week or two after release.

It's all about managing your expectations. In some ways, Rift is really good, but I'm getting this nagging feeling that the devs have taken far too many shortcuts, thinking that players won't mind once they become customers. The game suffers from the Aion syndrome in that, whatever character you create, you're going to be doing one of two identical leveling paths. WoW kept us busy creating alts by given a choice of paths while leveling, at least until Cataclysm "streamlined" everything. The souls system isn't really all that fantastic once you get into it. Some trees are pretty worthless right now. The trouble is, when you're choosing a specialization, you're only given the hype for that tree. It's not until you get into it that you realize that some of the trees are situational at best and not all that interesting.

Crisscrossing Telara and having to clear a path every time is tedious. But Trion is banking that people will be so burnt out by Rift predecessors that they'll commit to the game blindly and overlook most of Rift's glaring shortcomings. From what I've seen, they may be right. The real proof will come in the first four weeks after release. I'm betting that the people who are singing its praises now will be quickly disillusioned once they become paying customers. Trion's got four weeks to clean things up, but from what I'm seeing, they may not have a clue just how to do it.