Eccentric Flower:201102/Rift

My two-day marathon data meeting ended early, and I have an afternoon to spare with very little brain left, so this is getting written sooner than I expected.

Content Warning: The first half of this entry is a discussion about the general state of online gaming and how World of Warcraft has destroyed the universe. It contains meta-discussion which might be interesting to a generally-uninterested-in-this-topic audience (we'll call this audience Robert, for purposes of simplicity), even though they don't play the games in question. The second half is a specific discussion of a specific game, and is only of interest to those who are considering whether they should try this game. The division of halves will be clearly marked.

There is a previous entry today, so if you don't care for this one, you should already have something to ease the pain. Also, here's a link for Robert concerning the Voting Rights Act and nuances of Bill of Rights jurisprudence, which is far more interesting than that description makes it sound to everyone but Robert.

So, as you may have deduced from reading the block in italics, I've decided that World of Warcraft has destroyed the multiplayer online game market. I have based this conclusion on the, I dunno, five or six MMOs I've played (ranging anywhere from a brief trial to heavy use) over the past couple of years. I figure that over the last fifteen years I have played more than twenty MMOs, in every genre but those goddamned superheroes, but in the last two years I have noticed a distinct change in the atmosphere. No matter how hard you try to escape it, no matter what the audience, conversation now inevitably returns - over and over and over and over until you want to puke - to WoW and comparisons with same. Is this game better than WoW? Will it lure enough people from WoW? How does it compare to WoW?

Admittedly, some of it is the extremely-poorly-socialized who often seem to try a new game just so they can troll in the general channels about how much they hate it. But it's a legitimate topic, and I'm not the only one who gets a little annoyed that it is a legitimate topic. We would love to make the elephant in the room go away, but we can't. We wish the discussion wouldn't happen, but we can see clearly enough to know why it does.

The broad statement of the problem is that no MMO has ever had the success or longevity of WoW (and who knows, perhaps none ever will again). The narrow, specific problem is: When you are trying to market a new MMO and make it profitable, it is no longer enough to attract people who have never played MMOs. To be profitable, you must now steal people from WoW. WoW has, at this point, sucked up so much of the easy-to-get player base that the only people left who have never come anywhere near it are people who would be a very hard sell to play online games of this sort at all. Sure, you might grab a few of them for one reason or another (I'll come back to that when I talk about Star Trek Online in a moment), but in order to get the sort of critical mass you'll need to stay alive, you will need to convert a substantial number of the estimated twelve million people who play, or who have played, World of Warcraft.

This is very, very hard to do - not because WoW is so freakin' brilliant (it was once, but in short-attention-span internet terms, is kinda old and tired now), but because it has critical mass. Simply put, people keep playing it, even if they're sick of it, because that's where their friends are, and playing a multiplayer game is not nearly as much fun if you don't have friends - preferably an established, known group of friends - to play it with.

I'm an atypical audience. I like playing alone or with a very small number of trusted people. (Currently that number is 1. I wish more of you whom I trust played online games as actively as I did, but that's neither here nor there. And even when I have someone I trust to play with, sometimes I still want to go it alone, just so I can do things like explore to my heart's content without worrying that I'm boring anyone else or wasting their time.)

For most players (based on personally-collected anecdotal evidence as well as evidence from forums, gaming sites, etc), the solo aspects are an unavoidable nuisance - that the whole point is to get as quickly as possible to big multiplayer play, where you can be part of a large group of people tackling some objective which would be impossible with a smaller group. Hence the importance both of a critical mass of players, and of being in the same place as your friends.

These days the survival strategy for a new game mostly seems to be based on one of two principles: Either 1) be a milieu that will attract the kind of people who really don't care for WoW's milieu or 2) be a milieu that will attract specific fans of a specific franchise who have not previously had an outlet.

I currently hold active accounts with three games (besides Rift). None of them charges me a recurring subscription. In one of them, Star Trek Online, I bought a "lifetime" membership so I could play it as occasionally as I like without worrying about money I was paying for a game I didn't play. The other two, Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online, have an option to play for free, buying perks and goodies as needed from the game's store. (I like this method, but I'm not sure it's economically viable unless you cripple the game so hard that you have to buy stuff from the store just to make it through the quests - the approach a lot of Korean MMOs take.)

Notice that each of these is a specific, named franchise that (ideally) has a specific fanbase which will eagerly flock to play a game in that milieu. Notice also that STO is a franchise that has never really had its basic idea - large-scale ship-to-ship space combat including group maneuvers - addressed in an MMO before, unless you count Eve, which doesn't count because it is so unstructured that it's barely an MMO (and I'll spare you the Eve rant. Some other day).

This is what they're pinning their hopes on - except that each of these games has been out for a while now and it's not clear to me that it's worked. Sure, LOTRO and DDO have their dedicated fan bases, who would play just because it's that milieu (and each has a group of players who appreciate the quirks in their structures - LOTRO has player classes unlike any others in fantasy milieus, and DDO is organized around a wholly different set of play mechanics than other MMOs). But each couldn't thrive on those people alone. To the extent that they're still around today, I am willing to wager, it is because they have attracted people from WoW.

(I can't report on the success or failure of STO because I have barely played it beyond about a week of heavy play right after it was released. That isn't to say I'll never come back to it again. It's just that its primary emphasis is ship-to-ship combat, and that's something I only get in the mood for once or twice a year. Which may, in itself, be a bad sign, if a lot of other people feel the way I do.)

Rift's strategy is different. In just about every way you can name, the game mechanics are very similar to WoW - similar enough, in fact, to be instantly comfortable to people who have played WoW (and especially people who have never played any MMO other than WoW, which is the majority of the WoW player base). And yet, everything is different in subtle ways. Often it is improved, as if the developers have watched WoW closely, learned from its problems and mistakes, and tried to fix them.

From this, I conclude that Rift is trying something fairly daring - they are going straight for people who are bored with/disgruntled with WoW as their primary target players. They are making steal people from WoW their main plan, rather than their backup plan.

It makes sense - an original milieu, not based on any existing universe, clearly in the realm of fantasy? There's no way to really claim any "native audience" for that. They have to steal their audience from other places.

It's gutsy and I applaud it. Yet I can't shake the suspicion that it's not going to work. I'm not sure it will ever work. In fact, I'm not sure that any other MMOs are going to succeed in the long term until WoW dies. And I have no idea when that will be.

Because, suppose Rift gets a million curious players on their opening day. Suppose some of them even stick around for a month. That would be extraordinary. That would be an amazing number. And yet, it can't last. Because no matter how much they like the Rift universe, no matter how much they enjoy the game, most of those million are going to end up back in WoW, as soon as the first Friday night they want to raid and none of their friends have come over to Rift to raid with.

No, I'm pretty convinced that as long as WoW is alive, all other MMOs will have transient existences at best. Which is why I think you probably should play Rift while you can. Because it won't last, and really, it's looking pretty damned good so far.

I'm not sure how stringent my NDA for the Rift beta is, because I didn't read it too closely. But this site isn't seen by very many people, and anyway, it's a good review; so I don't think the Rift gods will object too strongly.

In Rift you play as a member of one of two factions: The Guardians or the Defiant. Each faction has its own three races. Like Horde-Alliance, the factions don't like each other and social contact/interchange between factions in-game is essentially impossible. But the difference stops there. Unlike the WoW script (in which, despite some feeble attempts at nuance, the Alliance are stereotypical good guys and the Horde are stereotypical bad guys), motivations here are a little more complex. The Guardians believe their strength and justification is that they have been chosen by the gods to keep control; they think the Defiant are amoral technologists and, furthermore, were incidental in starting the mess that everyone is now in. The Defiant think the Guardians are zealots, and being composed of the races that didn't quite fit the Guardian's standards of purity, know what it's like to be on the bad side of the Guardians' mandate. Also, they think the Guardians are fuddy-duddies who won't use perfectly good technological tools that might help with this dire crisis, and furthermore, if they had a hand in starting the crisis, it was because a misguided Guardian leader asked them to and told them it would be perfectly all right.

It's not perfectly all right.

There is, in essence, a third faction in the game, and that faction is composed of elemental entities - "demons" will suffice, although I don't think the game ever calls them that - from parallel planes. The gap between the world in which our two factions must function and the elemental planes has grown (or been made) thin - thin enough that it is often breached. The elemental forces would like to breach it further; they think the plane the players inhabit is prime real estate. The mortal world is in dire danger most of the time now, with constant vigilance required to close these planar rifts and fight back the invading forces that emerge through them, and each faction blames the other for putting the world in this state.

You, the player, are not exactly a mortal. In fact, you were once dead. You are Ascended, brought back from the dead to be a hero, and as such you can do some things which mortals can't do. In particular, you can absorb multiple souls of various other dead entities, each of these souls giving you an entire tree of specialized talents based on what that soul was and did.

In practice what this means is that each player has three talent trees - but unlike WoW where every, say, paladin has the same three trees, you choose which three trees you have from a selection of some six or seven possibilities for your class. Furthermore, you can optionally start new "roles" - each role having its own distinct set of three souls/trees. You're a cleric and you want to stop being a damage dealer and become the group healer? OK, just change roles - assuming you have set them up and found souls to put in them. The class system is extremely flexible. Even within the initial three souls you choose for your character, there is a great deal of leeway for multiple styles of play within a class.

Each faction has a self-contained starting/training area with its own set of quests, which can take several hours to play through - very similar to the "pre-searing" environment in Guild Wars. The way those training areas are set apart from the main world is novel; without spoiling too much, the Guardian starting area is in the past relative to the main storyline; the Defiant training area is in the future.

Gameplay is under-explained, or at least is in the beta - further proof that the primary audience is WoW refugees. Although the most important parts are clarified by in-game tips, some things are never made explicit (such as the color-coding of player and NPC names, or how elites are designated onscreen). Still, I don't think it will be too daunting unless you have never played any MMO at all. The biggest problem I had as an Old Hand was that targeting took me a little time to get used to, and it took me forever to find where to undock a second action bar so I'd have more buttons to use.

Map functions are excellent, although the map also tracks the movements and objectives of rift invasion teams, so from time to time the map looks like the overhead diagram of the Normandy beachhead, with different colors and arrows and symbols everywhere. Once you get used to its information density, though, it tells you a great deal at a quick glance.

Now about those rifts. Rifts come in six types: earth, fire, water, air, life and death - each with its own types of invasion forces. This is a good thing to keep track of. Bringing fire resistance and/or water damage to a fire rift, for example, is a fine idea. Rifts begin as small tears in the fabric of space (the visual effect is quite effective - the sky itself appears to ripple and get sucked into a vortex). At an early stage, you obtain the Ascended ability to open one of these tears into a full-fledged rift. Why would you do that? Because fully opening it, and fighting what emerges, is the only way to close it. But don't worry - many rifts will open all by themselves, pushed by the forces on the far side.

Rifts cannot be fought alone, for all practical purposes. That's where the fun starts. When a major rift invasion begins - and they begin pretty often - everyone hears about it; it is globally announced to the entire zone. You may or may not choose to drop everything you're doing and help fight it; and admittedly, sometimes you'll think "oh no not again" and just want to go on with your questing. But don't do this all the time, because (even though it's the only place I encountered lag in the game) fighting a rift force in the company of twenty or so other people is great fun. Besides, you have to deal with the consequences of a rift whether you help fight or not. Rifts are everyone's problem.

Also, fighting rifts is the only way to get some of the game's rewards; when you participate in a rift-closing, you get some items which are essentially currency for buying some of the game's best goodies. (Just be sure to pay attention for when the too-inconspicious "you have rift loot" icon lights up - it is easy to miss, and if you don't attend to it within a fairly short length of time, you lose your chance - one of my few real complaints with the game.)

Normal questing in the game seems to be better-than-average so far, with "kill twenty rats" quests kept down to non-tedious levels and no frustrating drops yet, plus a fairly high degree of novelty. I didn't get far enough in the game in 2.5 days of heavy beta play to see how badly the quests peter out at high levels; nor did I get to try one of the instanced dungeon areas (the earliest starts becoming doable for groups in the 15-20 range, I gather). There is apparently a system of controlled PvP play/engagements for those who fancy that, which I don't.

Rift provides a certain amount of quest help, and in general does a very good job of telling you where you need to go next and who to talk to next - but it also doesn't hold your hand for you. You do still need to read quest descriptions and supplemental information, and many interesting sparkly objects are not labelled on purpose - so click on sparklies to see what they do; the results are usually rewarding.

Small improvements over WoW abound. For example, if you have killed a small pile of enemies in a confined area, you don't have to painstakingly loot each corpse after the fight. Looting one gathers the loot from all of them in the area, giving you one window full of the combined loot, yours for a single Take All button. (You can disable this behavior, should you for some strange reason want to have to click on ten separate bodies.) The crafting system requires no space-occupying tools. Bags are plentiful and reasonably cheap. Many lore items, such as books, can be "catalogued" or checked in, whereupon they vanish from your inventory to go permanently into the appropriate pages of your character/statistics window.

In general - except for big Rift fights - lag has been nonexistent, even during the massive stress test conducted during one day of the beta weekend; and the game runs more smoothly and buglessly than any of the multitudinous betas it's been my privilege to play over the years. My biggest complaint was the movies and cutscenes seemed to "skip" a fair bit (which may very well have been a local issue).

Now, mind you, I have no idea how well this will scale up in general release, just as I have no idea how well-developed all the additional zones of the map are; I played two characters into the teens and never got all the way through the content of the initial zone with either of them. But so far, the outlook is positive. It's certainly good enough that I'm willing to pay for it, even if I only last a few weeks before the content gets out of hand for me. I pre-ordered midway through the beta weekend.

The final Rift beta period is going to be an extended one, from the 15th to the 21st. I cannot say whether you would be able to get a beta invitation. If you'd like to try for one, go make an account at the website, and be sure to fill out the beta application fully; they definitely won't consider you without one of those. And make time for a very large download if you get invited.