Many games in the MMORPG genre have launched with great fanfare and were a blast to play until you hit a certain level. Others started out slowly but had more rewards and better content as you got further along.

Rift came out of the corner swinging at World Of Warcraft, the gold standard of massive online role-playing games. You’re not in Azeroth anymore! The marketing slogans led a lot of WoW players to give Rift a try and compare the two games. The new one-week free trial is also encouraging many gamers to play RIft. So how is the game shaping up now, nearly three months after launch? Honestly, things have never been better for Rift -- that is, if you get yourself on the right server.

Having played through three Rift betas and a thrilling pre-launch, I've thoroughly enjoyed the soul structure and rifts/invasions that provided a strong gameplay experience. However, the initial rush of new players after the game's launch eventually wore off. As my server's population began to decline, unfortunately so did my enjoyment of the game. The rifts are very dynamic and can be quite exciting when there are plenty of players around to help close them. The flipside is that when server population plunges, so do the frequency of rifts and invasions.  Worse yet, when rifts do pop up, you will have tremendous difficulty closing them without assistance from other players.

Trion has done an amazing job of balancing rifts so they are appropriate for the population in the world at a given time. But the game is just not that much fun if there are not enough people in the gameworld available and willing to fight the rifts. Fortunately Trion has taken great steps to drive more players to Rift with an aggressive marketing campaign and a week-long free trial. This has generated a great opportunity to enjoy playing Rift with plenty of people in the gameworld and plenty of excitement.

Does Rift really compete with World of Warcraft?

I’ve never been one to get too attached to any single game. I was on the beta team for Ultma Online. After that, of course, I had my time with Everquest. Soon I was playing World of Warcraft. Since the early days, I’ve always enjoyed playing many different MMORPGs because I appreciate the variety and the discovering of fresh content and new areas.

Rift has been a lot of fun to play. World of Warcraft, however, remains at the top of my list. Because so many people ask and it is such a popular topic, I’m going to give my honest opinion in comparing World of Warcraft and Rift.

World of Warcraft vs Rift - Who is the MMORPG Champion?

Since Rift comes into this fight as the underdog, I’m going to start with one of the most exciting aspects of building a character in Rift. The open soul trees allow you customize your character with a great variety of skill sets, and yet the game manages to never have any one calling or soul combination become terribly imbalanced. While there are certainly soul/calling combinations that are preferred due to specific advantages, the game really delivers in allowing players to make a character that has the traits they like.

Pyro Mage, with Elemental and Storm Caller

This is an example of a soul build which I use. It fits my stype of play and allows me to be somewhat competitive.

Sure, my rotations are weak. Sometimes I run out of mana. I do get owned by the hardcore players. Still, I enjoy the fact that Rift allows me to build my character with my specific soul choices.

So what does this Pyro-Elemental-Storm Caller soul combination do for me?

As a Pyro mage I can dish out tons of damage. This is a pure damage soul that essentially sets people on fire in every possible way. As you can see from the tree, most of my points are in this soul.

The elemental soul allows me to have a “pet” that can be conjured to fight alongside me. As a mage, I have very little protection in my weak cloth armor. The pet does a respectable job of drawing mobs away, giving me space to dish out the pain.

The Storm Caller soul, you will notice, has no points. This does not mean, however, that the soul is not valuable. By having the Storm Caller soul, I have an ‘’electrocute” spell that knocks back an enemy 15 meters and serves up a small amount of damage as a bonus.

Using this build I can cause considerable damage and use my pet as a lightweight tank. My elemental soul allows me to create distance between me and my enemy for an escape or to setup for another round of fire! While World of Warcraft does offer a lot of customization with talent trees and a variety of very distinct classes, but Rift gives you considerably more control over the exact qualities of your character.

Rift - More complex PvP opportunities

The soul system flexibility makes for very dynamic and complex player-on-player fights when playing in warfronts and in the PvP world. A player will know quickly that I am a pyro-elemental mage from my fire spells and by the “pet” that I have conjured which is fighting alongside me. My opponent may be completely caught off-guard, however, by my electrocute spell from my storm caller soul. Depending on how you spread out your points and which souls you pick, your character can be very specialized. Your opponent can only gain occasional glimpses into your soul  combinations, allowing you to be crafty and more strategic in planning your attacks.

Here is a video that shows a great example of various soul combinations for the Rogue calling:

This is a must see video if you are interested in Rift!

Rifts and Invasions - The advantages of a Dynamic World

For the most part, World of Warcraft is a quest-driven, open-world environment. There is amazing freedom, and you can pretty much do anything you desire. But for the most part, the world is rather static. Mobs are stationed in their appropriate spot, and they will be there today, tomorrow, and probably months from now. While the Rift game does look a lot like World of Warcraft, the rifts and invasions create a world that is dynamic and can potentially be taken over by the invading monsters.

When a rift pops open, players can look at the map to see the location and the type of rift that is invading. If players come to shut down the rift promptly, they will receive rewards and experience points for their efforts. On the other hand, if the rift can’t be shut down quickly or the players fail to close it altogether; the monsters soon start invading the world, setting up strongholds. Sometimes there will be mass invasions with dozens of rifts and elite monsters pouring into the gameworld. Quest-givers die and pretty much every player in the area is killed. You will even receive a message that major quest hubs or cities have ‘fallen’.  

These dynamics of the game give you a heroic feeling that really makes you want to keep playing Rift, to keep ‘saving the world’. Instead of fighting isolated mobs, your battles seem almost epic. In Rift the world feels like it is in danger all the time, and you and your friends are the only thing preventing the world from being overrun.  On top of it, you get rewards that allow you to get awesome gear. Next to the soul system, this is the biggest strength of Rift.

Both World of Warcraft and Rift are very solid games

Rift launched very strongly and with few bugs. There was a hacking problem with some accounts, but Trion has apparently put that problem behind them. Trion also is stepping up with patches and major changes that typically take most MMORPG publishers much longer to roll out. Blizzard has, of course, been in this business a long time; they do a great job of making sure major glitches and problems are handled promptly.

Graphically Rift has a strong edge on texture quality. Naturally, this is true because it is much newer and also requires better hardware for the game to be playable. While Rift does have better textures, Blizzard is no slouch when it comes to artistic design and making bold artistic decisions. For many people, this will be a matter of preference.

One negative for Rift is that they offer poor support for 3D vision. This may not seem like a big deal, but their primary competitor World of Warcraft offers some of the best 3D vision support of any game on the market. Blizzard even created dedicated in-game controls for controlling 3D depth and convergence. (3D convergence refers to how much of the 3D shows up in front of the screen.) Lords of the Ring Online (LOTRO) has amazing 3D vision support. War Hammer and Eve have far better support than Rift. While Rift does have great next-generation graphics, they are ironically far behind when it comes to supporting the wave of 3D gaming hardware. Hopefully in the months to come, Trion will put out a patch that will bring Rift up to the current standard of 3D support that the other popular MMORPGs incorporate.

Content is King

Now I suppose it is time to dish the truth on Rift’s weaknesses. First on the list is that Rift has only two starting areas. For an altaholic like me, who enjoys creating many characters of all races and callings, this is a bit unfortunate. For many gamers, the limitation of two starting areas may be a non-issue. If you only want to play one or two main characters, then it won't matter if there are only two starting areas.

Being a new MMORPG with a great deal of polish, it was inevitable that there would need to be sacrifice somewhere. For Rift, the world itself isn’t massively huge. Certainly the game is not small, and most players would spend weeks if not months playing before they could come close to seeing it all. Still, compared to World of Warcraft, Rift has far less real estate. Certainly World of Warcraft has had many years to add expansion packs and new areas, and I expect Trion will be working hard to expand the world in Rift and give people more content to work with.

If you could just play one, which one would it be?

For many of us the time required to put into a MMORPG is more costly than the subscription price. Many players have played World of Warcraft so long, it is time for them to move on. For those who have never played World of Warcraft or were initially turned off by it, there are many reasons it is still a must-play MMORPG if you are a fan of the genre. The lore is deep. You have multiple starting areas. Classes and roles are well-defined and give your character a real sense of purpose. The depth of content is staggering, and the game is paced to move you through it rather quickly. You have countless quests from which to choose, and the open world is likely five times larger than Rift when you count the expansions.

On the flip side, Rift is shiny and new. This also means that there are a lot of new players joining every day which can make the experience of leveling very enjoyable. In World of Warcraft, most players are long-term veterans and so the entry points to world feel a little more empty to new players.

Getting the Best Rift Experience

I recently re-rolled a new character on Wolfsbane. Typically I prefer PvP servers, but I had heard many good things about the Wolfbane server population. Many new people and guilds from low-population servers were heading there. In peak hours there can sometimes be a few minutes' wait to get on, but that hasn't been a problem in the past week. I’m starting to believe that perhaps Trion was able to bump up their server populations in the past few weeks. At least for me the world feels much more full and alive, and overall that experience has been great. Trion has managed to add a new dungeon finder tool and address a number of soul balance issues.

After playing Rift for many hours now, my main take-away is that you will want to be playing on a server that has a high population. The rifts and invasions require enough people in the gameworld for them to be successful. When population gets thin, the fun inside the game tends to drop very quickly. Now with the seven-day free trial, it is worth giving the game a spin to see what you think of it. Once you do, please feel free to leave comments below!