RIFT MMORPG on Deepwood NA Server

Yesterday was a day of trying 3 PC MMORPGS in one day which included Trove, Fiesta Online, and Rift.  Each of these games are currently officially published by Gamigo through the Glyph launcher.  After spending a relatively short amount of time on Trove and Fiesta, I landed on RIFT as the final game of the day and I was enjoying my time with it.  Rift came out during the WoW Era, which pretty much overshadowed the game as WoW did to all games during that time.  Coming back to it however gives me an appreciation for the quality of game that Rift is, and I plan to stream more of it on Twitch later today.

There are some unique elements to Rift, primarily around the Soul Tree (talent tree) system as well as the open world in the form of Rifts (World Event portals that spawn enemies).  Rift was one of the first games to have these massive world events that many games like WoW and Guild Wars 2 have emulated in their own game.  There is a system in which you can open these portals so that you can banish them from wherever they came from, and they usually have multiple stages of spawning enemies that need to be vanquished before you can close the rift for good.  They randomly continue to respawn on each unique map that the game takes you on and often provide some very lucrative and powerful rewards for those willing to take them on.

As mentioned, the Soul Tree is another unique element to Rift because it allows you to mix three different talent trees and invent soul points at the same time.  There is no restriction or penalty on what you can mix and match, assuming you have the talent tree for the build you are trying to make unlocked (many if not all of these talent trees are unlockable in game).  This allows players to truly create a unique and fully customizable build for their character to utilize and can create some very interesting combinations.  

My personal character build is called a Skirmisher and was selected during character select as the game allows you to choose predetermined soul tree combinations as a starting point for your adventures. I personally appreciate that since I have very little knowledge or memory of the last time I played RIFT, and the build automatically selects what talents to invest in as you accumulate soul points (talent points).  The Skirmisher is a mix of the Ranger, Marksman, and Riftstalker soul trees, and in the early stages is heavily invested in the Ranger tree.  In fact, 11 out of the 14 soul points earned thus far are in ranger with 3 soul points into marksman.

The combat of the game is a modified tab target that also allows you to turn on smart targeting which allows you to cast a skill when you do not have a target and it will automatically select the nearest target for that skill to activate on, making it quite convenient when you don't wish to press tab after every mob kill.  It also includes a combo point system in which you use certain skills to build combo points up to a maximum of 5 and use a separate set of skills known as finishers to consume the combo points for added damage and impact to your target.  This added impact scales with the amount of combo points you consume.

With the MMORPG genre being as dry as it is, I look forward to putting a little time into RIFT, assuming nothing new comes out of left field or I don't burn out on it too fast.  It seems to be as good a game as any other to invest some time into, and it seems to also have a positive outlook from my twitch community when people stop in to see the gameplay.  There was a bit of a revitalization effort by the RIFT community to resurrect the game by focusing the player base to join the Deepwood NA server, so we have chosen that server to play our playthrough.  

Since this revitalization has taken hold, it appears Gamigo has decided to take some added effort to add certain features like an XP lock and a new battle pass for the people coming back to the game.  There is still no word however if there will ever be a next expansion to look forward to, which is a shame because I think new content could help revitalize things further.  We shall see if we stick around long enough to help push RIFT in the right direction with more players as well, and I look forward to grinding it more later today on stream.

Until next time,

Blackboa