Rift

Trion's first outing into MMORPG land is a good one showing all gamers that they know what they are doing. For the most part there is alot of familliar aspects to the game design and it will seem like you have played most of it before; so for those of you who don't like having to start new characters in a game may find it a bit of a slog getting back upto the end game. I won't go into those designs now other than to say that if you have played WOW et al, then you will have seen them before.

There are a number of new features though that have been implemented well, which personally add enough incentive for me to keep playing. The first is that your 'calling' (Warrior, Mage, Rogue and Cleric) defines which skill trees you can assign skill points to. At any one time you can choose upto 3 skill trees to define the role that you are performing. Each character can then have upto 4 roles (using different skill trees in each if you wish)  which you can more or less switch between on the fly. This means that you can have a setup that is good for soloing, PVP, Support and so on and not getting locked into a situation that your build cannot handle. What draws me to this is that when playing other MMO's I find it frustrating to face identikit Warriors and so on. When facing others in RIFT's PVP, this helps bring an element of uncertainty to what you are about to face, which I find refreshing.

The second is the rifts themselves. These crop up all over the place in different flavours (water, death, life to name a few) but are not as random as the marketing suggests. There does seem to be areas where they tend to form (albeit alot of them) so if you waited around one will likely appear soon enough. However, the rifts do help add a break from the more traditional questing that goes on and in themselves structured into stages that provide a quick and compartmentalised bit of fun. The rewards are ultimatley good for closing the rifts, but are a grind to get to the top kit.

Overall, I have been enjoying Rift and can see myself playing for a little while longer yet. Whether there is a long term prospect in  the game is still unclear as to me, server populations seem low. Trion are still working hard on the game though as less than a month in, they have already released some new content that introduced a 'World Event'. Trion currently plan to release these regularly but only time will tell if they can keep it up.