With seven open beta sessions under its belt, Rift: Planes of Telara is probably one of the most polished fantasy MMORPGs at launch. The graphics range from pleasing to breathtaking depending on one’s tastes, bugs are nonexistent or if some managed to survive they are certainly not show-stopping or heavily frustrating gameplay wise and all the game’s elements come together to create a fluid gameplay experience. But is that sufficient to keep a subscription based MMO afloat on a market in which free-to-play is the new rage? We took a look for you at what Rift hides under its shiny polished cloak so you can decide for yourself.

As polished as it can be, the game doesn’t take any chances and doesn’t come with anything new for the MMORPG genre. The old has been reshuffled and reshaped, wrapped nicely and advertised as next-gen. I’m sorry to point out, but there is nothing “next-gen” about Rift, apart maybe from the fact that the next generation mmorpg players might look at Rift as a trend setter if they are ignorant of the fantasy MMOs that came before it. Let’s start with factions for example: there are two, the Guardians and the Defiants, they both have the same goal, but they hate each other‘s guts with no apparent reasons apart from the fact that they tend to do things in different ways. Your next choice at the beginning of the game will be related to the class you’ll be playing. There are four general archetypes to choose from, none of them being even slightly original for the fantasy setting: Warrior, Rogue, Cleric and Mage.  The additional character customization allows players to mix together three souls (just a fancy way of saying “specializations”), each coming with their own skills tree and ability sets. The system, used before in other MMORPGs, allows the creation of highly specialized classes or of interesting hybrids, depending on the player’s preferences. But it also leaves room for a lot of design and balance issues, not to mention the fact that the total amount of usable skills resulting from three different souls is ridiculously large and adds an unnecessary difficulty level to the game.

The over flooded skill pool has a detrimental effect on the solo PVE combat, because every player will always have enough tricks up his sleeve to take on numerous mobs of close or equal levels without fearing a possible failure – and even if that occurs, the death penalties in Rift are insignificant. The triviality of the solo PVE encounters leaves you yearning for a challenge and unfortunately group PVE doesn’t rise up to it. Everything that involves some sort of group coordination is best avoided in Rift. Interface elements are not oriented or tuned towards group play and most of the on-screen information has no relevance group wise. For example in Rift you can only see your own dots and debuffs on a target even if that target is focused fired by other players, part of your group or not. The large number of skills per class also makes the idea of devising a lengthy battle plan to include all the game’s classes and souls against some might boss simply ridiculous.

The same issues also plague Rift’s PVP to some extent and coupled with others they make this section of the game a complete nuisance. The fact that PVP in Rift is limited to some instanced battlegrounds is an unpleasant surprise, but one that many will accept as a common and sufficient feature for a “next-gen” MMORPG. But there are other issues which are simply unacceptable, such as the lack of class icons, the fact that almost all the game’s characters can control some sort of pet and that pet targets have the same value in a tab-targeting cycle, lack of silhouette features to allow clear separations between one type of enemy and another, lack of clarity for ability animations to allow proper and timely responses, and the list can go on and on. In the end it’s better to simply consider the game has no PVP whatsoever and only an extremely good looking PVE section.

The PVE is dominated by the idea of rifts, which are planar doorways that allow powerful beings to access the world of Telara. They resemble the PQs (public quests) of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, in the sense that their difficulty forces players to team up, they are not instanced but placed in the open world, they have several stages and completion of one stage leads to the next one and completing the rift stages earns you rewards in the form of loot and experience points. The main difference between them is that rifts spawn in a random fashion across the map. This was probably meant to generate the feeling and the tension of a perpetual conflict, but since the elite enemies that appear through the rift are not mobile and can not leave the area defined by the rift, many players will simply ignore them and move someplace else. This also leads to situations where roaming groups of players looking for such rifts come together in the same location by accident and turn what was conceived to be a lengthy challenging experience into a trivial encounter. Another difference between the above mentioned design and that of the rifts is that for the latter there is no sentiment of accomplishment. All these rifts are just small battles of a much greater war and treated as being insignificant in the greater scheme. They lack independent stories, they lack cohesion both between their own stages and between each other, and apart from the loot, they offer no incentive to the player.  At first, driven by blood thirst and/or curiosity, you will walk into every rift you see, but after a few hours of gameplay their repetitive design will lead to boredom which in turn will make you ignore… the game’s main feature.

However, there is more to Rift’s PVE than these planar portals – nothing original indeed, but still quite a lot of content. Quests are nicely done and linked together in such a way that you always have something to do, some target, some goal, and the tracking system keeps you focused on the task and not on finding clues inside the quest texts. Exploration has its fair share of surprises and rewards and the crafting system supporting the in-game economy, even though it looks like an upgraded version of World of Warcraft, is pleasantly intricate and the items that can be created at low levels are clearly superior to what can be obtained from loot.

In conclusion Rift has enough polished PVE elements to keep some PVE-oriented players happy for some time, and a PVP system which can only be regarded as some sort of mishap. At a quick glance I believe it has enough value to draw the MMORPG players’ attention, but simply not enough depth to keep the bulk of the MMO consumer base interested for more than a few months. Rift was launched in the US on March 1, 2011 and EU player will be able to access its servers on the 4^th of the same month.

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