So I joined the last 3 betas on Rift and have been playing the game for the last month or so. I was impressed enough with the game to pre-order. Now I'm in the Head-start program.
Is this game breaking new ground? Well, only if you consider breaking well trod ground something new. Rift is not the next step in mmo games. It does take what was good about certain other "games" and exploit them well. I see a lot of other games in Rift. I see a great deal of Warhammer Online artwork and game concepts in Rift. I also see a lot of WoW in the game. As well as Lord of the Rings Online. Again, Rift has taken the best of the innovations and created a very solid game underneath them. Plus they have managed to create a very nice buzz around their product which has led them to 1 million head-start accounts. It is still speculation if they will gain a million more with the official release on March 1st and will be able to keep all their subscribers in the coming months.
The game has two opposing forces, called Guardians and Defiants. One side being "good" the other "bad". The variation of this mmorpg theme standard of opposing forces in Rift has made me extremely uncomfortable. The player characters in this Rift setup are, for all intents and purposes, all powerful deities. Unlike other games, in which the gamer is an average, every day nobody, learning to take part in a campaign...Rift characters are gods. The NPCs treat the player characters as gods. The cut scenes are bombastic, with a booming narrator crowing about the player's sanctity. Let me just say it bluntly, I felt as though I were watching fascistic propaganda. This game is the very example of Susan Sontag's Fascist Aestheticism idea. I am aware of the dangers of these ideas floating around the internet at the moment. But I'm not sure how this is affecting the people who play Rift or other games like it. I can only conclude that these types of UR Fascist ideals soften us up for the real thing when it takes form in some kind of political ideology.
My discomfort has extended all the way to the actual character models themselves. There is little option to personalize these characters. They remain, first and foremost, fantasies of the developers. Instead of being a projection of the player's will, they are just theme park vehicles for the player to ride in.
The characters have only one skin color....WHITE.
If you want to be something else, you can be purple or maybe blue. But those colors are for baddies...i.e. Defiants. If you are good in this game, you are caucasian. You are not black, you are not asian, you aren't even any other ethnicity under the sun.
Like I said....Fascist Aestheticism in all its glory.
The models also have this strange ideal of a misshapen small head to large body ratio. If you check my portrait screenshot, you can see the head/body disparity. It looks like a voodoo head on a regular body. Why this is so, I have no idea. During beta, many players complained about it, including myself. But the models were never changed. I'm not sure if they could be changed. I also have a feeling that the developers are staunchly against the change because these characters are THEIR fantasies not OUR fantasies. We are going to take what they give us and like it.
The actual gameplay is smooth. There are minimal problems. Probably the most glaring problem right now, is that people can't roll on the servers they want. The beta servers which survived release, are all intensely popular and have long wait times for entry. It has led to a lot of wailing on the forums. I could not get on my beta server, so instead I created a character on a new server. Which has a nice population and no wait times. There are enough people to take part in public Rift quests. These Rift invasions are fun and rather exciting. I'm not sure how successful they will be in the long run as population thins out. Hopefully the developers have kept this eventual problem in mind.
I don't believe that I will stay with this game past my initial subscription. Mainly due to the problems with the game that I have listed. These problems are all artistic and thematic. The technology platform is rock solid. And the gameplay is virtually problem free.
It all depends on taste. Will it be a WoW killer? No. But it could give all mmorpgs a run for their money for a bit. Before the next shiny is released.
