A Touch Of Cthulu In Rift

A few months ago I decided to buy some Lovecraft, and bought a collection of stories based on the Cthulu mythos. In reading those stories there was a common thread that ran through them; mankind was completely utterly unable to comprehend the elder mysteries and those who faced them were driven insane.

So while playing Rift tonight, I was sent to a little place called Lakeside to meet with someone on a mission there.

When I arrived, I was told that the inhabitants were behaving strangely, and that the quest giver felt she was being watched. She was also having visions.

Of course when I sent to find out the details, and then to knock off the cultists I discovered, the citizens morphed into eldritch beasts called the Deep Ones. Upon returning to the quest giver wasn’t feeling better, in fact her headaches were getting worse. It looks like something is building.

I received the distinct impression that some in Trion are fans of Lovecraft. I love these little touches in Rift.

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Rift Progress – Leveling, Alts, and Invasions

I spent a good portion of last weekend playing Rift.

You might remember that I created a Guardian Cleric in order to check out the start of the Guardian story. Once I completed that, and found myself in the main starting area, I logged that character and loaded up my Defiant Warrior, Stropp. I proceeded to level him up to 16, and then, as is typical for me, I decided to create another Defiant alt.

The problem was, I found the Guardian Cleric playstyle more enjoyable than the Warrior. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the Warrior, I did, but that ended up nagging on me. So Boneshaker was born.

After running her through the tutorial area, I did some of the starter area quests and, being late on Sunday, logged off for the evening having reached level 8.

Last night I logged back in and proceeded to work through the quests. I find now that I’m getting used to the way things work in Rift, that I’m a lot more efficient. Rift seems to reward players with an easy learning curve. It doesn’t take long to figure out the best way to do things. So much so, that after only a couple of hours, I dinged level 13.

One of the coolest things about Rift, has to be the invasions.

On Sunday during the day, the area in which I was questing attracted the attention of a large number of werewolves, undead, Guardians, and other assorted invaders.

My first experience with this, at level 11, was to see a bunch of level 8 baddies approaching, and in noting the level difference proceed to engage… and get thoroughly womped. Fortunately, there were a lot of players around during these events including a bunch of fairly high level players. Still, protecting the wardstones turned in a bit of a hairball, and was chaotic, and fun.

At one point, I opened up the map and saw about ten invasion forces all headed to my location. Very cool.

More and more it looks like Trion have a real winner with Rift.

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Rift: The Defiant Are The Good Guys

Warning: There are some early Rift story spoilers in this post.

I mentioned last night that I had selected the Defiant faction in Rift, and that the opening story line painted the Defiant as the put upon in the Rift universe. I also mentioned that there were two sides to every story, and so I decided to put that to the test and created a Guardian Cleric called Majikthise.

Having just played through the starting zone I didn’t see anything to change my view that the Defiant are the good guys.

In the Defiant story, many of the NPCs had suffered great personal losses to the Guardians, and indeed, it was the Guardian faction that opened the rift that let loose Regulos.

In the Guardian story, the Defiants were simply the bad guys and had to be stopped at all costs. Their crime? Attempting to replicate Ascension using technology. Something the Guardian faction took as a great afront to themselves and their gods.

So. In essence the Guardians started the war in an attempt to crush what they saw as heresy.

I was kind of expecting some kind of reasoning by the Guardians to justify that position, but it simply seemed to be simple zealotry.

Not that that’s bad. I find it refreshing that the bright and shiny guys are cast as the villains. Too often we see stories (and real life) where awful acts are justified by the excuse that it’s the ‘good guys’ doing the acts.

I also found interesting the two elements of the time travel aspects of the Defiant/Guardian story.

The Defiant story started at the end of the world. Regulos had effectively won and had destroyed everything, conforming all souls to his purpose. The goal of the player in that story was to fix the machine that would send him back in time to the current game time period.

The Guardian story was more like a prologue. It starts twenty years before the events of the main game story where the Guardian king has just done the dirty and has released Regulos using Defiant technology. The player in this quest chain effectively puts paid to the plans of Regulos and smacks him with a dirty great hammer, shattering him and putting him into statis for a time. The player is then sent forward in time twenty years by the gods of the Guardians.

I’m sure that I’ll end up playing more Guardian at some point, but for now I’m happy to have picked the good guys.

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My First Few Hours In Rift

The Rift patching took a little longer than the initial time suggested, but around 9:30pm last night I was able to log in to the game.

A month after the release the notable thing was that there were no queues, but quite a few servers did have a medium population. I picked one of the busier servers, as that is where the Casualties of War have set up. Considering that I play during the US offpeak period having servers with medium pop is not a bad thing. When I finish this post, I’ll be logging in again, and since it’s mid Saturday morning here I expect the number of players online to be much greater.

Anyway after creating my Defiant Warrior I logged in to the newby area. I’m quite glad I went Defiant as the story line paints the Guardians pretty much as zealots who want to control everyone’s beliefs and are willing to kill them if they don’t conform. Very much like the inquisiton period in Europe. Of course there are two sides to every story, so I’ll definitely need to create a Guardian and play through that intro. However, since the guild is Defiant I’ll be spending most of my time there.

Oh, BTW my characters name is Stropp of course. I chose the Bahmi, mostly for aesthetic reasons.

The first thing I noticed after logging in is what others have commented on. Rift is graphically a very nice looking game. The Defiant starting zone is very foreboding.

The starter area took me along a fixed path, progressing the Defiant story in a fairly standard way. For the most part it was kill x of something and collect y items. There weren’t any other players in the area, so I figure it was instanced as is the way of starter areas these days. At the end however, as I was about to go through the time portal, a rift formed, and I was given a taste of how the public quest system worked. A few shades of Warhammer there.

Once through the portal I was in the world. It was fun to see a few characters react to my presence, one fainted as a I walked past. These are the little things that make a game great.

At that point it was running quests.

I haven’t yet explored much. I want to get a handle on the systems first, but I fall into the explorer archetype of gamer so at some point I’ll be wandering around looking for things to see.

I ended up playing the game until 1am. It’s plain to say that I quite enjoyed the game, but there are a couple of things to mention.

The controls feel a little clunky. Once I got more than one Soul, and a few actions on the hotbar, I noticed that my keypresses\clicks on the buttons had to be timed exactly to be effective. If I clicked on a button a little early, the action didn’t register. No biggie there, that simply means that Rift doesn’t queue actions and that I have to be a little more involved in the combat; that’s something that some players have been calling for a while now.

However one thing I’d like to see. If I don’t meet the criteria for a combat action, dual wielding a couple of weapons for instance, then the button should be disabled. That’s good GUI design practice.

I’ll end up here saying that the other thing to mention is that I ended up last night with some measure of confusion about the systems. Certainly the Soul system seems powerful; I chose Riftblade as my first Soul, and from the recommendation the game gave chose Champion and Paragon as my second and third Souls. This system has similarities to World of Warcraft talents, but adds extra dimensions to that system. Being a noob to Rift I find myself a bit unsure about where best to spend the points I get when leveling. So far I’ve only dumped points into Riftblade.

I figure that as I continue I’ll work these concerns out. Of course, a bit of forum research might be in order to figure out the best way to go.

My verdict then. It’s still a little early to say I love it and will continue playing after the free months, but I’m enjoying Rift so far and have hopes that once I get used to the systems will stick with it for a while at least.

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Oops! I Did It Again…

I did it. Sigh. I bought Rift a few minutes ago, despite the warnings I received on my earlier post.

I guess now I’ll be subject to a set of symptoms including, but not limited to, feelings of elation, sleeplessness, decreased sexual appetite, social aversion to the real world, and a distinct tentacle fetish, according to Grimnir. However, since I am over 10 years old, and not quite elderly (yet) or even a militant extremist, Amish, a hard right wing conservative, a members of the Tea Party, or Tibetan then I should be able to play the game successfully.

As I write this the patcher is hard at work downloading at 777KBs and telling me that the download should be complete in about 3 hours, around 9:30pm my time. Perhaps I should get dinner, watch some Time Team, 2 1/2 men, and other vague TV shows until then.

Cheers all.

Update: BTW, this isn’t an April Fools prank.

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