The following is my review of Rift after having played World of Warcraft for many years and Rift (two weeks)
By nature MMO's evolve. World of Warcraft which released in 2004 borrowed heavily from Everquest and other pioneer games. Since I played WoW from Vanilla through Cataclysm, I can attest to how much the game has changed. The World of Warcraft we have today is much improved thanks to Blizzard putting a lot of their earnings back into development. The number of features and content added since launch is incredible. This is only possible once the ball starts rolling.
Along comes Rift- brought to us from a company called Trion Worlds a much smaller development company. To start comparing early Rift to modern day WoW, WoW wins hands down. The resources put into World of Warcraft at this point would not be put into another game at a launch. It wouldn't make sense. The loss if a game failed would be too great. So Trion has to develop enough of the common MMO elements to get by and choose one area to excel. Trion has very limited time to succeed. The expense of maintaining MMO's is large and if launch doesn't pull in enough attention the funds start to dry up and before long the game is free to play. Trion knows in order to succeed it must have something different to offer us - so it gives us dynamic gameplay. Since MMO's are so expensive to develop you can't take risks in every area, the best bet is to follow a formula. So outside the dynamic gameplay, most of the game plays like WoW.
Dynamic gameplay is injected into the game by Rifts which open up sporadically in the zones. When a rift opens up, all nearby players join together to conquer monsters coming out of the rift. This is a great distraction from the usual repetitive grinding of doing quest after quest. Another source of dynamic gameplay are invasions. Invasions deal with NPC's generated at a random place on the map. NPC's move throughout the zone with intent of accomplishing an objective. Players must band forces to stop the NPC's.
Rifts and invasions are extremely fun. Just being able to instantly get in a group and work together with out any setup is not comparable to anything in WoW, except maybe one of the rare zone invasions. The world suddenly feels more alive. I feel motivated to save the zone. I know the quests will be there when I'm done.
Outside of rifts and invasions, Rift plays a lot like WoW. Instead of 8 different classes, you have four classes but each with eight subclasses. Rift allows you to play three "subclasses" at a time, but you really have to put most of your points in a particular class. This makes for some interesting class combinations. I'm currently a DPS Two handed warrior with a hunter style pet, but also have some tanking skills.
Graphics are an improvement, but nothing like you'd see on a console game nowadays. Crafting is very similar to World of Warcraft. Rift has all the other elements WoW has... Dungeons, Raids, PVP, Factions, but is lacking a lot of the nicer tools such as Dungeon Finder, Customizable interface etc. We can only hope they are added in the future.
The story from Rift tends to be more mature and has a darker tone. I'm not a player who gets into the lore, so I won't comment any more on that. The world seems pretty small compared to WoW, and the zones are not up to standard with Cataclysm zones. Rift zones are more like Vanilla WoW zones in my opinion. Of course I've only seen the entry level ones so I can't speak for endgame zones.
Overall the developer has been really responsive to the community and this might be the biggest sign that Rift will continue to grow. No one can expect Rift to kill WoW overnight. All we can hope for now is more kindling to add to the fire. A lot of people playing WoW just want something different. It doesn't have to be incredibly different, just deviate enough from the WoW forumula to give us a different perspective. My hope is Rift will continue to innovate to the point where Blizzard can start taking ideas from Trion and we no longer have a market dominated by a single developer.
Do I hope Rift kills WoW??? No. Do I hope WoW kills Rift??? No. In the end I want to two great games. One choice.
