Why did Rift fail?

Dandai_sl said:

I absolutely loved the difficulty of the heroic dungeons at release. You needed to play with quality players

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They did a tremendous job of tuning the heroics at release. I had a ton of fun playing Rift, but it was followed by a period where I just didn't have any free time to play it anymore. It gets my vote for best MMO post-WoW.

Rift was created with the idea that if you make a WoW clone that wasn't an immediately broken pile of shit you would make an obscene amount of money.

That idea was wrong.

Lost in its design somewhere was the fact that a game has to be entertaining for people to play it.

Draegan_sl said:

Out of that whole post you saying "exact same bag system" made me laugh. Damn trion for copying their bag system!

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it's pretty huge when you add it all up. I can only say "oh, this is just like WoW did it" so often before I get sick of the game.

dual factions
quest hubs with the proper quest to send you to the next one once finished
talent points


it's been too long since I played Rift, but I remember it felt a lot like WoW because of all the mechanics they flat out copied.

tower_sl said:

Rift was created with the idea that if you make a WoW clone that wasn't an immediately broken pile of shit you would make an obscene amount of money.

That idea was wrong.

Lost in its design somewhere was the fact that a game has to be entertaining for people to play it.

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Pretty spot on.

Quineloe_sl said:

it's pretty huge when you add it all up. I can only say "oh, this is just like WoW did it" so often before I get sick of the game.

dual factions
quest hubs with the proper quest to send you to the next one once finished
talent points


it's been too long since I played Rift, but I remember it felt a lot like WoW because of all the mechanics they flat out copied.

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The similarities are shockingly overwhelming.

Pet class system is disgustingly WoW-like (the right click to "auto use ability" even the position of the icons and how the icons looked like even the NAMES of the abilities were like WoW; Bite? Claw? correct me if I'm wrong).
The font used in the Item Tool-bar and how the information listed is exactly like World of Warcraft.
The Talent Tree.
The Combat.

This is just from the tip of my head since I didn't play the game a lot. Combine all these and you end up feeling dizzy thinking "I've been here before...." Deja Freaking Du.

I never called a game/MMO a WoW clone; Rift, however, was a WoW clone.

Even being a huge EQ-fan (playing it again for the last year) I still think there is a lot to like in Rift. It is therefore the MMO that ranks second on my list. I like the setting and graphics, there is a lot of mood in certain aras and the world feels pretty big (now with the xpack). The flow of leveling and combat is pretty smooth.

If I ever get fed up with EQ again, I see myself playing Rift again for a while, before let us say Neverwinter Online and others. I still like the Rift events, even though it may not have panned out as planned it is still a mechanic that I enjoy. Both the roaming packs of NPC's that attack outposts as well as the Rift themselves still spice up the world some for me.

What I do miss in Rift (and many other MMO's) is true cities. Rift has hubs that look fantastic but they feel too utilitarian to me. I never felt that any regular people lived in the world of Rift. Sometimes it feels more like a Fantasy Themepark at War, but at the same time that makes it rather different which I like (from time to time).

I also dread the fact that when I come back I probably have to relearn and setup a complete new build, since they change stuff around so much. I do like to fiddle with setting up macro's and such, but I do have to be in the mood for that.

If Rift manages to build up a loyal if smallish fanbase that keeps coming back then it has not really failed in my eyes. I think most MMO's will end up like that if they are lucky. If not, and they manage to alienate even those loyal people, then it has truly failed I think.

Rift had some good points, but ultimately it was too similar to WoW. Most people that had played WoW were unwilling to commit to a game that just felt like more of the same with less polish. And given that most potential customers had played WoW this ensured a small player base. For a WoW-clone to succeed it really must be significantly better that the original from day one.

Or there is pushback from the players as in why pay 300 bucks to participate in a two year beta test. Or maybe just me , taken to looking at games a couple years after release .

tower_sl said:

Rift was created with the idea that if you make a WoW clone that wasn't an immediately broken pile of shit you would make an obscene amount of money.

That idea was wrong.

Lost in its design somewhere was the fact that a game has to be entertaining for people to play it.

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Gonna be interesting to see how Wildstar does since they are pretty much doing the same thing (hopefully they wont neuter what sets them apart from WoW during late beta like Rift did).

Laura_sl said:

even the NAMES of the abilities were like WoW; Bite? Claw? correct me if I'm wrong).

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I never really played Rift so I am not disputing the overall feel... hell it's probably why I didnt get into the game in the first place. But isnt that a silly complaint even then? Calling them Gnaw or Scratch just to avoid that is asking a bit much, especially in light of many more glaring similarities.

Asherah_sl said:

Rift had some good points, but ultimately it was too similar to WoW. Most people that had played WoW were unwilling to commit to a game that just felt like more of the same with less polish. And given that most potential customers had played WoW this ensured a small player base. For a WoW-clone to succeed it really must be significantly better that the original from day one.

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This really is the reason here. The game was designed and marketed to be not only be a WoW clone, buttheWoW clone. Trion's goal was to appeal to the legion of ex-WoW players that were tired of WoW and bring them into Rift. The problem with that thinking (which to be honest was pointed out by a number of people at the time) is there was nothing that made Rift different enough for those players to want to stick around. If ex-WoW players got burned out on WoW due to x-y-z and your game is pretty much like WoW, they are going to burn out for the exact same reasons in your game at a much faster clip, since there is nothing else (lore, series history, brand name) that would keep them there. Rift is exhibit A on the phrase 'you can't out-WoW Warcraft'. You have to bring something new to the table. Plus it's the notion of trying to appeal to ex-WoW players is a lost cause anyway since in my opinion I think those players are not just burned out on WoW, but on the quest treadmill/themepark type of MMO.

Jais_sl said:

Didn't Rift have like 7 dungeons and the most linear lvling/quest path ever? Think I quit pretty quickly after getting lvl 50.

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Yep. The heroic mode dungeons were retreads. Trion was great at one thing it seemed "recycling content".

I just loaded it up for a go and noticed they took any and all snares out of the ranger/marksman.( can't recall where they were but they were there ).

My guess: pvp balancing fucks pvE again. Sucks because that ranger/marksman was a fun leveling class back in the day. Now i clearly remember why i left. Trion was doing the same exact things to RIFT that made me leave WoW in the first place. Combine that with a god awful linear leveling experience once you hit max level there was no point. ( i had 2 chars max level and saw all content at the time. Even in Wow 2 chars did not = see all content.

Their design was "get everyone to the gear treadmill ( battlegrounds or raids ) as fast as possible"... which to me is just horrible and lacking any imagination which pretty much describes most of RIFTs implementations.

Vandyn_sl said:

Rift is exhibit A on the phrase 'you can't out-WoW Warcraft'. You have to bring something new to the table. Plus it's the notion of trying to appeal to ex-WoW players is a lost cause anyway since in my opinion I think those players are not just burned out on WoW, but on the quest treadmill/themepark type of MMO.

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I'm tired of the themepark, nonetheless I played them religiously for years and years, with short breaks inbetween. Rift is just less appealing than WoW for class flavour, boring specs, shitty pets (I love pets, I mean combat pets, not the shitty cosmetic crap). I was pretty much forced to change spec every patch to perform adequately. They nerfed one group instances which are my favourite part of any MMO and overall didn't enjoy the massive macro fest and bloated hotbars.
Game was good, just not good enough.

Oh, as I said elsewhere, I was the only one that stayed past the first two months out of a dozen friends, that speaks volumes.

It's not a bad idea to take successful UI concepts from games that work - that shouldn't be a knock against RIFT.

"Stealing" right click auto-use for pet abilities or the bag system is not a bad thing.

The gameplay being a clone is, however.

I'm sure all the usual suspects have been touched on. I don't know if anyone has mentioned it yet, and I doubt they have, since probably everybody played Defiant. As a Guardian player I can tell you that one MAJOR problem with Rift was their inability and unwillingness to address their severe population imbalance.

They tried 2 things and both were too little too late.

Free server transfers only made the problem worse on guardian side as there was an exodus to 2-3 raiding servers, leaving the rest to wither. Their conquest thing... well, I don't know, I'd left by then, but it was a pvp fix that did nothing (from what I understand) to address the pve issue.

The population problem was utterly predictable and I have no doubt that they predicted it. Failing to have a plan ready-to-implement cost them money. It was not only a bad decision for their game but a bad one for their business.

Rift was a really generic wow clone with some really awful design decisions, like the soul system. In theory it's not bad to have hybrid classes across the board but in practice giving people 14 talent trees and 934 talent points to assign is fucking awful. There's few things worse than coming back to Rift after a long break and not knowing what the fuck do to with all your shit.

It's like they copied wow and then took some bad part of it and cranked it to 11 as if it would appeal to some hardcore demographic. I think this is going to be Wildstar's major mistake as well with 40 man raids. It's one thing to churn out a copy of WoW, but then for your minor deviations to be so insanely bad is like shooting yourself in the foot.

The worst part of it was the questing and zones, there was nothing memorable whatsoever except maybe the realm of the fae dungeon. Rift to WoW is like Homefront to Modern Warfare.

i thought the artifact stuff in rift was awesome and wish more mmos would copy that

I wonder if kids today even play MMOs, I have never seen any one of my kids friends talk about any mmo, and my son is acutely embarrased when I proudly wear my warcraft hoodie (its horde, of course). when I crouch behind the couch to listen and understand their pearls of wisdom, when not discussing how stupid their parents are (AGREED) the only games they seem to talk about are minecraft, dota2, and candysomething.

which probably explains why trion is so into voxels and shit now

Exposure from a young age and the prevalence of "casual" games that have massive qualities have probably dulled the mmorpg interest somewhat, I would imagine. Especially since a fairly big chunk of people tend to get to max level, find out they don't have time for raids or something similar, then quit in most mmorpgs. It is a lot more interesting to talk about an exciting DotA match or describe this awesome penis-castle you built than to say "yeah I killed boars for a couple of hours, turned in some generic quests and my weapon is marginally bigger now", comparatively. Especially for younger kids. Shit, when EQ/WoW/etc first popped out, massively multiplayer was like... 32 person fps servers or forum board shit. Now it is borderline every online game under the sun. The snowflake has melted.

Oh, and Guardian Side rift (the grind was too much for me to make a defiant as well) had the most retarded lore and boringly generic fantasy look/feel to it out of any game recently. It made LotRO look innovative with their work, and that shit was derivative of ancient books and movies that came out several years before. And yada yada agree with all the sentiments of clunky combat and shit-tastic class design decisions.

spronk_sl said:

i thought the artifact stuff in rift was awesome and wish more mmos would copy that

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Shhh, don't tell anyone, but even that was wholesale copied from Hartsman's other game

Rift failed because it was a shitty wow clone....

There's already a bash rift threat, it's called "the rift thread."

And when you name your game after a feature that turns out to be a trivial, boring, repetitive grind fest for minor stat increases then you've really got problems. It'd be like naming Everquest "LootCamp."

I find it funny that people think the problem with the zone invasion system was they didn't happen frequently enough. I guess die hard Rift fans enjoyed getting into a big zerg ball and mowing down hundreds of trivial trash mobs for a handful of lootcoins for items you don't need but for the rest of us, well, we don't play Rift for a lot of reasons. Especially awesome was how so many of those events happened in zones where there weren't enough people around to deal with them, nor did anyone give a shit enough about them to come kill a few hundred mobs for no reward.

The "whiners" were completely right. Invasions were mostly annoying, stupid and pointless for a very long time. You were far better off doing practically anything else in the game. A boring grind with no reward, oh sign me the fuck up.

And the only reason I could tolerate the combat was most of it could be done by holding down one key while running a repeater macro. The laughably bloated and stupid combat system was thankfully nullified by the ability to bind the majority of it to two keys - "deeps" and "aoedeeps." But if I was actually smashing those keys five times a second as intended.. ugh.