This is one MMO you'll want to keep your eye on

Never judge a book by its cover. Or in RIFT's case, never judge an MMO just because it has magic, fantasy monsters and is, well, an MMO. A combination of Trion's own policy at hype management, and the game's easy-to-stereotype image on first glance has meant that RIFT has kind of snuck up on us. But like a Master Ninja, it pounced and garrotted us with its razor wire of awesome... or something. I need to work on that analogy.
 

And then the sky rained fire...

RIFT's mixture of archetypal conventions, modern MMO game mechanics and the odd bit of 'flavour' has really helped it create a unique image for itself. Like those quirky yet amusing ads you've probably seen around the place tell you, we're certainly not in Azeroth anymore. The world of Telara mixes various traditional high fantasy elements, with the odd bits of steam punk, and even time travel, to create a world and a story that's both engaging and well paced. Basically, Telara co-exists with six different elemental 'planes' which are in another dimension. However the barrier between the worlds is weakening, and so these dimensions are bleeding through into Telara. Depending on which faction you choose, the game could actually start when Telara is already overrun, and you need to be sent back in time to stop that from happening.

The class system seems very versatile so far : even though you can choose from four classic archetypes - Warrior, Rogue, Mage, Cleric - the 'Soul System' means that no two avatars, even if you replay a class, will be the same. Basically, each character has three slots in which they can insert a 'soul', essentially, a themed style of combat based on their class. So for a Warrior, the souls you could have would be Paragon - specialist in dual-wielding and skills related to that, Rift Blade - magic enhanced attacks, Paladin, Defence skills, and so on... You combine three different souls, and the skills that come with them, to spec out your character.

Souls are gradually given to you early on in the game, and respec-ing is cheap and easy to do. You get a certain amount of skills points per level gained, but if you decide you want to change souls (or even if you just want to re-assign your points), you can ask for them all back and re-deploy at will. This is proving to be the most robust and complex skills system we've seen in an MMO, reaching levels of possible The Witcher-like craziness. This could put off some people, but honestly it's worth sticking with it if you can, the game seems to do a good job of easing you in.
 

Nothing special in combat, but the focus on using skills keeps things interesting

One of the other core components of RIFT is where it takes its name sake - the Rifts. Using a form of Dynamic Content Generation similar to what NCSoft want to do in Guild Wars 2, the rifts so far have proven to be a delightfully engaging distraction from the main quests. These rift's can appear anywhere on the game map, and they instantly take over a terraform the local space. Everyone and anyone can then congregate and team up to take on this invasion, and you get rewards based on how much you contribute to the fight. With a lot of people about it can be hard to find a target all to yourself, but you get rewards even for assisting, so it's all good. Rift's also scale themselves up in difficulty depending on how many people are present.



As you will have seen from our earlier coverage of the game, there's a lot of content here at launch. Rifts we've talked about, you have the main PvE quest-line. There's PvP as well although that's not as central to what the game's 'about' we'd argue, it's there because it needs to be there. There's Raids as well, and tailored 'expert' high-level content (raids, rifts etc...) to keep end-game players interested as well, allegedly. As one of the lead designer's boasted - this will be the most fully-featured new MMO games ever, and we believe him. You've also got all of the usual suspects like crafting, pets, companions... even this notion of 'collectables' which seems interesting. We're not quite sure what they're about but it's yet another  thing you can do.

We've been impressed so far, so much so that we feel kind of bad for not giving it more attention earlier. We get the impression though that a lot of these more unique features - especially concepts like having to actually take back your own quest hub, were relatively recent editions, so this game has evolved a lot over the years. The pacing is good, the world is alive, and we're actually having fun. The only thing stopping us playing is the fact that, you know, I have a job and stuff I need to do. If I wasn't such a responsible adult (ED: Hah!) I'd be playing it right now instead of typing out this report.
 

There's a very casual approach to grouping

Whilst the game has already released in North America, unless you were in the Head Start period us Europeans will have to wait till Friday before you can get your hands on it. We've given you some impressions here based on our preview experiences, as well as the first ten levels or so of the gameplay. This is NOT an official review - we'll bring you that in a couple of weeks. Regardless, be interested in this game... even though I think we're a bit beyond 'WoW-beating' talk these days, this could probably be the closest I've seen in a long time.

Most Anticipated Feature: What else Trion will do with their Dynamic Content system and World events.