Why did Rift fail?

Or remove all that crap entirely and narrow it down to a small number of meaningful choices, like wow did.

I don't think having 1,000 skill nodes when 900 of them are "+1 stat" is exactly the model to copy.

Well sure, but I didn't say the grid has to be a constellation of +1 dex nodes. The point is that you can reach interesting talent choices by entering "trees" at different points versus having to put 21 pts in a tree just for one interesting talent.

Draegan_sl said:

Just imagine if instead of Rift having 3 vertical talent trees, they actually used a radial design. Instead of 8? tiers of vertical rows, they squished it down to like 5 broadened it out a bit. Then you design the soul system so that each soul sat on the point of a triangle and the trees went around on a curve thus you could bridge across souls horizontally instead of just going vertical in each one from the bottom.

That would of been the bestest. Then you could toss in quests, gear, thing-a-majigs that allowed you to equip extra souls.

Oh then you can release expansions with additional new "mini" souls that you can equip outside that ring of the core 3 souls.

OMG all of the sudden you have an awesome system like POE but those mini souls are things you collect from the game. Then you can design souls and release them constantly like MOBAs release champs/heroes because they aren't full classes... !

Or god forbid they sell them in a cash shop.

Trion are you listening to me? Hire me and I'll design the system for you.

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So they should have just copied TSW?

I can't remember, but could you progress horizontally through the radial tree in TSW? I thought it was still all vertically done, but the UI element was just radial.

Follow the yellow brick road gameplay.

You had to progress from the inside of the radius of the circle in TSW.

Rifts trees and classes as a tank were a joke. From the original Alpha hard modes until the second raid zone dropped we posted how much it sucked being stuck as that ghetto ass Reaver / Paladin / VK build to have enough spell mit to raid tank. The raids were a total shit show too.

Remember during raid testing how bad Greenscale got trashed? Then three months later the game comes out and Greenscale is stil bugged and the same, gets killed weekend 1 and has to be released again in his "final form" which was still able to be reflected and stuck in the air.

Krassus_sl said:

You had to progress from the inside of the radius of the circle in TSW.

Rifts trees and classes as a tank were a joke. From the original Alpha hard modes until the second raid zone dropped we posted how much it sucked being stuck as that ghetto ass Reaver / Paladin / VK build to have enough spell mit to raid tank. The raids were a total shit show too.

Remember during raid testing how bad Greenscale got trashed? Then three months later the game comes out and Greenscale is stil bugged and the same, gets killed weekend 1 and has to be released again in his "final form" which was still able to be reflected and stuck in the air.

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That's why you used Rogue tanks who went from best raid boss tanks in T1 to a complete joke in T2 because of how broken their scaling was. Rogue tanks in the Hammerknell took roughly 2.5x as much damage as a warrior tank. It's like the thought never occurred to them that new content would ever be released with better gear. They had to do a lot of drastic changes to fix all that bs.

I do think Saboteur, Tactician, and Defiler are some of the coolest classes I've seen in an MMO.

It failed for me because it felt derivative. It was fine-tuned to be a product born from the streamlining of MMOs over the past years. It was Corolla the MMO. The only thing it did to mix things up was create random enemy spawn points that could temporarily take something over as a minor inconvenience.

I didn't hate Rift, I just hit cap and quit. Every so often I'll log in, be told my skill points have been reset again, and log out. The class system sucks, too.

Simple:

It was uninspired shit. Wow clone #12593.

It had all the worst parts of wow with the addition of 1 button combat macros and ugly as fuck character models.

Imagine the same abilities, but without macros.

It would then have been the worst MMO combat in the history of everything. Even worse than EQ2, because of all of the reactives and non-GCDs.

Macros were not the problem, they were the solution to an even worse problem.

Illuziun_sl said:

Follow the yellow brick road gameplay.

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Ha I knew when I played rift I had seen it all before ! Rofl

Kreugen_sl said:

Imagine the same abilities, but without macros.

It would then have been the worst MMO combat in the history of everything. Even worse than EQ2, because of all of the reactives and non-GCDs.

Macros were not the problem, they were the solution to an even worse problem.

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Absolutely. But, I don't think anyone here is dense enough to actually think that the macros were the problem. Mentioning the 1 button macro bullshit is just a quick way to illustrate the skill design issues with the game. I think Trion intentionally allowed macros to execute the way they did because they knew how awful the combat would be without them.

Devnull_sl said:

Absolutely. But, I don't think anyone here is dense enough to actually think that the macros were the problem. Mentioning the 1 button macro bullshit is just a quick way to illustrate the skill design issues with the game. I think Trion intentionally allowed macros to execute the way they did because they knew how awful the combat would be without them.

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I would first macro all my abilities so that I would have 1 or 2 keys to press. Then I would use a mouse macro to auto repeat those keys on a toggle.

Then I would ask myself, why am I even playing? Then I would quit. I've gone through this cycle at least 3 times since the game released.

Then it just becomes about your class/build and your gear rather than your ability to maintain a rotation/whack-a-mole priority queue while avoiding fire. It was good enough for Everquest, right? I have no problem with a game where your "do dps" ability is basically autoattack, as long as there are lots of things to react to and situational abilities to use. Like FF14 bard - I held down one button and mashed another one on a proc while dodging circles on the ground and it was entertaining enough.

WoW goes overboard with the "this shit is hard enough on a training dummy" dps + "holy fuck FIRE EVERYWHERE" hard modes. There's only so much of that you can take.

(heavily class dependent, of course. HUNTERLOL)

I thought the macro system was the best. The one thing I hate about the DIKU MMO genre is having 2-4 hotbars with 5-7 ability rotations, dots to keep up, situational dps boosters all the while moving and dodging and doing whatever. Fuck that.

Having 2-3 buttons to press (holddown) and actually enjoy the fight because I can see and concentrate on other things was pretty awesome. I prefer to theorycraft combat ability sequencing before the fight and not during it. If I liked guitar hero I would of bought it.

Well, at least someone agrees with me on something these days, heh.

Now obviously, a system like wow allows individual skill to matter more. Someone who can keep up some crazy optimal rotation while minimizing the damage they take is pretty valuable. But the issue becomes how much the effort vs potential varies by class. You can have a supremely simple rotation that does uber dps, or some godawful complexity that tops out just north of the tank. That shit can be enraging, especially when you have some classes that are massively affected by fight mechanics while others don't give a shit. It all combines into a big pile of Fuck You, at least at the bleeding edge of poopsock raiding. But it does let you show off your uber skills, assuming you don't get RNG fucked by every goddamn tornado forcing you to recast your motherfucking rune of power every ten fucking seconds and sljfslkejlksdjf FUCK ARCANE MAGES.

Ahem.

Like Rift, you had classes like Warlock where you had to put up SEVEN dots and THEN start your rotation. Then you had two cooldown abilities that refreshed your dots on a target, and then two more to transfer your dots from one target to another. And for all that, you did slightly better dps than an elemental holding down one button (unless it was a fight that bugged out pets, meh)

Jais_sl said:

About 2 months ago I got an email from an old friend saying that he and a few of my old gang were playing Rift again. I DLed, installed, saw that I had to redo 50someodd points into a spec tree, googled specs for 5 minutes, camped and uninstalled. Couldn't be bothered.

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I downloaded last night. Ran into this same shit, and I at least gave it a shot and went to the forums. There was so much shit there that I just logged off. Mentioned to my friends I downloaded, and the 1st thing they hit me with is how much crap you need to go thru to get back into the game. On top of that how homogenized the classes have become.

It failed for a few reasons. The WoW done meh...was the biggest. Just go play WoW.

Second...game was called Rift, but people did everything they could to avoid the fuck out of them. There were so many great suggestions on how to make these work, and they were of course ignored.

They started fucking with the builds way too much. Forcing you to go a full 51 points (was it 51?) to get abilities really was the doom of Rift for me and a couple of my buds.

The retarded amount of skills, then the crazy macros needed to get the most out of said skills. GOD there were too many skills.

What I did love about Rift was the difficulty of the dungeons initially. Skill mattering ageing was pretty cool. I actually liked the look. The art style was pretty nice. The engine was meh, as far as actual animations and shit went, but it did the job.

Played it at release and it just wasn't remotely interesting. I didn't specifically dislike playing it, but there was simply nothing new or cool about that game. It was such a resoundingly average, unimpressive MMORPG that it wasn't possible to justify choosing it over WoW (which I wasn't even playing at the time). I played for two weeks and then basically forgot I owned the game, I just suddenly realized I hadn't logged in for like five days and took it as a sign not to waste any more time on it. I didn't even care enough to spend energy hating it like I did with WAR and GW2 and a few others, Rift was just not noteworthy in any way. I believe I made it to level 48 and then it didn't even tempt me to go two levels further for the level cap, that's how little that game made me care. I've at least hit the level cap in pretty much every other MMORPG I've paid money for.

reading some of the employee comments on whether its a good place to work or not is pretty interesting
Trion Worlds Reviews | Glassdoor

I do wonder how they are doing financially, feels like the kind of studio that is always a step away from being shut down