Steep Learning Curve
Most games of this type suffer from this kind of thing mostly because they are fairly complex. That's to be somewhat expected. The Ascended system takes this the next logical step. In other games you choose your class, maybe bits of your spec, and you're on your way. At the very beginning of Rift you pick your first soul. You've already picked a class and now there's more to choose? Worse yet, you're picking from a largish list with only the barest of information.
One of the strengths of the game is its customizabiliy so it's hard for me to single it out in this installment. On the other hand, it is tremendously confusing for anyone who a) isn't hardcore, and b) hasn't done a mess of research about the game before hand, and c) has played other games in the genre I got this stuff all sorted in beta but as part of the head start program, a very large number of the people in my guild had not. These are some of the frequently asked questions:
- Q: Am I stuck with the souls I picked? A: no, you can pick up all the souls at level 13 through quests.
- Q: How many points do I get to spend in my spec? A: 66 at level 50; you get one per level and two for every level that's an even multiple of 3.
- Q: How do I get new abilities? A: most of the time you get them automagically by spending points in a spec tree (in the root, unlocked by total point count). Sometimes you can pick them directly in the spec.
- Q: Can I respec? A: yes, at the trainer and it's not terribly expensive.
- Q: What is a role and why do I care? A: a role is a slot for a single spec. You can have up to [s]four[/s] five of these so that you can change your character for any particular encounter.
Misconceptions From Other Games
A better segue, I could not conceive. What makes the Ascended system hard to get your head around is the fact that it's not really at all like other games. When you get it all out on the page it's pretty obvious that the devs put some serious thought into not make any given decision painful. This is not helped by other games in the genre.
For those of you who don't remember the Bad Old Days(TM), let's take a trip down memory lane. Your class defined/defines everything you can do. If you're a cleric, you heal and not much else. If you wear plate, you tank and not much else. If you can stealth, you DPS but only if no one is hurting you, yadda, yadda, yadda. We all know the score. If you could spec (and in a lot of games you couldn't) you were lucky if you could respec--ever, and sometimes it required the killing of a dragon.
As mentioned in the previous post, lots of builds shatter the usual holy trinity's usual cast of characters. To make matters worse, you can swap it between combats if you so choose! Unlike in other games where there was a pretty clear cut best choice, Rift allows you supreme flexibility and I like that. Unfortunately there are a (very) large number of people who a) don't get it, b) don't want to get it, and c) try to impose their Right Way(TM) onto the other players in the game. Just as the community often made Champions Online bad, the same is also true for Rift, just not to such an extreme level.
Limited Appearance Customization
Most games in the genre have very, very complicated and adjustable faces and/or costumes. There are usually lots of options and lots of ways to build exactly the face you want, given the time and the inclination. A lot of times this also means that you can create some terribly horrific looking characters but all in all you don't spend a lot of time looking at your own character's face anyway.
Rift streamlines this tremendously. Each {race, gender} pair has a single face with a very limited number of different features to adjust. The face slider is a triangle with big chunky types at the left, thin types at the right, and square-jawed types at the bottom. The game lets you pick anything within the continuum and does the appropriate blending in game. The upshot is that it's very hard to get a character that doesn't look right which I like. The downside is that it's not uncommon to walk around in the main cities and see many of your identical twins. I don't like that.
But it gets worse! A lot of the gear in the game shares the same art assets. This is to be expected. One of the bigger problems is that a lot of the top end gear is identaical but the lower level ones aren't. In a game where you want top end gear to be aspirational, it's almost criminal for the art between epic tiers to be the same. Say what you want about the art style but this part isn't so good.
Raid Timers on Expert Dungeons
Expert dungeons are what you might expect: everything cranked up to 11 in the instances you've already done. The old bosses have new tricks and there are new bosses to learn. This is all well and good. The difficulty curve is relatively easily overcome for competent players. Personally, I liked the increased difficulty even if it led to some nail-biting and grey hairs.
The bad part is that progression is very much gated on completing expert dungeons so that you can either get the rare dropped upgrade or enough plaques to buy gear but there are one day lockouts on expert dungeons. Why? The drops in the expert dungeons aren't spectacular on the whole and until recently you could clear an entire instance and get only blue non-upgrades. With daily quests giving
If a group goes into a 5-person dungeon and farms the first boss to get X to drop, who really cares? Was there really a need to make people wait around a day to try again? These are not raids! The upgrades are good but not stellar. Did there really need to be a lockout? Sure, you can PUG them, but who wants to do that? This leads us to...
Lack of Medium Sized Group Content
There is a big difference between doing one group content and raid content. This is usually in the form of logistics like getting people geared, in the right place, and generally going in the same direction. It sounds easy but it's not (trust me). In the best case there's a reasonable stepped progression that makes the bigger things seem more accessible.
Vanilla WoW had a real tough time with this requiring maybe 15 people for an UBRS run and a pretty solid 40 for a serious Molten Core run. This progression was then fixed (much to my benefit) by adding the Zul'Gurub and Ahn'Qiraj 20 person raids. That meant a much easier progression with the added benefit that raids usually had better gear moving to the next tier. Rift until recently, did not have that. Prior to launch Trion said that they had 10 and 20 person versions of all the raids so that if you were in a smallish guild or more casual one that you still had fun things to do. There were also supposed to be 10 person raid rifts that were appropriately tuned to people not geared for the big raids. Both of these were cut prior to release. At the time of this writing, the game has been out for just over 3 months and they're just now adding the 10 person content. This probably doesn't seem bad until you consider that I hit cap in two weeks and I work full time.
There have been lots of people in small or casual guilds that have already done all of the appropriate 5-person content and have nowhere to go. Because it doesn't take all that long to hit 50 there isn't as much investment in your characters and thus far less reason to stick around to try to get into the big raids. Sure, you can do the small number of expert rifts in a raid and get one or two reasonable drops but right now it takes five clears of T1 instances to be able to open one. It takes ten clears of T2 instances to open a raid rift and you'd better be well geared to have a hope of completing one. Remember: you can't run more people through easy experts because of the lockouts so if you're short a healer or tank and/or for whatever reason can't form regular groups, you're kind of out of luck.
As mentioned earlier, the last patch addresses some of these issues. There are new 10 person raids. There are also new crafting rifts and they've made expert and raid rifts easier to open. It looks like there's hope yet, but it remains to be seen if this is enough or if lasting damage has already been done to the playerbase.
The Grind
Rift is an easy game to level in. I kind of wish it wasn't. When you get to 50 and aren't in a raiding guild (as in: most people) you thankfully aren't excluded from gear progression. The bad part is that gear progression comes in the form of a particularly ugly grind. If you're like me, you want to see everything so you go through all of the appropriate dungeons more or less at the appropriate levels. Maybe you run them twice. But now you hit cap and want to progress and you go back to those same dungeons on expert mode.
The problem lies first with the itemization which is largely lacking for many roles, and next in the fact that you mostly get upgrades through items bought with plaques. Drop rate for epics in the expert dungeons (read: meaningful upgrades) is not especially high which means that you mostly need to complete runs to gather enough plaques to buy gear. On the surface, buying gear from plaques earned by killing bosses/finishing quests seems like a good idea. You do X runs, you buy Y gear at a fixed rate. The problem is that they haven't settled on what a good rate is, yet. Without belaboring the point, it's been changed a handful of times since release and at every change it gets slower. This seems bad.
It looks a lot like a dev team that's struggling to slow down turnover, but this isn't a great way to do it. At some point you've seen all the dungeons and have been unlucky enough with drops that you look at the tiny number of plaques you have and the number of plaques you still need and come to the conclusion that it just isn't worth it anymore. No one wants a grind and as cool as the instances are the first handful of times, if you go through the same ones for weeks on end, they lose their luster very quickly. But what else is there to do?
