|
Time to dust off my old characters, I had forgotten how many things I like about this game. Applied as Kahakai.
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2014 19:03
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2024 15:35 |
|
|
Zoness posted:I'd really wanted to defend as much about RIFT as I could, because the raid encounters were in fact fun, and maybe they could have made F2P work, but the F2P implementation's 3-month aftermath and beyond really detracts from Trion's previous reputation as one of the hidden gems of the MMO world. To their credit, they've done a great job of leaving the core of the game intact in the F2P state, I can't think of anyone who has done it better. Lord of the Rings Online basically breaks everything up into the content packs - the only thing you can do after level 30 (I think) is the epic quest, which is great but there is no meaningful way to level up and experience it without buying content packs. Neverwinter comes close, but has no meaningful raid game and last I checked the dungeon design was unbelievably lovely. The Old Republic is not free to play for any reasonable definition - it's a large and extended demo mode. I can understand how this would introduce all sorts of distortion to top-end raiding, but quite frankly top-end raiding scenes (where you give a gently caress about anyone else's progress) are tiny nuthouses of borderline personalities bashing against each other. If that's the price we have to pay to keep the rest of the game as accessible as it is, I can't say I'm unhappy with the compromise.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2014 23:58
|
|
|
necrotic posted:Oh, did it come out already? Yup. Servers didn't melt but a few quests in the beginning are...strained...due to how many people are doing them at once. So far I have to admit, I like the Lovecraftian aesthetic they're going for. It's still just Rift, but the new window dressing is very pretty.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2014 16:36
|
|
|
Zoness posted:I wish it were still just Rift instead of Daglar's Poor Decision Simulator I realize that Rift's high end raiding touched you in bad places, but is there really that much to get bent out of shape over if you're not trying to Realm First Bindings of Blood?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2014 17:15
|
|
|
So in Rift, bleeding-edge raiders act like whales. Interesting data point.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2014 18:57
|
|
|
Thunderbro posted:Business wise Rift is great though! Dumb grognards will pull the lever in their skinner box forever and fork over tons of cash to do basic things because they want to be better than other people in virtual play land! If other people can reach their level then they can't sit on that pedestal! No effort required on Trion's part, just throw up cash shop poo poo and make raid bosses have really inflated numbers and you have your exclusivity! I'd be really surprised if the raid design was a super-secret plan to drive people to buy BiS gear in the store. More likely they're just bad at raid encounters. Rift appears to be unique in that normally the whales are milked for money to play princess dress-up, as opposed to buying stuff with stats. It's just my tendancy to assume people are incompetent rather than malicious.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2014 23:50
|
|
|
Adam Bowen posted:It's incredible that Blizzard's ten year old game is still the best looking MMO on the market. Rift is almost EQ2 levels of hideous. Having recently started leveling an alt in WoW, I'm gonna have to disagree when it comes to their older stuff. I love the new models, but most of the art assets in the 1-70 stretch just haven't aged well. The low poly count stuff tends to rely on textures more, and the textures are just sub-par. Things get noticeably better when you hit Northrend, but I don't think they can claim the crown on best looking MMO any more. Final Fantasy XIV pretty much owns that slot now. KaneTW posted:FF14 is pretty much the best WoW-style MMO out there, followed by actual WoW. Literally the only reason I'm playing WoW instead of FF14 right now is that they have better raid tech. Crystal Tower just feels very small and lackluster compared to doing a full raid in Raid Finder mode. I really hope they abandon the distinction between the full party hard-as-balls stuff and the alliance easy-mode and move to one dungeon with multiple difficulty tiers. Flex raiding would probably be too much to hope for, but it just makes such a huge difference.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2014 16:22
|
|
|
Zoness posted:Downsizing raids also isn't a perfect solution because a raid is a delicate balance of tuning for difficulty and forgiveness. More players enables easier tuning and the existence of more classes/playable archetypes per encounter (for example good luck not having 3 clerics available for a 10 man group for GA progression or 6 clerics for a 20 man roster, and while 6 of any class was normal for rift, 6 active members keeping 2 raids going was a tough sell because that involved people learning roles that didn't translate to 20 mans). Another problem here is since each player's responsibility is higher, it's tougher to maintain a bench on a low roster because you're expecting your benched players to immediately know what's going on, whereas on a 20-man encounter you can delegate a greater variance in degree of responsibility and ease people into the content. I'd also loop this back to the massively thing - why keep the size of content lower when the game is intended to be played by a large population of players? What's the point of there being millions of subscribers if I only see 7 other people at any moment? Flex raiding is such a game-changer in this regard; it really needs to become mandatory in the way that automated PvE matchmaking became mandatory 6-7 years ago. It gets rid of the bench problem because you don't have one anymore - everyone can raid every night, particularly in something like Rift where any given character can always fill 2-3 roles. It forces a certain amount of design rigor because you have to sit down and think about how your scaling works, so you have to set hard targets on things like DPS, HPS, tank mechanics. As far as I'm concerned it has no downsides - except that you have to have your poo poo together on the technical end to make it happen. And no one seems to have their poo poo together these days except for Blizzard and Yoshi-P.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2015 17:48
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2024 15:35 |
|
|
Looks like someone convinced someone else holding pursestrings that Rift isn't dead yet: http://www.trionworlds.com/rift/en/2016/08/04/new-rift-expansion-starfall-prophecy/
|
|
#
¿
Aug 11, 2016 18:24
|
|