Rift was one of the best mmos that was run by one of the worst companies. It had so much promise that was squandered because of incompetent management.
@@AstheaTV Well, I can’t speak for the game in 2014 but from what people have told me it was completely different when it was released. I began playing last year and it’s by far the best mmo rpg I’ve played. If you haven’t played in a while I’d strongly advise you to try it.
Trion made a killing on ripping off existing game mechanics and modernizing them. They took the WoW route and extended it across all of their projects. Look up all of their games.
I know how you feel man. This was one of my favorites and to see it like this sucks. My friends and I talked about going back for the past few years but now I know we can't.
god, I remember those times, being fully immersed in this at the time gorgeous world and just being obsessed with this game despite being a casual pleb. Started playing shortly before it went F2P and from there on it was downhill all the way
had to come back to this one to mention this "Have you ever had a hobby that you really enjoyed, but then one day you stopped, and you just have no interest in returning? You don't dislike the hobby and you'll speak of it fondly you've just not got any burning desire to pick it up again" Until the first time I watched this video I hadn't found the words to describe how I feel about Graphic Design ever since I stopped working in the field, but this, this is it. This is *exactly* how I've felt about Graphic Design for the past several years and I just wanted to thank you for putting words to a sentiment I hadn't found the words fer yet.
How I feel about writing. Loved to do it, had so many ideas. Granted it was cringe fan fic, but I liked doing it. Then I stopped for a bit, thought I'd have a short break, and never got back to it. I like the idea of getting back into it, but I can't find that spark to.
I feel the same about video editing. 20 years on and I still talk about it on occasion. I could do it again any time I choose, but... nah. I'm good on that.
@@furiousapplesack funny enough video editing and post production FX is what kept me in the field for a couple of years after I stopped working in Graphic Design. So same, haven't done any real video work in years and I'm good on that too.
It has to do with skills, and "Skill", I think. At one point, you just reach a point, you're not just good enough, but actually very, very good. Getting any better would either involve life changing changes, or monetary expanses you're not ready/able to make. That plays a lot into this over all feeling, I think. (You've mastered the field, and brains are inquisitive, always curious entities. They have no interest in repeating tasks for ever on end, they need to learn something new to thrive)
All things considered, this struck me as actually quite a positive review. I think that there are so many BAD mmos, that even being "good but not great" is something of a rarity.
@@ppsarrakis first time i played it was with a gtx 570. i think the card did never run that hot with any other game. it still played fine but damn, that heat... hardware from 2005 would drop out of its slots on the mobo if ordered to run the game xD
It was a lot of fun when it came out. Tried it again recently and some of the changes really didn't sit well with me and I couldn't bring myself to play long enough to adjust.
Rift was good when it released, then SWTOR came out. People forget how huge SWTOR's release was. And GW2 came out too. We all left for those games. In other words, Rift was a rebound MMO after breaking up with WoW at the time, and like most rebounds you're only there until something better comes along.
swtor got close to wow numbers like 10-11mil and dropped to 2mil in 1-2 months. I heard rift was much better in last beta and they nerfed everything + selling the company was the last blow, I did play rift when it launched.. all those life time subs whining "don't play if you don't like it" well sucks to be them
@@kaiosun That's because levelling in SWTOR was amazing but the raids were broken at the time, the pvp was laggy and beyond that there really wasn't much to do besides chasing cosmetics and doing the space combat minigame. When the game went F2P they had the audacity to paywall extra action bars. The actual DLC story content later on was good though and the game seems in a better place now but nowhere near it's release numbers.
Yeah, if I remember right, the game was fantastic, especially the versatility of the class system and the addition of the support role. They had some neat ideas, like a dodge tank, a couple variations on something that resembles a modern WoW Discipline priest, and a Bard that had a bunch of 10ish second duration party buffs with a meta buff that scaled based on the buffs you had up. The open world rifts came in solo, group, and full on raid difficulties which was neat. The big problem was that the launch for SWTOR was after the first raid tier was on farm, but IIRC before the second was released. I jumped ship to SW, and by the time I realized that it wasn't going to have any longevity, my Rift guild was dead and WoW's next xpac was getting close. RIP RIFT
To their credit I was able to remember the villain's name purely because how bad it was, which tops plenty of games whose villain or even characters I forget shortly after.
Half way through the video i scrolled down to read the comment; Spotted this and i had forgotten the actual villains name but i do remember "Generica" and i'm sticking with it.
It’s like when I played Mass Effect Andromeda and they were talking about the antagonist species the ummm… the uhhh…. Yeah those guys. Forgot they even existed or were a thing for over half the game.
I miss this game so much. When it came out, zones were PACKED with rifts and the quick, popup join was so refreshing, big groups of people taking down rifts. Ended up forming raids and you could do this for hours if there was an invasion going on. There were some serious RPers to be found almost all the time in the Taverns, it was just a FUN game. Then it died and part of me went with it. It's a graveyard. I would play this again in a heartbeat if the game was somehow revived. No game ever has offered a wardrobe system like RIFT. It should be an industry standard IMHO.
Totally agree with you I remember how many people used to gather at the Rifts and how packed the zones were, was the only other mmo that took me and my friends away for some time I always wish they would of kept up with it cause it had SO much potential.
As a former developer on rift I think you nailed it. I worked on the game before launch and up till just after Storm Legion came out. Yeah all of the teleporting around totally breaks the player out of the story. Its jarring and provides no context for what you are doing. here is a baddy, go punch it in the face. But at the same time it does keep you constantly moving around, keeps you interacting with things at the expense of the story. *If it's not clear yet, I'm a story writer but I also worked on the rift system and on raids. Story is important to me but I understand its not the end all be all.
Sure you are a developer of rift xD You make me laugh dude xD Everyone who worked on Rift has signed an NDA so even you saying that would be a lawsuit. But its all good... I also "worked" on Rift before and after the release of the last expansion."jk ofc" And if you are the story writer on rift you didnt do your job anywhere near good enough to call yourself a story writer xD
Dude, take two seconds to google before you rip into someone for no reason. He is a dev@@inceneration Also, rarely does an NDA say you can't talk about having worked on something. It prohibits giving trade details and spoilers. Are you 12?
@@incenerationhow long do you think NDAs last? Do you think he wouldn’t be able to put his experience on a resume? There is nothing illegal about saying you worked on a game. If he’s a developer, his name is even in the credits.
@@inceneration NDAs are not indefinite unless maybe if you are working for CIA or FBI or any other alphabet soup organization. Also vague stuff is usually ok; I have been under NDA two times in my life, both having some variation what can and can't be said.
In a later video you talk about the quit moment. Here's my quit moment with Rift. I had leveled my chosen class to max level. Sorted the abilities on my bar in a way that made sense to me. Then realized that I would never, under any circumstances, use the abilities out of a certain priority list. So, I set about making a macro which triggered those abilities in that specific order. I literally was playing max level Rift doing this: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 I even PvPed with that macro and never was there a time that I wanted those abilities to fire in another order. I was, and am, a fan of MMOs that provide a way to reduce the massive button clutter than is the poor legacy from the early MMOs onward. I'm glad that I could have a 2-skill combo where I don't have to take 2 separate keys to fire them off. It is one of the pain points I have with FFXIV. But on the flip side, if your abilities have no situation where you would want to fire any of them out of order? There's no thought to be had there. That was when I quit Rift.
I had the same exact quit moment. When I realized if I wanted to be even a tiny bit competitive, I had to macro all my buttons to a "single target" and "aoe" macro. Incredibly effective, but absolutely killed any fun I was having. Edit: this was after I had already played at launch and had quit and come back for the Storm Legion xpac I think it was.
This is very dependent on the class. I played cleric. Shaman was about alternating lightning and ice themed abilities, and there were charges and cooldowns to consider. It couldn't be macroed like this and considered the hardest cleric set to play. Inquisitor as a ranged dot class was about keeping your dots up and then casting non-dot filler spells (this part could probably be macroed). Druid was pretty simple and I macroed him as you describe, one priority list attack button, rest of the bar about cooldowns, support spells, summoning different pets, etc.
"What was the bad guys name" Me: regulos. "I said it at the start of the video" Me: regulos. "Can you remember?" Me: regulos. "No. Exactly. So I award this video regulos out of 10" Me: goddamnit that's not even a picture of regulos!
I played a tank in this game and my most memorable tanking moment ever was in the is game: I was the only tank fighting an open world boss with a crap tone of healers and and unknown number of DPS, I went head to head with this Giant scorpion with my HP bouncing around so wildly from so many healers as I worked to keep aggro.
lol rift was the only game that as a mage i could main tank raids at least post first xpac but was always a raid healer since it was a easier role to do with a shitty PC
I was the guild's Archon, and it always made me smile when the DPS would post their big dick numbers that were only made possible by me doing the right thing at the right time. I wish more games had a dedicated Support role that actually mattered.
Your lying.... Big time none of the world bosses can be solo tanked.... No matter if you have 50 healers they all have debuffs that stack eventually you will be one shotted....
Reminds me of WOTLK WoW, when Paladins we're stupidly powerful. I would tank ICC 25 man with another tank, hed take 1 enemy, id take the other 15, so funny. Even joked with my mate in PvP as a pally healer, we did 2v2 and he died, so i said look how dumb this is, and stayed alive forever while 2 dps wailed on me. Fun times, wish WoW was still good but i'll never go back to "omg your only ilvl 50 we need ilvl 60 !!!"
I know this video is old but I had to comment that it made me laugh that a long time MMO player took so long figure out that he was not using his abilities simply because they were not called skills. Josh, you are just precious.
I really would have thought the fact that he had a finishing blow ability would have been a give away that he had abilities he wasn't seeing haha. (I know your comment is as old now as this video was when you commented, but here I am)
I think hes playing as a new player would. Unless you're TOLD or Shown in some way the skills page you wont exactly not know where it is, and probably most people wont interact with it!
When I played Rift years ago, I had a lot of fun. The talent tree combos were fun, the dungeons/raids were fun, etc... and the thing that stuck out to me.... I'm an explorer at heart. I go where most don't to look around and see what's there... Rift rewarded exploring! There were little artifacts you could find and click on hidden all over the place. Behind trees, under rocks or bridges, in jars, etc. There were several times I climbed hills and found a cairn on top that I could click on for loot, just... out in the middle of nowhere. THAT'S what I miss about Rift. I wish more games would reward exploring. I even got off map in a few locations and occasionally found an artifact spawn offmap (likely a remnant of the map making process), but STILL! What game has that quality now? None that I can think of. :(
Yes. It was a fun game. Finding a difficult cliff to climb and discovering a cairn to loot was a nice touch. Or a puzzle to solve to open a door. What sucked about rift is that they tried to be wow.
I remember getting addicted to wandering the mountain ranges in the good (human?) starter zone cos they had loads of artifacts. What a ridiculously silly way to spend time.
I still think RIFT’s soul system was one of the most creative designs I’ve ever seen. There was so much opportunity for self expression, especially in PVP. It left such a strong base to be built on, as well-shame the management of the game wasn’t quite there. I still miss it.
@@Knonme21 Yeah that was always frustrating. I get that having such an open system like that would be so very hard to keep balanced, but the solution is not to nerf anything that beats your max point ability in damage.
Trion's issue is they took RIFT's profits and used it to seed a ton of awful MMOs, most that didn't launch, rather than reinvesting it back into content. By Nightmare Tide, Trion was in Dire straights and was more worried about Archeage being their savior, and went full in on wringing out every drop of money out of the F2P aspects of RIFT.
Yeah, min maxxing and the inevitable 'balancing' killed any innovation in the soul system. I loved Reaper Tanking 'back in the day', it was awesome pulling crowds of 10+ mobs to solo tank and grind for XP ;)
That lack of emotional engagement you highlighted was introduced later, after the game had significantly decayed. Originally there was no instant adventure option, but finding things to do with other players in a disorganised fashion wasn't hard because the Rifts and Invasions happen constantly. The most epic MMO experience I've ever had was my first zone-wide Invasion event. Rifts open up all across the zone, monsters come flooding out of them and they make it impossible to continue questing normally until the invasion is contained. They would literally take over towns and mass murder the NPCs until they were stopped, and the game emotionally incentivised you to do it. It felt like a big deal, like the characters really were fighting off the apocalypse. And every zone had several different events like this that could occur in them, so it wasn't the same thing over and over. You could also just join and leave other people's groups with the click of a single button, and the game incentivised you to do so. Additionally, the core storyline quests were fantastic, leading the player to explore the world and learn about what was happening and why. As I'm sure you can tell I'm passionate about this game, but I don't play it anymore because every time I go back it just feels empty and reminds me of the great times of the past that will never come back.
Yes, Yes, Yes. Also i'm extremely frustrated and annoyed at how clueless josh seems to be. No abilities? Okay you fixed that later. However, spent the majority talking about 'raids' that he joined through the "Instant Adventure" menu. The 'Raids' you were in were added much later so Trion could recycle content that was too hard for 99% of the players to experience. They weren't meant to be raids, they were meant to allow players to level up alternatively. Yes the game is on life support, but the bulk of your video is wrong solely because you couldn't break outside the thought that you knew. The encounters in IA's scale yes, but are tuned so that 1-2 players in a group of 20 could do them. How can you be invested in something if there is no potential for failure? That is a problem with IA's for sure, and now that the game has been out so long it's starting to be a problem in actual raids at endgame. Admittedly you probably never would see an actual dungeon group queue before level 65. Normal dungeons are 10x harder than IA's and i'm fairly confident that if you went in with 4 other new/leveling players you would become emotionally invested in the success/failure of the group. In the IA's most the stuff you took damage to would of been a 1 shot in the real versions at release. You'll never know the emotional roller-coaster of fighting that giant squid in a 20minute encounter with 0 deaths in raid. Only so that when the boss is at 0.5% hp a player in your group uses their charge ability and dies in one hit to the bosses breath attack, preventing everyone from getting the 0 deaths during encounter achievement. You stood in that attack for what seemed like an eternity. I can understand why you aren't emotionally invested, but the video was 99% you talking about how certain things that felt wrong to you didn't live up to your expectation. The problem with this is that the things you talked about weren't what you thought they were. The class and ability system of rift is by far the biggest draw to the game as far as combat goes. You didn't even use an ability the majority of the intro. Facing difficult quests/dungeons/raids that get you invested in others/achieving a goal which help you get emotionally invested in the game... Again, you did none of it. You went to the thing purpose built for being able to jump in/out of without any consequences and then talked about how there was no emotional investment. There is just so much that is left out about rift. Spent 30 seconds of 44 minutes talking about the main draw of the game for combat. Never experienced dimensions (personal housing). Never experienced dungeons. Never experienced raids (of course, but at max level they happen all the time) Never experienced (afaik) a true story quest line. No mention of artifacts. No talk about guilds. Never even visted the first main city (which is in the first zone out of tutorial). Like, most of the praise given was about how good the world building was but you never even glimpsed the world. You opened the map and saw a gigantic world then looked at 1/5th of the first zone, proceeded into instanced content and complained about how the content was instanced.
Man spot on, great memories of those zone-wide invasions. The only thing similar I've found since then is Guild Wars 2 and their open world meta events. They also have level scaling to the zone but it's automatic. Rift really was great in its heyday. Trion pulled some greedy shit and killed the game fast right after Nightmare Tide. I saw the writing on the wall with the earrings debacle so I left.
@@davidcampbell9931 Thank you, you found the right words expressing why I has a bad feeling about this review. MMORPGs are so huge, it's impossible to get an actual impression of the game from just one few hours long session. At least if it's a somewhat serious game, not something like Fiesta or such. I REALLY wished he would have accepted the one guy's invitation in the end who wanted to take him on a tour through the game. This also and especially would have been great for the viewers. Do you still play Rift? Are the things you talk about still as enjoyable today?
Yes, from the beta until the first expansion it was amazing. Beautiful art, quality of life features, finding yourself healing a raid group at level 9 to close a rift. And everyone working together to stop the invasions - I forget the zone, but it had werewolves and an NPC named after Suzanne Vega at the center where it took a bunch of players to get rid of those elite invaders. It remained great F2P, but felt grindy in the first expansion; combat was kind of like this video - mobs with very high HP for no particular reason, go kill 30 of them. Last time I went back they had an underwater expansion and I gave up. But it was a beautiful game 10 years ago.
This game did so many things ahead of it's time, it felt like The WoW Clone WoW Kept Cloning. Did things like AoE looting, crafting from bank and wardrobe system where anything you pick gets added to your collection way, way before WoW did. The dye system was better than what I've seen in MMOs around still, I have yet to meet with a housing system (dimensions) that allows it's amazing amount of freedom, the class tree was impressively robust in options AND it had not just "that one support class that people are still having second thoughts about inviting (AKA "The Bard"), it was a DEDICATED party slot. It's worth mentioning it's key binding system should be standard. I know I kinda recently saw it elsewhere (I think WoW?) but being able to change keybindings by hovering the mouse over the hotkey on the screen instead of going down a list should be the NORM with how quick and intuitive it is. And they did it since day 1. I honestly feel like if I had known it was going to just DIE, I would've actually "mained" this MMO back then and gone super hard on it. Because now, the experience just can't be re-lived... So much regret.
I played a bard during Nightmare Tide because I didn't think anyone would want me to raid with them. Came to find out that it was an in-demand support class. lol There was SO much I loved about that game and miss. The transmog and housing systems are far and away better than anything else I've had in WoW or FF14.
The problem with the talents system was that metas formed relatively early. It basically invalidated most choices outside of the meta. It was a great game, though. So many good memories.
@@Emajenus I didn't really hit endgame but I didn't find this to be the case. As long as what you used made sense you didn't seem terribly limited. A main tree to focus on and two trees mostly for passive boosts that enhance your main is what I figured worked the best. Third tree was mostly passive fluff but even the second tree usually allow to provide decent utility. At least that was my interpretation of the system when I played back then. And last I played Nightmare Tide (or something like that) was new.
What I love most about these videos is that although MMOs are not my thing, I enjoy exploring the often well-crafted fantasy worlds while having Josh slog through the actual game so I don't have to.
Rift was my "mmo for a summer" i got invested into a roleplaying guild with twice a week meetups. It was a fond memory at best after so many years. I stuck with it for 2 or 3 months and slowly drifted away as another semester of high school started. Here i am, probly 9 years later, smiling and remembering those simpler days.
The thing that stunned me as a wow player at the time i was playing/trying this game out, the spell casting, the mages/casters actually use the staff when you have one equiped to cast a spell, while on wow its been a decoration since 2004...
What struck me as a player about to quit WoW during the beta at the end of 2010 were the quality of life changes (auto-grouping so you wouldn't have to worry about tagging, clicking once to sell all gray items, I forget what else), the RIFTS and invasions, the triple soul trees, the art, and the chloromancer who could heal by doing damage.
I know right? I've seen some alpha footage of WoW and characters actually used their weapons to cast spells. I have no idea why they changed that but it always bothered me.
maybe they are eventually making that every race can be every class and this exact change would help blizzard team a whole lot of work from animating wand/staff actually being used in every single class.@@happybalint
I remember RIFT making for easily my most fun weekend of the year when I first played it brand new. After a 30 hour straight session, I closed the game feeling like I absolutely loved the experience, and then I never opened the game again. I don't even know why anymore, for some reason the game just didn't leave me wanting more.
IMO Rift was fantastic. I played at launch, quite a bit. It was one of the first MMOs of its type to allow you level in so many different ways legitimately. I loved the classes. There was a lot more of an emotional connection when the game first came out. It took a LOT longer to level, and it was a very social game. It's totally different now.
The original RIFT was an amazing MMO, as perfect a WoW clone as ever was done; it truly was a better WoW than WoW. Just Trion was a terrible company and completely ruined it after. To this day though as a die-hard WoW fan the "vanilla" Rift has been that only game that ever got me to quit WoW to play it.
TRION actually borrowed a lot of money to put into marketing campaign for RIFT. Time passes new games comes out and money had to be turned back. Then it came F2P and all bad things..
I agree in that it was the best "WoW" clone by far. It expanded upon a lot of what WoW was doing and the ability to customize your class so much was amazing at the time. I played Rift in the Beta but didn't have enough money to reliably sub to an MMO at the time and I regret never getting to play it at release.
I'm with the other 'Originals' - the game at release was AWESOME! Had a huge community, great questing system, the Souls system that was lightyears ahead of any other MMO, Public Rifts, Invasions, Dungeons, Raids plus a plethora of other incidental stuff you missed in your review - the sparklies you had to find collected for achieves in each zone (and physical rewards, titles etc), puzzles, exploration, shit - even reaching he highest point in a zone etc Rift was the MMO that invented most of those. I remember well the point Rift began to decline. One week our Guild was raiding, opening 25 man guild rifts ... then a week later we couldn't form a raid ... within a billing cycle no-one was playing anymore. You are right in that we got sucked into other newer MMO's. SWTOR was the big one that drew the most people away. I was one. But SWTOR had its own spectacular fall as well. People returned to Rift - but it wasn't the same, the feel was gone. Max level people had no desire to go through all the low level content again, especially after seeking out all those quests, content, achieves, puzzles etc on one toon, I know I didn't. Raids couldn't be filled and 5 mans were the best you could do ... the 1st expansion was still some time off. Thats when I last seriously played the game. I've gone back a couple of times, but I am soloing it when I do, it's deserted ... and I only last a couple of hours and I forget it again ... it's still on my hard drive. Rift deserved better
Rift was also very much in the "World of Warcraft" genre of MMOs. The only players interested in that genre of MMO are either playing WoW, or taking a break from it. A lot of Rift's playerbase just went back to WoW, again.
I mean their catch phrase for the adverts before and during launch was "We're not in Azeroth anymore", they where not trying to fake not being a wow clone :V
Or went to play FFXIV, the more casual catgirl alternative. Seriously, in that genre there is only WoW and FFXIV. And the only thing stopping ex-WoW players leaving FFXIV to go back to WoW now is the fact the decided to quit WoW because the feel Blizzard perminantly messed it up. Rift is also the most steriotypical example of the 3rd generation of MMO, ironically being one of the last examples; Which half were WoW clones and the other half licenced IP games, all of which were rushed, all of which went overbudget and all of which claimed to be WoW killers to which all of them crashed and burned so hard they either bankrupted their developer or lead to the publisher quietly looking for ways to make their money back somehow off the tiny population left behind after the first month of release. It was games like these that turned most gamers off MMOs, but it was also the era of the MMO cash grabs and trying to replicate WoW success. But, since Battle Royals became a thing, they are the current target for cash grab games; MMOs quietly returning to passion projects while no surprise, the cash grab focused MMO studios have swappped from MMOs to battle royals, Trion being one of them.
The thing that killed Rift was its lack of endgame content and what there was being too easy to complete. In every other aspect Rift absolutely destroyed World of Warcraft. Endgame is what keeps MMO's alive and well unfortunately.
I recall in the early days we had a valley below us where the bad guys were pouring through from a magic gate. I was charging down to fight them and looked around. Hundreds of other players were with me -- and there was no lag, none. It was amazing. I finally stopped playing when I had trouble keeping up with what to do after switching between three totally different builds (in addition to all the other games I was playing).
Fun fact: "regulus" roughly means "petty king" in Latin. Not exactly an awe-inspiring name for the evil dark overlord threatening the universe. 'Regulus out of 10' is the best rating for Rift.
I believe that would be the literal translation -- "little king" is what I found when I looked it up -- but "prince" is more of an accurate meaning. I don't know if the character is basically the "prince of evil" or "prince of darkness" or something, but it's a name that denotes royalty at the very least. So, I didn't find it a bad or forgettable name, myself.
If I recall the lore correctly, (I couldn't get an account during the time when it required pay, but I read through all the lore in the really cool website they use to have while imagining what soul combinations I'd go with for each calling. Favorite one I had in mind was a Warrior Paladin-Paragon-Beastmaster), Regulus had been a prince who decided to seek out dark arts and so betrayed his home and home to become the ruler of the death domain. So the name then makes sense. He's one of the few if only domain rulers that use to be human.
One of my guild mates at the time who was trying Rift with me, back when Rift was at it's peak, said something that really resonated with me: "Rift is an MMO without a soul". And he was right. (Rift players will also see the irony in that). It just didn't have any emotional attachment. It was beautiful. Balanced. Had some incredibly forward thinking systems, especially with regards to classes. But it just didn't make me feel anything.
I had a massive a connection with the game, perhaps the community. We were pushing for world first hammerknell back then and got stuck at 11/13 when vudu and his team took the W. Just sayin, I felt a connection!
@@-JustinCombs I feel like that’s abit different from what he meant. It is super fun watching/participating in a lot of different games systems/races but that doesn’t mean the game has soul. Just like modern WoW or CoD for the last 10+ years.
Rift was great. Played at launch, left for a bit, came back during Storm Legion and had a blast with it for a long time. It makes me sad too when I see what it's become. It didn't deserve the awful fate that was thrust on it. .
Same. I put so much love into that game. I learned to tank and I'll never forget when we were doing one of the end game raids and our main tank went down and I had to immediately jump in from being off tank and everyone cheering for me as I practically learned the fight while doing it was incredible.
Man that class system is a far cry from when it started. I remember back when you could pick a bunch of different classes of different alignments regardless of race or faction, including Necromancer, which some people did while playing as the de-facto good guys the Guardians (we were chosen not for our virtue but for our might!). Seeing only four with an optional, payable fifth is a far cry from when I first got interested in Rift.
Not sure if anybody cares but I re-tried the game like 8 months ago and you technically still have the freedom you had when the game released The builds and classes you choose at the beginning are just based on actual builds by players like a guide but you can also go into the skill tree and freely combine your classes skill trees in combination of 3s For example as rogue assassin/nightblade/marksman could be changed to assassin/bladedancer/saboteur or any combination you like They still added some skill Trees you only can use with money for example a tank sub class for mages or a heal sub class for rogues
The Chloromancer mage was such a fun take on how to create a different type of mage archetype. They were like a resto druid combined with any other mage spec you wanted to combine with it.
Way to use big words to sound extra dramatic but you are simply wrong. While the rest of the game is a shadow of what it once was, the class system is still the exact same. I was a founder when it came out and go back to it about once every 2 years hoping to recatch some of that initial enjoyment.
@@Haphazardization Literally the only reason I stopped playing that game was because the PvP lobbies emptied out, and there was no way to turn of xp points (so you could keep playing the honestly really fun pvp modes they had in the level 20-60 range). Dragon Age: Inquisition is mostly single player yet "stole" the idea of rifts, and the storyline is solid. If you wanted some kind of RPG to get a bit of that Rift mode again then that game is honestly quite fun for a singleplayer-ish game.
Almost 2k hours in, countless max level characters, such a sad thing to see how this game turned out. Stopped after best in slot gear was gotten from loot boxes. Miss this game so much, really wish a good ip would take it over
you could never get BiS Gear from lootboxes lol, Not even now. you could get the previous Tier If a new raid launches, for absurd amounts of Money or get a free Ride through the previous Dungeons and get the Gear for free. you got Tons of guilds and pugs doing that, equipping undergeared Players for free cause they could and were Nice people.
@@h3m1v33 around nightmare tides expansion was when I quit. Almost 99% positive at the time BiS gear could be obtained through loot boxes off of in-game store. If not BiS, a step right below it. Was definitely something that shouldn’t have been in the game
What made Rift great for me was that it allowed me to level my character up to max solely through PvP. Not only that : it encouraged me to grind battlegrounds so that I could buy new pieces of PvP equipment. The Soul diversification was outstanding : as a Rogue I could reroll into ranged DPS , melee DPS , tank , support , offtanks with crazy DPS - you could never bore yourself because your playstyle was extremely flexible.
@@FeewRift if you compare it to vanilla wow release schedule, it would look pretty reasonable, but the problem is the market had already evolved and people expected much more much earlier. Rift release endgame was so desolate most people only lasted a month or 2 and then got bored. LONG LONG before any of the major patches actually added end game substance. the only reason people lasted that long in vanilla wows terrible endgame (before MC) was because they had never experienced that before and had no other games to turn to. But when Rift came around, there were already other options for them to move to, so what worked for wow in 2004, wasnt going to work for Rift.
@@FeewRift well im just relaying my experience. i got Rift the day of release. i hit max level in a few weeks. for a month or so after that there was basically nothing but pvp, then they added some high level "raid" rifts but it was just more of the same thing that already existed (already spending all day doing rift repeat rift repeat rift repeat, so adding a slightly larger Rift was VERY lackluster). I uninstalled after about 2.5 months. WoW came out in 2004. Rift came out in 2011. at that point wow was already on its 4th expansion, Cataclysm had released a few months before Rift, and people were disappointed in that expansion within a month, even though they had already migrated to their (current) content release schedule bringing out the first Raid within a few months of expansion open, and people already were quitting wow in massive numbers because they were bored of the extremely content lacking wow expansions. Rift tried to get by with the same poor content release timing as WoW was already proving was insufficient. It still to this day surprises me how many people still play WoW. but hey there are still people playing Rift too, so its clearly common for some small group of people to hang on to dying games '\_O_/' we dont even have to bring up classic wow, we can just point back to the infamous moment at blizcon when the wow dev told the crowd "You dont know what you want". He was right. But humans are often very stubborn idiots so they will hang on to their pride by hanging on to their dead games and proudly pronounce "what are you talking about WoW is still great! lots of people still play!" mmmhmmmm just people who cant accept reality and move on. SUPER common in human history.
@@FeewRift i dont know where you are going with this but the point is THE ONLY THING BESIDES PVP (which was horrifically unbalanced worse than any other pvp game ever) TO DO AT END GAME IN THE FIRST FEW MONTHS OF RIFT: WAS MORE RIFTS. so it was fucking boring. thats just the facts, evidenced by the MILLIONS of players who quit in the first couple months, citing EXACTLY that reason: "The PvE endgame sucked. the pvp is too unbalanced.". Though I will say 2011 was a year when a LOT of really amazing games came out, so Rift had some hard competition. Remember SKYRIM came out shortly after Rift.... not to mention: MINECRAFT, TERRARIA, Dragon Age 2, Crysis 2, Oh yeah and SWTOR which was a far better MMO game and which STILL crumbled in a couple months for exactly the same reason: Boring endgame. I know you clearly have some attachment to Rift, but thats no reason to convince yourself that reality didnt happen, that millions of players quit for something OTHER than their stated reasons: the endgame sucked. instead you can just say "well I liked it." and move on and accept that you are a rare minority, and the majority do not like things the same way you do. its pretty simple.
I spent hundreds of hours just decorating my dimensions, and still have super fond memories of 20 man raids. If there's ever a Rift 2, I'd play it in a heartbeat. A shame you didn't mention other amazing aspects about Rift like the dimension system.
I like how giant two headed abomination that takes 15 minutes to kill gives 95 exp but some random humanoid enemy that takes 2 minutes to kill gives 110 exp
I was in the developer alpha of Rift and may have had a helping hand in that :P played Chloromancer/ Warlock/ Archon for most of it and most of my feedback went towards those. I am very happy with how it turned out. Early on the attacks felt too light, but with more crit camera shake and noise to the beam spells it felt better to play than most other awakenings
Me and my wife had so much fun in this game around 2011-2013. I remember loving this game so much... I still play it from time to time just top off my nostalgia meter. I do the same thing with 3.3.5 wow.
Rift was better than WoW for a couple of years. I played WoW from WoD until Mythic Helya in Legion, and I can say Rift had more challenging fights such as Planebreaker Abominus, Inyr'kta and Binding of Maelforge. The various classes were also within 5-10% of each other at the highest level of play. The combat was not only insanely fun but also complex and deep, with room for innovation.
I was so excited for a second thinking I remembered the villain's name but you were talking about Regulaos or "Generico". I was thinking about the tutorial area's first "hard" enemy Frederick or "no one scary has the nickname Fred".
Oh man how much I loved this game. I was hooked the moment I noticed that my favourite thing in any game, exploration, actually gets properly rewarded. In my first hour of playing in the open world I decided to hardcore parkour up a huge mountain. There were quite a few jumps in there that couldn't have been intended that way but still somehow worked. And what do you know, all the way up there was a chest with epic items I couldn't use yet. It felt SO rewarding. I haven't come across another game doing things like this since then. I know GW2 has jumping puzzles but it's a fleshed out and advertised feature there which takes away from the whole experience.
Exactly this! And all of the secret puzzles and stuff. I really enjoyed Rift. Also all "Server first" messages when you crafted something etc was really cool :)
To be fair: The "DLCs" you found on steam are mostly the subscription options - that's not a DLC ;). Summing those up is pointless. Thanks a lot for the vid though. It's been a while since I last played, gonna give it a go though. I was laughing so much when for the first few levels you just autofight everything and wonder how long the combat takes - it's hillarious. I wonder if that's a bug though. I thought if you autospend your points into your chosen soul combo it would place the relevant skills in your bar automatically (including those from level up). Did you accidentally swap bars or why did this happen? Next to Vanilla WOW this was my favourite MMO, I just loved the class system. Playing a (low) dpsing healer in raids was huge fun. Leveling my rogue as a teleporting, high speed, tank - also great. I've tried so many MMOs since then and none had anything comparable - so sad.
@@touyuber-k8h Yea, it was very strange and hyperbolic. I usually like this guys reviews but that was...dumb. And the combat; you get skills and he seems to be ignoring them somehow and just auto-attacking.
The rift event reminds me of the invasions in Tabula Rasa... My god there were a lot of MMO's... I think the oversaturation of the 00's and 2010's is honestly what killed the genre. Speaking as someone who used to play UO, SWG, EQ 1 and 2, Tabula Rasa, Earth and Beyond (no one remembers that one lol) CoH and Vanguard Saga of Heroes, I know I personally became overwhelmed by the sheer number of new releases and the never ending stream of MMO's. While I was playing Vanguard I had a realization of how vapid and throwaway pretty much MMO's were, and realized there was never going to be that great MMO everyone wanted. Another one was just going to come along, everyone would get shiny ball syndrome, the current game would be abandoned and the cycle would repeat ad infinitum. Now everyone's waiting on Ashes of Creation and Star Citizen to be the one to finally do everything right... when they're just the next shiny ball rolling past. >__> MMO's just felt like an endless stream of mediocre time-sinks that never seemed to reach their potential and were depressing by design... Once the novelty wore off I realized I did not like the genre, and haven't played one since.Nothing instills a feeling of ennui quite like an MMO.
This is the best post about MMOs I've seen. MMOs are "depressing by design." I was a GM with Verant, and an endgame raiding Shadowknight during the PoP era. When I stopped playing EQ, I vowed never to play another MMO (I've since added gacha games to that vow). But I've watched enough reviews to notice certain trends, and I'm convinced that was a good decision.
While I largely agree with you, doesn't that describe _most_ video games? The only games that I can think of that even can keep people playing consistently for years, are survival games (Like RUST, Ark and the like) competitive games or MMOs. Most people put 20-100 hours into a game and never touch them again. _They're virtually all passing shiny rolling balls_ at the end of the day.
i played rift when it first came out, and from day one, i felt the same way. "it isn't bad, it is fine" i LOVED the unique class system. that was the main draw for me.
This was one of my favorite mmo's back in the days. I remember playing it with my much older sister who i had just gotten back in touch with. I dont remember the graphics being this mediocre but the game was great regardless. I had so much fun, the first ever RIFT i closed dropped me an epic lvl 50 mount that was worth a ton, and my sister had apparantly been trying to grind it out for some time when i started playing. I left when the game went f2p because they promised there wouldnt be advantageous or pay2win items in the coming cash shop and fast forward to it going f2p the cash shop introduced, came filled to the brim with a bunch of p2w and pay4advantage stuff. thats when i knew it was over. And its really a shame what became of it. I think it was one of those rare gems that had massive potential.
And the other two were actual expansions, no different then WoW having made you buy BC and WOTLK separately. *edit* NVM, im an idiot and read the screen wrong, those were just mounts/cosmetics and a couple weeks of sub time.
I loved Rift for about the first 8 months it was out. Trion ran it into the ground with their management choices. Still one of the best leveling experiences I've had in the 40 plus MMO's I've run thru in the last 22 years.
I honestly don't even remember how long I played, I just remember sitting in a snowy town having long since got bored of going to the rifts as it was the same thing constantly and deciding "ye this is enough". Like you I enjoyed my time with it, but just nothing about it really encouraged me to keep playing it beyond that. I can't even remember what level I got to now, so I have no clue if I just reached the end of the story, or the grind got to bad and I stopped because of that.
The one thing I remember about Rift was that you had fall-through macros. Meaning, I could put pretty much all my abilities on one or two buttons in order of damage done and just spam them and it would use whichever ability was off cooldown. I was able to take down hordes of mobs that way.
Scott harstman and team did a genius job. The game at launch was incredible. It sure didn’t stay that way for long. I still yearn for the class trees and combos of this game
Your analysis is spot on now. But it couldn’t be further from the truth when this game came out. I could spend hours talking about how awesome this game was, and I could spend hours bitching about the mismanagement that took place. This to me was the most badass game I ever played. I fucking loved it. The dopamine rush I got from this was on another level. Spending so much time going through raids, with our guild and finally taking down the final boss was absolutely awesome. The pvp was fucking awesome. And the people that developed this game should be dam proud of what they did. I was and still am emotionally attached to my toon, that I have spent thousands of hours conquering rift.
@@chrissears5482 Ironically that was not my experience. I played EQ first (and random graphical chatrooms like *shudder* Furcadia before that in the early to mid 90s), and then Lineage 2, and finally WoW was the one (in the early vanilla days) that really addicted me. I will say in some ways I think EQ2 was the better game compared to WoW, but WoW just had that... nice medium between casual and hardcore play before they nerfed it into the ground. In vanilla WoW you could get those highs of EQ while only needing to grind for 8 hours a day, as opposed to EQ or Lineage 2's 16 or more hours a day. (Yeah, it sounds insane now, but that was the hardcore expectation back then.)
@@zeriel9148 You were 100% right regarding EQ2 v WoW. EQ2 was the better game, and it wasn't really all that close. Unfortunately, the one thing Blizzard did right with WoW was made the game play exceedingly well on average computers. EQ2 absolutely did not do that. They gambled (and lost) on the idea that the speed of processors would continue to increase and that within a year or two their engine would run stunningly well. What happened was the change from single core to multi core systems as clock speed leveled out. EQ2's engine is heavily CPU bound, and it wants a CPU that runs around 10 Ghz. Most unfortunate.
@@chrissears5482 My first was Guild Wars which I don't see as a proper MMO but it was still really fun. And when Burning Crusade came out I got into WoW and that was a truly amazing experience. I would actually say my time in BC is my most nostalgic MMO experience. Then when Rift came out it just blew me away with how social it was and how fun the combat system was. There was just something about the combination of features it had that gave the game some kind of magic. So Rift for probably like that first year after launch holds the spot for my favorite MMO ever and the one I miss the most. I've actually accepted that no MMO is going to capture that again but I'm still hopeful.
@@Banditman i had a brand new top of the line PC when EQ2 came out and needed every bit of it to play that game. I was an EQ1 junkie for years and i didnt really like a lot of the things EQ2 did.. I liked WoW much better than EQ2 but I still have all the best memories with EQ1. The internet was still so new so you just had to figure things out for yourself. All the info wasnt just easily available and solved the moment it came out
Thanks for calling out subtitles/accessibility. I don't personally have a need for them, but it's so important. It's rediculous how hard it is to get on priority lists.
Great video but the first part of this was actual pain for me to watch, I wanted him to figure out to use his abilities so, so badly lol. Watching him die over and over was rough, poor guy learned the hard way
The thing with Rift is that it's like a girlfriend that does nothing wrong and there is nothing wrong with her, and she's perfect in almost any way, But it's her parents there is something very very off with her parents not sure if they will kill you at night or something but something is off... And that was Trion world's.. good at making games and bad at managing them and that is what is wrong with Rift.. it's parents
@@morcossthegreat7960 I spent thousands of hours on AA and can agree, AA could've been the next big MMO but they fucked it over so badly with P2W it's almost unplayable now.
i loved the traditional purifier/sentinel/warden healer build in raiding, and i played the hell out of inquisitor in pvp. using fanaticism into nysyrs rebuke was sooooo fun every single time man...
Its so crazy how you described the issue Rift when I just clicked this video thinking "oh yeah, how did I completely forget about Rift?! I remember it being such a fun game."
To those of us that played at launch it was an amazing experience. Rift-ing through each zone with an army of mmo comrades, we conquered all the rifts. Unfortunately it didn't last. It was fun the first month, then it quickly fizzled. I still treasure that adventure.
I'm pretty sure I played it at launch. I still have some funny screencaps of bugs I reported, like when your face or torso went missing while riding a mount.
I mean, I wouldn't have gotten into Rift if it wasn't F2P. But I get what you're saying. It became less of wanting to improve the game and more of monetizing it; I would say that was a problem with Trion and its executives in general, not necessarily a problem with a free to play model. WoW and FFXIV are popular and sub-based, but I'd hesitate to say they're popular *because* they're sub-based. Even then, there's still lots of microtransactions on their end. Shareholders are no longer satisfied with revenue from subscriptions. While costs have gone up, I doubt that game costs have exploded so much, and that it's more of a case of the money being used to pay executives (while often letting go or lowering the pay of those actual working on their products).
@@BoisegangGaming I would much rather pay a sub fee for a game that i know is good, that gives me all the tools i need to succeed without spending extra money (wow, ffxiv) than play a game with a model that DEPENDS on my swiping my credit card anytime i need something.
It's cheesy but not in a good way, it really takes you out of the moment since it doesn't match up well with what's going on. It's a prime example of why this MMO failed: It's not the worst voice acting, but it's placement and tone is off. It's a veneer that wears off almost immediately.
I just rewatched this and remembered what you said about the raids and the voice acting. That wasn't always the case with bosses. But Nightmare Tide was a horrible monster that gave us that one thing. An overarching villain that didnt take himself too serious and actually was super sassy towards us. It was great. I miss Rift.
I can't believe how incredibly sad I became watching this video. This game had so much potential, and it was really fun when it came out. It's absolutely a shell of what it once was, but I do login every few months and play a bit for the nostalgia.
Is it a shell because you never see any other players? Or do you mean the gameplay has changed since launch? I haven't played this since probably 2012 and think it could now be a fun mostly-solo experience, unless the gameplay has actually been ruined somehow.
Man I miss this game. Literally named my channel after it, and the years of fun I had with it. Not just one of my favourite MMOs ever, but one of my favourite games, ever, period. What happened with Rift Prime, Trion's Fall from one of the best MMO Companies to well....dead. And Gamigo. So sad to see Rift with them.
Since most of the games core is still intact, I firmly believe that in the right hands it can be saved. Itl never get the attention back, but the game is still good and hasn't been gutted.
i found some of the designs pretty odd. but the game in itself was fun. i was playing a year or so and had to stop because of movement for work, less time etc etc. then i remember it went f2p. i never tried it again
The whole "Rift mechanic" spawned from Warhammer Online's Public Quests. These same sort of quests sorta carried forward the "theme park" dynamic questing we would see in Guild Wars 2 and ESO. Kinda cool how this stuff evolved over the years.
I played Rift from 2010-13... even had a wallpaper from the game as my desktop BG. Sad to see how hard it fell. Watching this makes me feel both the urge to play it again, but also the knowledge that I'd just be disappointed and would be better off not bothering. May as well leave it with the positive memories I had instead of ruining them.
I’m sorry, but the first fight that took that long, I would have immediately been looking through every hot Key binding to find abilities...I get that the game should mention it, but come on... you had to know you should have some abilities. How could you call auto attacking through 5 levels “fun”? lol
The issue there was, he thought he had and that there simply weren't any offensive abilities available there yet, only utility stuff, because he had looked in the wrong place.
He had to remove the abilities from his bar just to have the meme for his video (or to whine about the delay for the skills/talents tutorial), as soon as you choose one of the presets it auto-fills your bar with the level 0 abilities
@@brianbates212 Actually I just had to see so I made a Triumphal Warrior. They do not get auto Skill placement on your Action Bar. However the Character Info button was pulsing/highlighted as was the sub buttons of Abilities to show they were important and should be pressed. Just like in his video, though he never pressed them.
The name sounds like he is just some regular guy with bad breath. But they probably went for something like "the regulator" as in he regulates the universe or whatever...
@@LasherTimora i had Latin in school for years, also you could just have googled it: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulus_(disambiguation) Most "Fantasy" names have their roots in other languages
I had a similar experience. I remember a slow crawl to level 10 or 20 (I can't remember) and then I joined a raid at the suggestion to people in zone chat. I was powerleveled so much that I was just LOST after I got out of my string of raids. I don't think I logged in again after that day.
For me to play an MMO I have to care about the setting. For games like WoW and SWTOR they have pre-existing settings that I am already into. For games like Rift and Tera, they need to snatch me up in the setting right away or I lose interest. I can collect 8 wolf pelts after killing 12 spiders in plenty of MMOs, that's not what keeps me there; I have to actually care about the story and the setting.
A bit late to the party but this is what I try to tell everyone when talking about MMORPGs. They need to be a _world_ a fun, living world for you to explore and play within. You can have the best raiding on the scene, your PVP can be top notch, your character customization could be so in-depth you can customize each individual hair, your combat could be the finest on the market... but if your _world_ in your MMO is a dry, empty, meaningless place that's nigh-impossible to get attached to, your MMO will be forgotten as soon as the next flashy example of mechanical fluidity waltzes by.
@@DuskEalain I don’t know, WoW still exists and granted I haven’t played retail in a couple years but even when I did I legit couldn’t tell you ANY of the zones I put hundreds or more of hours into. I wasn’t attached to the zones I was attached to the group content.
@@NotSoSerious69420 Yes but if you were thrown into the thick of Icecrown Citadel with 19 other random people like Josh was here... would you really care? Yeah sure you got loot and XP but there would be nothing building up to it. It's not about the individual _zones_ necessarily it's about the _world,_ and you being invested in what's going on.
This game was so amazing at launch. There were so many people online that you would be running towards world bosses in a huge army of players and it was such an epic experience. It had a grouping system that automatically put you in groups with people if you were near each other doing the same events and this made it feel like the most social MMO I've ever played. People often stayed in the groups and went on to tackle other content together so it was so easy to meet new people. Ah I really miss that.
It makes me sad that people don’t get to experience their childhood game quite the way it should be. Games being poisoned by bad business practices will continue to plague the industry and game preservation.
This one always makes me sad, because this game had probably the coolest class system to ever appear in an MMO. Being able to choose your own build, putting specs together piecemeal style, was so damn cool. Being able to play every role as every class (tank, heal, dps, support) was awesome. The very fact there are support classes in general that aren't just healers, but actually exist to provide buffs and debuffs. There was so much that was just really fun and interesting. I really wish this game had done better.
This was one of the few games i remember playing where healers were dangerous. I had a build that could res and heal half a raid party (12 people) in 3 casts
I remember the instance finders. It was cool being in thrown into groups with others and then smashing enemies all across the map - for a while at least. You quickly start to realize that, as usual with these things, nobody talks to anybody, because nobody is dependant on anyone. You become a part of a voiceless, faceless horde that might as well be bots for all intents and purposes. And the fact that it instantly teleports you somewhere else is also bad. The moment you can access something through a menu and be taken somewhere KILLS the world immediately. Suddenly you're no longer in a digital "physical" world, you're playing through menus. Sure it's more convenient but the prize for it is a dead and much less immersive world.
The different rift invasions were great when they took over the entire zone and you had to group up to fight them back. This was a good mom then it went p2w.
Yeah i couldn't watch the whole video because of this. How am i supposed to take someone who refuses/can't find the skills/ability window seriously? It may have been a long joke, but it wasn't funny/entertaining just frustrating. Because MANY mmo's don't hold your hand to the skill/ability window.
The problem is that you have to treat the tutorial as if the player has never ever picked up a video game before in their life, so missing a way to point players to an ability book can and will confuse and frustrate them and they're going to experience the game in the exact same way as you see in the video, which will only turn them off the game right at the start.
@@Keyce0013 So I went ahead and downloaded Glyph and installed Rift, just to see what is up. Followed the same path he did. As soon as I was in the game various buttons were pulsing/highlighted. I clicked on them and it showed me character info, abilities, and skills. Also at 6:25 he X'ed out of the Combat Tutorial which discusses how Warrior abilities use Power to Build and then Spend.
@@Enarei Didn't think you'd go THAT far to prove your point, but it's commendable that you've done so. I guess that makes him as bad as the Cuphead guy?
Your opinion of this game is exactly mine; The game is fine. But it never really sparked that "must play" feel to me. I played it 3-4 months on launch.
The early combat problems was strange because I started playing just after this game came out and I had abilities on the hotbar from the moment I entered the map
I had the same impressions of Rift. I wanted to play the regular game, but there was no one around and really nothing to do. All of the remaining players were doing endless, disconnected raids. That's just not my thing. If you enjoy that sort of thing--Rift still has something for you.
I actually played Rift for quite a while when I had a break from WoW, and I liked it.. the problem lies in what you said - its good, but its not really great or special
no offense but both of you played the game for how long? if you don't remember the name of Regulos ofc you didn't play nearly enough to scratch the surface. You didn't feel drawn in, that's fair, but don't use that to justify the game not being special. You simply didn't experience a fraction of what the game has to offer.
It will stay in my heart as the first MMO that allowed me to play my favourite class, a rogue, and do my favourite activity, tank. And just for that I'll always cherish my memories.
Why do I now want to return to Rift more than ever. I recall the game being the first HD game and the sound so amazing. I hope I will not be disappointed.
I returned after watching this. It seems that since I've been gone, they've added a system where you no longer have to buy dyes or store costumes in the bank & can wear anything you've ever tried on in any color you want on the fly. Damn, Aura Kingdom needs this so bad.
I am convinced the giant demon crotch boss was intentionally made to be at that very specific level just so you'd constantly be thinking that you're fighting his dong.
Remember playing this game with my grandmother. Ill never forget her bouncing around on these huge orbs (Jellyfish?) and reaching level 60. I remember her moving onto this area where you fell down into an area that had water all above it and eventually making it there myself.
I played the crap out of this game, and my most active period was during the Storm Legion expansion. The wardrobe system was incredible! The cloth armor in particular made me angry at WoW for re-skinning the same stupid robes over and over again. You nailed something I could never articulate... I just never felt invested in the world, and never felt truly attached to anything in it, including my own characters. So many awesome systems & visuals, but in the end I just never felt anything connect me to the world it was set in! Thanks for the video, I can finally articulate my feelings 10 years later hahaha. :P
When it first came out, Rift was great. It had decent lore, great quests and a pretty decent character building system, which even innovated certain things. Trion itself killed the game over the years - they murdered pvp, nerfed and buffed classes at random and then started to recycle raids and other content, which crapped the game out. Now one button macro'ed builds are king and there hasnt been anything new in years.
Vanilla Rift PVP with Runner Specs is still the most fun I had in PVP in a Themepark MMO. I felt like a Star Running Back when I enter Whitefall Steppes lol
@@marshinz5696 Whitefall was the only PVP i liked. Sat in the middle as tank was good fun, though getting one shotted by a fire mage was never fun :P Very enjoyable until they nerfed warrior tank.... well warriors in general into the ground.
@@spwicks1980 I remember when mage pyro was super strong also but I made a counter class with my warrior. It was a reaver/riftblade build that had super amount of self heal and huge range on spells as riftblade burst was carried by my reaver dots. I would stand on top of hill in codex and nuke them with dots where i am out of range of most of there spells then teleport behind them and finish off with melee lmao.
@@adriansmith5241 Reaver was an amazing tanking class back in the day. I loved my reaver tank. It was hard as nails. I left at the end of the second tier of the vanilla game and was absent during 2.0. In that time they turned reaver into a dps. Damned shame...
@@spwicks1980 I was just using the reaver dots to carry my rift burst and makes it to where riftblade can fight at 35 meters then when they low hp you port behind and finish them, soul feast gives you some goof self heal also.
So I am a bit late and I havent combed through all the comments but I wanted to answer your curiosity or anguish regarding the "raiding" experience. They added the instant adventures to open world originally, which was just a questing alternative as you observed. What you ended up discovering or joining was a method that they introduced to make 1. Instant adventures more interesting 2. They wanted to cater towards the casual players. In the sense that they wanted to allow the casual players to experience the art and hard work that they did put into these raids. These raids were very difficult. The instant adventure raids give you the RP, mobs, etc but really removes majority of mechanics and insta kills. If I remember correctly they only did instant adventure raids for 3 raids. So there was a lot more raids/dungeons you didnt get to see. The final boss fights like Arak, Akylios etc had phases where you could attack them in a more realistic manner. If curious look up Maelforge or Volan. Also thank you for this video, gave me a little piece of nostalgia that I cant get from just trying to play it anymore. Been BIS from launch to the current patch so... yeah problems letting go ./shrug, cheers.
Rift was one of the best mmos that was run by one of the worst companies. It had so much promise that was squandered because of incompetent management.
I got the same feeling, rift trult was ahead of its time.
@@AstheaTV Well , Trion fucked it up badly even before they sold it. All of the players knew what was up , even years before the sale.
@@AstheaTV I guess you haven’t played eso. XD
@@AstheaTV Well, I can’t speak for the game in 2014 but from what people have told me it was completely different when it was released. I began playing last year and it’s by far the best mmo rpg I’ve played. If you haven’t played in a while I’d strongly advise you to try it.
Trion made a killing on ripping off existing game mechanics and modernizing them. They took the WoW route and extended it across all of their projects. Look up all of their games.
One of the best MMOs I ever played. Played at launch. It was packed and fun! I miss it. Now it's an empty shell of what it used to be.
TERA than BDO is the best for me
I know how you feel man. This was one of my favorites and to see it like this sucks. My friends and I talked about going back for the past few years but now I know we can't.
I too remember the release, there were SO MANY players it was like being at Nagoya Station
god, I remember those times, being fully immersed in this at the time gorgeous world and just being obsessed with this game despite being a casual pleb. Started playing shortly before it went F2P and from there on it was downhill all the way
True ...I loved it and it feels dead
"The burning village looks fine"
Me after every dnd session.
Haha I love that
@LizzybellGaming Of course not, you need those to bring the fire to the next village.
Jesus guys, that was supposed to be a relaxing shopping and personal quest session!
You smell, Stinky.
@@MiqoteMonk no u
had to come back to this one to mention this
"Have you ever had a hobby that you really enjoyed, but then one day you stopped, and you just have no interest in returning? You don't dislike the hobby and you'll speak of it fondly you've just not got any burning desire to pick it up again"
Until the first time I watched this video I hadn't found the words to describe how I feel about Graphic Design ever since I stopped working in the field, but this, this is it. This is *exactly* how I've felt about Graphic Design for the past several years and I just wanted to thank you for putting words to a sentiment I hadn't found the words fer yet.
How I feel about writing. Loved to do it, had so many ideas. Granted it was cringe fan fic, but I liked doing it. Then I stopped for a bit, thought I'd have a short break, and never got back to it. I like the idea of getting back into it, but I can't find that spark to.
I feel the same about video editing. 20 years on and I still talk about it on occasion. I could do it again any time I choose, but... nah. I'm good on that.
@@furiousapplesack funny enough video editing and post production FX is what kept me in the field for a couple of years after I stopped working in Graphic Design. So same, haven't done any real video work in years and I'm good on that too.
It has to do with skills, and "Skill", I think.
At one point, you just reach a point, you're not just good enough, but actually very, very good.
Getting any better would either involve life changing changes, or monetary expanses you're not ready/able to make.
That plays a lot into this over all feeling, I think.
(You've mastered the field, and brains are inquisitive, always curious entities. They have no interest in repeating tasks for ever on end, they need to learn something new to thrive)
All things considered, this struck me as actually quite a positive review. I think that there are so many BAD mmos, that even being "good but not great" is something of a rarity.
I mean, this game would be a banger, but in 2005
@@chronostasis9510 no computer could run this game back then... the performance was shit when i played..
@@ppsarrakis first time i played it was with a gtx 570. i think the card did never run that hot with any other game. it still played fine but damn, that heat... hardware from 2005 would drop out of its slots on the mobo if ordered to run the game xD
Come join us in Telara rift is still going strong in 2021
It was a lot of fun when it came out. Tried it again recently and some of the changes really didn't sit well with me and I couldn't bring myself to play long enough to adjust.
" You've committed the cardinal sin of _boring me_ " - Emet-selch after playing Rift.
gold
i see you are man of culture as well
I miss him 😭
@@Funguspower2 But you do remember him :)
It made me chuckle xD
Emet will be remembered.
Rift was good when it released, then SWTOR came out. People forget how huge SWTOR's release was. And GW2 came out too. We all left for those games. In other words, Rift was a rebound MMO after breaking up with WoW at the time, and like most rebounds you're only there until something better comes along.
swtor got close to wow numbers like 10-11mil and dropped to 2mil in 1-2 months. I heard rift was much better in last beta and they nerfed everything + selling the company was the last blow, I did play rift when it launched.. all those life time subs whining "don't play if you don't like it" well sucks to be them
@@kaiosun That's because levelling in SWTOR was amazing but the raids were broken at the time, the pvp was laggy and beyond that there really wasn't much to do besides chasing cosmetics and doing the space combat minigame.
When the game went F2P they had the audacity to paywall extra action bars. The actual DLC story content later on was good though and the game seems in a better place now but nowhere near it's release numbers.
@@hakarthemage I know. I wish at this point they would make a SWTOR 2
Yeah, if I remember right, the game was fantastic, especially the versatility of the class system and the addition of the support role. They had some neat ideas, like a dodge tank, a couple variations on something that resembles a modern WoW Discipline priest, and a Bard that had a bunch of 10ish second duration party buffs with a meta buff that scaled based on the buffs you had up. The open world rifts came in solo, group, and full on raid difficulties which was neat.
The big problem was that the launch for SWTOR was after the first raid tier was on farm, but IIRC before the second was released. I jumped ship to SW, and by the time I realized that it wasn't going to have any longevity, my Rift guild was dead and WoW's next xpac was getting close. RIP RIFT
@@theFrozeman Playing Bard was my favorite. Still haven't found that in any other game to date.
To their credit I was able to remember the villain's name purely because how bad it was, which tops plenty of games whose villain or even characters I forget shortly after.
I remembered it solely because he has the same name as a yugioh card i use a lot.
@@LunatheDergbold THE KING BABY
regulos
Half way through the video i scrolled down to read the comment; Spotted this and i had forgotten the actual villains name but i do remember "Generica" and i'm sticking with it.
It’s like when I played Mass Effect Andromeda and they were talking about the antagonist species the ummm… the uhhh…. Yeah those guys. Forgot they even existed or were a thing for over half the game.
I miss this game so much. When it came out, zones were PACKED with rifts and the quick, popup join was so refreshing, big groups of people taking down rifts. Ended up forming raids and you could do this for hours if there was an invasion going on. There were some serious RPers to be found almost all the time in the Taverns, it was just a FUN game. Then it died and part of me went with it. It's a graveyard. I would play this again in a heartbeat if the game was somehow revived. No game ever has offered a wardrobe system like RIFT. It should be an industry standard IMHO.
Totally agree with you I remember how many people used to gather at the Rifts and how packed the zones were, was the only other mmo that took me and my friends away for some time I always wish they would of kept up with it cause it had SO much potential.
Was a great game when it first came out.. Lot's of fun! Kinda died though!
The battlegrounds were also dope, and imo RIFT’s class design was the best and most interesting out of any mmo I’ve ever played.
Neverwinter online picked up wardrobe system
oh, yes, i remember that!
being able to wear fancy clothes essentials OVER armor, so you could look good without sacrificing defence, was VERY nice!
jokes on you, I remembered the bad guy's name. It was Fred
It was indeed.
I thought it was regulas
@@reaperx7026 I think it was Bob from marketing.
Wrong....it's Gamigo
@@JoshStrifeHayes wait it actually was? i only wrote that as a joke xD
As a former developer on rift I think you nailed it. I worked on the game before launch and up till just after Storm Legion came out.
Yeah all of the teleporting around totally breaks the player out of the story. Its jarring and provides no context for what you are doing. here is a baddy, go punch it in the face.
But at the same time it does keep you constantly moving around, keeps you interacting with things at the expense of the story.
*If it's not clear yet, I'm a story writer but I also worked on the rift system and on raids. Story is important to me but I understand its not the end all be all.
Sure you are a developer of rift xD You make me laugh dude xD Everyone who worked on Rift has signed an NDA so even you saying that would be a lawsuit. But its all good... I also "worked" on Rift before and after the release of the last expansion."jk ofc" And if you are the story writer on rift you didnt do your job anywhere near good enough to call yourself a story writer xD
Dude, take two seconds to google before you rip into someone for no reason. He is a dev@@inceneration Also, rarely does an NDA say you can't talk about having worked on something. It prohibits giving trade details and spoilers. Are you 12?
this may be a year old comment but thank you, i enjoyed the story and came from wow just to play it. I really enjoyed the game and how it was built
@@incenerationhow long do you think NDAs last? Do you think he wouldn’t be able to put his experience on a resume?
There is nothing illegal about saying you worked on a game. If he’s a developer, his name is even in the credits.
@@inceneration NDAs are not indefinite unless maybe if you are working for CIA or FBI or any other alphabet soup organization. Also vague stuff is usually ok; I have been under NDA two times in my life, both having some variation what can and can't be said.
In a later video you talk about the quit moment. Here's my quit moment with Rift.
I had leveled my chosen class to max level. Sorted the abilities on my bar in a way that made sense to me. Then realized that I would never, under any circumstances, use the abilities out of a certain priority list. So, I set about making a macro which triggered those abilities in that specific order. I literally was playing max level Rift doing this:
1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1
I even PvPed with that macro and never was there a time that I wanted those abilities to fire in another order.
I was, and am, a fan of MMOs that provide a way to reduce the massive button clutter than is the poor legacy from the early MMOs onward. I'm glad that I could have a 2-skill combo where I don't have to take 2 separate keys to fire them off. It is one of the pain points I have with FFXIV. But on the flip side, if your abilities have no situation where you would want to fire any of them out of order? There's no thought to be had there.
That was when I quit Rift.
I had the same exact quit moment. When I realized if I wanted to be even a tiny bit competitive, I had to macro all my buttons to a "single target" and "aoe" macro. Incredibly effective, but absolutely killed any fun I was having.
Edit: this was after I had already played at launch and had quit and come back for the Storm Legion xpac I think it was.
This is very dependent on the class. I played cleric. Shaman was about alternating lightning and ice themed abilities, and there were charges and cooldowns to consider. It couldn't be macroed like this and considered the hardest cleric set to play. Inquisitor as a ranged dot class was about keeping your dots up and then casting non-dot filler spells (this part could probably be macroed). Druid was pretty simple and I macroed him as you describe, one priority list attack button, rest of the bar about cooldowns, support spells, summoning different pets, etc.
"What was the bad guys name"
Me: regulos.
"I said it at the start of the video"
Me: regulos.
"Can you remember?"
Me: regulos.
"No. Exactly. So I award this video regulos out of 10"
Me: goddamnit that's not even a picture of regulos!
Yep
I just blurted "Generica" when he asked, ngl.
@Dusk Sentry same lol.
I could only remember Fred.
same here, you member? coz I member
I played a tank in this game and my most memorable tanking moment ever was in the is game:
I was the only tank fighting an open world boss with a crap tone of healers and and unknown number of DPS, I went head to head with this Giant scorpion with my HP bouncing around so wildly from so many healers as I worked to keep aggro.
lol rift was the only game that as a mage i could main tank raids at least post first xpac but was always a raid healer since it was a easier role to do with a shitty PC
I was the guild's Archon, and it always made me smile when the DPS would post their big dick numbers that were only made possible by me doing the right thing at the right time. I wish more games had a dedicated Support role that actually mattered.
Your lying.... Big time none of the world bosses can be solo tanked.... No matter if you have 50 healers they all have debuffs that stack eventually you will be one shotted....
Reminds me of WOTLK WoW, when Paladins we're stupidly powerful. I would tank ICC 25 man with another tank, hed take 1 enemy, id take the other 15, so funny. Even joked with my mate in PvP as a pally healer, we did 2v2 and he died, so i said look how dumb this is, and stayed alive forever while 2 dps wailed on me. Fun times, wish WoW was still good but i'll never go back to "omg your only ilvl 50 we need ilvl 60 !!!"
dude tanking in rift is way better than most mmos
I know this video is old but I had to comment that it made me laugh that a long time MMO player took so long figure out that he was not using his abilities simply because they were not called skills. Josh, you are just precious.
I really would have thought the fact that he had a finishing blow ability would have been a give away that he had abilities he wasn't seeing haha. (I know your comment is as old now as this video was when you commented, but here I am)
You're just upset bc he said you weren't scary, *fred* 😤
I think hes playing as a new player would. Unless you're TOLD or Shown in some way the skills page you wont exactly not know where it is, and probably most people wont interact with it!
Are you implying he's role-playing in a MMORPG as a new player?
@@Spacesnakes474 makes me wonder if he played his first character (pre youtube) to lvl 16 with nothing but auto attack :D
When I played Rift years ago, I had a lot of fun. The talent tree combos were fun, the dungeons/raids were fun, etc... and the thing that stuck out to me.... I'm an explorer at heart. I go where most don't to look around and see what's there... Rift rewarded exploring! There were little artifacts you could find and click on hidden all over the place. Behind trees, under rocks or bridges, in jars, etc. There were several times I climbed hills and found a cairn on top that I could click on for loot, just... out in the middle of nowhere. THAT'S what I miss about Rift. I wish more games would reward exploring. I even got off map in a few locations and occasionally found an artifact spawn offmap (likely a remnant of the map making process), but STILL! What game has that quality now? None that I can think of. :(
Yes. It was a fun game. Finding a difficult cliff to climb and discovering a cairn to loot was a nice touch. Or a puzzle to solve to open a door.
What sucked about rift is that they tried to be wow.
I remember getting addicted to wandering the mountain ranges in the good (human?) starter zone cos they had loads of artifacts. What a ridiculously silly way to spend time.
@@lysandersensale2792 guardian
I am new to Rift and love it, come back!
I still think RIFT’s soul system was one of the most creative designs I’ve ever seen. There was so much opportunity for self expression, especially in PVP. It left such a strong base to be built on, as well-shame the management of the game wasn’t quite there. I still miss it.
@@Knonme21 Yeah that was always frustrating. I get that having such an open system like that would be so very hard to keep balanced, but the solution is not to nerf anything that beats your max point ability in damage.
To this day RIFT is the only MMO I have ever PvP'd extensively in. The souls system was so good.
As a current player, it's still good.
Trion's issue is they took RIFT's profits and used it to seed a ton of awful MMOs, most that didn't launch, rather than reinvesting it back into content. By Nightmare Tide, Trion was in Dire straights and was more worried about Archeage being their savior, and went full in on wringing out every drop of money out of the F2P aspects of RIFT.
Yeah, min maxxing and the inevitable 'balancing' killed any innovation in the soul system. I loved Reaper Tanking 'back in the day', it was awesome pulling crowds of 10+ mobs to solo tank and grind for XP ;)
That lack of emotional engagement you highlighted was introduced later, after the game had significantly decayed. Originally there was no instant adventure option, but finding things to do with other players in a disorganised fashion wasn't hard because the Rifts and Invasions happen constantly. The most epic MMO experience I've ever had was my first zone-wide Invasion event. Rifts open up all across the zone, monsters come flooding out of them and they make it impossible to continue questing normally until the invasion is contained. They would literally take over towns and mass murder the NPCs until they were stopped, and the game emotionally incentivised you to do it. It felt like a big deal, like the characters really were fighting off the apocalypse. And every zone had several different events like this that could occur in them, so it wasn't the same thing over and over. You could also just join and leave other people's groups with the click of a single button, and the game incentivised you to do so. Additionally, the core storyline quests were fantastic, leading the player to explore the world and learn about what was happening and why. As I'm sure you can tell I'm passionate about this game, but I don't play it anymore because every time I go back it just feels empty and reminds me of the great times of the past that will never come back.
Yes, Yes, Yes. Also i'm extremely frustrated and annoyed at how clueless josh seems to be. No abilities? Okay you fixed that later. However, spent the majority talking about 'raids' that he joined through the "Instant Adventure" menu. The 'Raids' you were in were added much later so Trion could recycle content that was too hard for 99% of the players to experience. They weren't meant to be raids, they were meant to allow players to level up alternatively. Yes the game is on life support, but the bulk of your video is wrong solely because you couldn't break outside the thought that you knew.
The encounters in IA's scale yes, but are tuned so that 1-2 players in a group of 20 could do them. How can you be invested in something if there is no potential for failure? That is a problem with IA's for sure, and now that the game has been out so long it's starting to be a problem in actual raids at endgame. Admittedly you probably never would see an actual dungeon group queue before level 65. Normal dungeons are 10x harder than IA's and i'm fairly confident that if you went in with 4 other new/leveling players you would become emotionally invested in the success/failure of the group.
In the IA's most the stuff you took damage to would of been a 1 shot in the real versions at release. You'll never know the emotional roller-coaster of fighting that giant squid in a 20minute encounter with 0 deaths in raid. Only so that when the boss is at 0.5% hp a player in your group uses their charge ability and dies in one hit to the bosses breath attack, preventing everyone from getting the 0 deaths during encounter achievement. You stood in that attack for what seemed like an eternity.
I can understand why you aren't emotionally invested, but the video was 99% you talking about how certain things that felt wrong to you didn't live up to your expectation. The problem with this is that the things you talked about weren't what you thought they were.
The class and ability system of rift is by far the biggest draw to the game as far as combat goes. You didn't even use an ability the majority of the intro. Facing difficult quests/dungeons/raids that get you invested in others/achieving a goal which help you get emotionally invested in the game... Again, you did none of it. You went to the thing purpose built for being able to jump in/out of without any consequences and then talked about how there was no emotional investment.
There is just so much that is left out about rift. Spent 30 seconds of 44 minutes talking about the main draw of the game for combat.
Never experienced dimensions (personal housing).
Never experienced dungeons.
Never experienced raids (of course, but at max level they happen all the time)
Never experienced (afaik) a true story quest line.
No mention of artifacts.
No talk about guilds.
Never even visted the first main city (which is in the first zone out of tutorial).
Like, most of the praise given was about how good the world building was but you never even glimpsed the world. You opened the map and saw a gigantic world then looked at 1/5th of the first zone, proceeded into instanced content and complained about how the content was instanced.
Man spot on, great memories of those zone-wide invasions. The only thing similar I've found since then is Guild Wars 2 and their open world meta events. They also have level scaling to the zone but it's automatic. Rift really was great in its heyday. Trion pulled some greedy shit and killed the game fast right after Nightmare Tide. I saw the writing on the wall with the earrings debacle so I left.
@@davidcampbell9931 Thank you, you found the right words expressing why I has a bad feeling about this review. MMORPGs are so huge, it's impossible to get an actual impression of the game from just one few hours long session. At least if it's a somewhat serious game, not something like Fiesta or such. I REALLY wished he would have accepted the one guy's invitation in the end who wanted to take him on a tour through the game. This also and especially would have been great for the viewers.
Do you still play Rift? Are the things you talk about still as enjoyable today?
P
Yes, from the beta until the first expansion it was amazing. Beautiful art, quality of life features, finding yourself healing a raid group at level 9 to close a rift. And everyone working together to stop the invasions - I forget the zone, but it had werewolves and an NPC named after Suzanne Vega at the center where it took a bunch of players to get rid of those elite invaders. It remained great F2P, but felt grindy in the first expansion; combat was kind of like this video - mobs with very high HP for no particular reason, go kill 30 of them. Last time I went back they had an underwater expansion and I gave up. But it was a beautiful game 10 years ago.
This game did so many things ahead of it's time, it felt like The WoW Clone WoW Kept Cloning.
Did things like AoE looting, crafting from bank and wardrobe system where anything you pick gets added to your collection way, way before WoW did.
The dye system was better than what I've seen in MMOs around still, I have yet to meet with a housing system (dimensions) that allows it's amazing amount of freedom, the class tree was impressively robust in options AND it had not just "that one support class that people are still having second thoughts about inviting (AKA "The Bard"), it was a DEDICATED party slot.
It's worth mentioning it's key binding system should be standard. I know I kinda recently saw it elsewhere (I think WoW?) but being able to change keybindings by hovering the mouse over the hotkey on the screen instead of going down a list should be the NORM with how quick and intuitive it is. And they did it since day 1.
I honestly feel like if I had known it was going to just DIE, I would've actually "mained" this MMO back then and gone super hard on it. Because now, the experience just can't be re-lived...
So much regret.
I played a bard during Nightmare Tide because I didn't think anyone would want me to raid with them. Came to find out that it was an in-demand support class. lol There was SO much I loved about that game and miss. The transmog and housing systems are far and away better than anything else I've had in WoW or FF14.
I pvp'd as a bard. The few videos I ever posted was a couple library runs.
The problem with the talents system was that metas formed relatively early. It basically invalidated most choices outside of the meta.
It was a great game, though. So many good memories.
@@Emajenus I didn't really hit endgame but I didn't find this to be the case. As long as what you used made sense you didn't seem terribly limited. A main tree to focus on and two trees mostly for passive boosts that enhance your main is what I figured worked the best. Third tree was mostly passive fluff but even the second tree usually allow to provide decent utility.
At least that was my interpretation of the system when I played back then. And last I played Nightmare Tide (or something like that) was new.
Back at launch we used to say "they stole all the good bits and did it better"
What I love most about these videos is that although MMOs are not my thing, I enjoy exploring the often well-crafted fantasy worlds while having Josh slog through the actual game so I don't have to.
Rift was my "mmo for a summer" i got invested into a roleplaying guild with twice a week meetups. It was a fond memory at best after so many years. I stuck with it for 2 or 3 months and slowly drifted away as another semester of high school started. Here i am, probly 9 years later, smiling and remembering those simpler days.
That sounds like the best way to play the game
I remember marrying a "girl" in game with my whole clan attending.
I miss Vittles "she" was a real one
@@ExtremeConing Haha its so sad that it was likely some old dude but hey at least you had fun
@@yourtrappedinmygenjutsu Hey, female gamers do exist :P
@Rent Free We definitely do, and I'm also a grandmother!
The thing that stunned me as a wow player at the time i was playing/trying this game out, the spell casting, the mages/casters actually use the staff when you have one equiped to cast a spell, while on wow its been a decoration since 2004...
What struck me as a player about to quit WoW during the beta at the end of 2010 were the quality of life changes (auto-grouping so you wouldn't have to worry about tagging, clicking once to sell all gray items, I forget what else), the RIFTS and invasions, the triple soul trees, the art, and the chloromancer who could heal by doing damage.
I know right?
I've seen some alpha footage of WoW and characters actually used their weapons to cast spells. I have no idea why they changed that but it always bothered me.
maybe they are eventually making that every race can be every class and this exact change would help blizzard team a whole lot of work from animating wand/staff actually being used in every single class.@@happybalint
I remember RIFT making for easily my most fun weekend of the year when I first played it brand new.
After a 30 hour straight session, I closed the game feeling like I absolutely loved the experience, and then I never opened the game again.
I don't even know why anymore, for some reason the game just didn't leave me wanting more.
This perfectly sums up my experience with the game
IMO Rift was fantastic. I played at launch, quite a bit. It was one of the first MMOs of its type to allow you level in so many different ways legitimately. I loved the classes.
There was a lot more of an emotional connection when the game first came out. It took a LOT longer to level, and it was a very social game. It's totally different now.
It wasn't fantastic lol it was good ideas wrapped in bug ridden mess... I'm seeing bugs that existed at launch... Nuff said...
The original RIFT was an amazing MMO, as perfect a WoW clone as ever was done; it truly was a better WoW than WoW. Just Trion was a terrible company and completely ruined it after. To this day though as a die-hard WoW fan the "vanilla" Rift has been that only game that ever got me to quit WoW to play it.
TRION actually borrowed a lot of money to put into marketing campaign for RIFT. Time passes new games comes out and money had to be turned back. Then it came F2P and all bad things..
Same
I agree in that it was the best "WoW" clone by far. It expanded upon a lot of what WoW was doing and the ability to customize your class so much was amazing at the time. I played Rift in the Beta but didn't have enough money to reliably sub to an MMO at the time and I regret never getting to play it at release.
I actually think WoW fans ruined Rift, and then went back to WoW.
@D3Sync - 100% this.
I'm with the other 'Originals' - the game at release was AWESOME! Had a huge community, great questing system, the Souls system that was lightyears ahead of any other MMO, Public Rifts, Invasions, Dungeons, Raids plus a plethora of other incidental stuff you missed in your review - the sparklies you had to find collected for achieves in each zone (and physical rewards, titles etc), puzzles, exploration, shit - even reaching he highest point in a zone etc Rift was the MMO that invented most of those. I remember well the point Rift began to decline. One week our Guild was raiding, opening 25 man guild rifts ... then a week later we couldn't form a raid ... within a billing cycle no-one was playing anymore. You are right in that we got sucked into other newer MMO's. SWTOR was the big one that drew the most people away. I was one. But SWTOR had its own spectacular fall as well. People returned to Rift - but it wasn't the same, the feel was gone. Max level people had no desire to go through all the low level content again, especially after seeking out all those quests, content, achieves, puzzles etc on one toon, I know I didn't. Raids couldn't be filled and 5 mans were the best you could do ... the 1st expansion was still some time off. Thats when I last seriously played the game. I've gone back a couple of times, but I am soloing it when I do, it's deserted ... and I only last a couple of hours and I forget it again ... it's still on my hard drive.
Rift deserved better
Rift was also very much in the "World of Warcraft" genre of MMOs. The only players interested in that genre of MMO are either playing WoW, or taking a break from it.
A lot of Rift's playerbase just went back to WoW, again.
I mean their catch phrase for the adverts before and during launch was "We're not in Azeroth anymore", they where not trying to fake not being a wow clone :V
I know I did.
Or went to play FFXIV, the more casual catgirl alternative. Seriously, in that genre there is only WoW and FFXIV. And the only thing stopping ex-WoW players leaving FFXIV to go back to WoW now is the fact the decided to quit WoW because the feel Blizzard perminantly messed it up. Rift is also the most steriotypical example of the 3rd generation of MMO, ironically being one of the last examples; Which half were WoW clones and the other half licenced IP games, all of which were rushed, all of which went overbudget and all of which claimed to be WoW killers to which all of them crashed and burned so hard they either bankrupted their developer or lead to the publisher quietly looking for ways to make their money back somehow off the tiny population left behind after the first month of release. It was games like these that turned most gamers off MMOs, but it was also the era of the MMO cash grabs and trying to replicate WoW success. But, since Battle Royals became a thing, they are the current target for cash grab games; MMOs quietly returning to passion projects while no surprise, the cash grab focused MMO studios have swappped from MMOs to battle royals, Trion being one of them.
I actually played it before I started playing wow
The thing that killed Rift was its lack of endgame content and what there was being too easy to complete. In every other aspect Rift absolutely destroyed World of Warcraft. Endgame is what keeps MMO's alive and well unfortunately.
I recall in the early days we had a valley below us where the bad guys were pouring through from a magic gate. I was charging down to fight them and looked around. Hundreds of other players were with me -- and there was no lag, none. It was amazing.
I finally stopped playing when I had trouble keeping up with what to do after switching between three totally different builds (in addition to all the other games I was playing).
Fun fact: "regulus" roughly means "petty king" in Latin. Not exactly an awe-inspiring name for the evil dark overlord threatening the universe. 'Regulus out of 10' is the best rating for Rift.
I believe that would be the literal translation -- "little king" is what I found when I looked it up -- but "prince" is more of an accurate meaning. I don't know if the character is basically the "prince of evil" or "prince of darkness" or something, but it's a name that denotes royalty at the very least. So, I didn't find it a bad or forgettable name, myself.
If I recall the lore correctly, (I couldn't get an account during the time when it required pay, but I read through all the lore in the really cool website they use to have while imagining what soul combinations I'd go with for each calling. Favorite one I had in mind was a Warrior Paladin-Paragon-Beastmaster), Regulus had been a prince who decided to seek out dark arts and so betrayed his home and home to become the ruler of the death domain. So the name then makes sense. He's one of the few if only domain rulers that use to be human.
basically it's regulus as in regal not as in regular
Oh, I need to reread Harry Potter now because I totally misread Regulus as ordinary
It's too Star Trek........they have a Regulus Sector. Way too generic, i actually prefer Generica.
One of my guild mates at the time who was trying Rift with me, back when Rift was at it's peak, said something that really resonated with me: "Rift is an MMO without a soul". And he was right. (Rift players will also see the irony in that). It just didn't have any emotional attachment. It was beautiful. Balanced. Had some incredibly forward thinking systems, especially with regards to classes. But it just didn't make me feel anything.
Just like New World
I had a massive a connection with the game, perhaps the community. We were pushing for world first hammerknell back then and got stuck at 11/13 when vudu and his team took the W. Just sayin, I felt a connection!
You should've tried playing a Bard while listening to the Tenacious D soundtrack.
@@-JustinCombs I feel like that’s abit different from what he meant. It is super fun watching/participating in a lot of different games systems/races but that doesn’t mean the game has soul. Just like modern WoW or CoD for the last 10+ years.
Too easy to walk away from.
watching rift just breaks my heart. my first mmo i actually commited so much time on
Rift was great. Played at launch, left for a bit, came back during Storm Legion and had a blast with it for a long time. It makes me sad too when I see what it's become. It didn't deserve the awful fate that was thrust on it. .
Same. I put so much love into that game. I learned to tank and I'll never forget when we were doing one of the end game raids and our main tank went down and I had to immediately jump in from being off tank and everyone cheering for me as I practically learned the fight while doing it was incredible.
Man that class system is a far cry from when it started. I remember back when you could pick a bunch of different classes of different alignments regardless of race or faction, including Necromancer, which some people did while playing as the de-facto good guys the Guardians (we were chosen not for our virtue but for our might!). Seeing only four with an optional, payable fifth is a far cry from when I first got interested in Rift.
Not sure if anybody cares but I re-tried the game like 8 months ago and you technically still have the freedom you had when the game released
The builds and classes you choose at the beginning are just based on actual builds by players like a guide but you can also go into the skill tree and freely combine your classes skill trees in combination of 3s
For example as rogue assassin/nightblade/marksman could be changed to assassin/bladedancer/saboteur or any combination you like
They still added some skill Trees you only can use with money for example a tank sub class for mages or a heal sub class for rogues
The Chloromancer mage was such a fun take on how to create a different type of mage archetype. They were like a resto druid combined with any other mage spec you wanted to combine with it.
Way to use big words to sound extra dramatic but you are simply wrong. While the rest of the game is a shadow of what it once was, the class system is still the exact same. I was a founder when it came out and go back to it about once every 2 years hoping to recatch some of that initial enjoyment.
@@Haphazardization Literally the only reason I stopped playing that game was because the PvP lobbies emptied out, and there was no way to turn of xp points (so you could keep playing the honestly really fun pvp modes they had in the level 20-60 range).
Dragon Age: Inquisition is mostly single player yet "stole" the idea of rifts, and the storyline is solid. If you wanted some kind of RPG to get a bit of that Rift mode again then that game is honestly quite fun for a singleplayer-ish game.
Almost 2k hours in, countless max level characters, such a sad thing to see how this game turned out. Stopped after best in slot gear was gotten from loot boxes. Miss this game so much, really wish a good ip would take it over
how you can do countless chars with countable time? :P smartass mode off
@@Fame_Rate people on the internet choose the stupidest shit to be upset over
you could never get BiS Gear from lootboxes lol, Not even now. you could get the previous Tier If a new raid launches, for absurd amounts of Money or get a free Ride through the previous Dungeons and get the Gear for free. you got Tons of guilds and pugs doing that, equipping undergeared Players for free cause they could and were Nice people.
@@h3m1v33 around nightmare tides expansion was when I quit. Almost 99% positive at the time BiS gear could be obtained through loot boxes off of in-game store. If not BiS, a step right below it. Was definitely something that shouldn’t have been in the game
@@zzJ3RKzz Theres a huge difference between BiS and a whole Tier below BiS.
"what was the bad guy's name? I said it at the start of the video. Can you remember?"
Frederico I think?
"Regulos/10"
Oh, that one.
the half humour worked with you too.
I was able to answer it right away. Idk maybe I'm just good at paying attention and remembering things.
R.I.P Freddie, he died of boredom simply because you were never going to be a challenge.
What made Rift great for me was that it allowed me to level my character up to max solely through PvP. Not only that : it encouraged me to grind battlegrounds so that I could buy new pieces of PvP equipment. The Soul diversification was outstanding : as a Rogue I could reroll into ranged DPS , melee DPS , tank , support , offtanks with crazy DPS - you could never bore yourself because your playstyle was extremely flexible.
I loved Rift. A shame they didn't put out more content fast enough. Their class system is still my most favorite to date. Still a top 2 MMO for me.
Yepp ther was sooo much choiches in the talent tree
Rift was decent, but SWG was the ultimate mmo
@@FeewRift if you compare it to vanilla wow release schedule, it would look pretty reasonable, but the problem is the market had already evolved and people expected much more much earlier. Rift release endgame was so desolate most people only lasted a month or 2 and then got bored. LONG LONG before any of the major patches actually added end game substance. the only reason people lasted that long in vanilla wows terrible endgame (before MC) was because they had never experienced that before and had no other games to turn to. But when Rift came around, there were already other options for them to move to, so what worked for wow in 2004, wasnt going to work for Rift.
@@FeewRift well im just relaying my experience. i got Rift the day of release. i hit max level in a few weeks. for a month or so after that there was basically nothing but pvp, then they added some high level "raid" rifts but it was just more of the same thing that already existed (already spending all day doing rift repeat rift repeat rift repeat, so adding a slightly larger Rift was VERY lackluster). I uninstalled after about 2.5 months. WoW came out in 2004. Rift came out in 2011. at that point wow was already on its 4th expansion, Cataclysm had released a few months before Rift, and people were disappointed in that expansion within a month, even though they had already migrated to their (current) content release schedule bringing out the first Raid within a few months of expansion open, and people already were quitting wow in massive numbers because they were bored of the extremely content lacking wow expansions. Rift tried to get by with the same poor content release timing as WoW was already proving was insufficient.
It still to this day surprises me how many people still play WoW. but hey there are still people playing Rift too, so its clearly common for some small group of people to hang on to dying games '\_O_/' we dont even have to bring up classic wow, we can just point back to the infamous moment at blizcon when the wow dev told the crowd "You dont know what you want".
He was right.
But humans are often very stubborn idiots so they will hang on to their pride by hanging on to their dead games and proudly pronounce "what are you talking about WoW is still great! lots of people still play!"
mmmhmmmm
just people who cant accept reality and move on. SUPER common in human history.
@@FeewRift i dont know where you are going with this but the point is THE ONLY THING BESIDES PVP (which was horrifically unbalanced worse than any other pvp game ever) TO DO AT END GAME IN THE FIRST FEW MONTHS OF RIFT: WAS MORE RIFTS. so it was fucking boring. thats just the facts, evidenced by the MILLIONS of players who quit in the first couple months, citing EXACTLY that reason: "The PvE endgame sucked. the pvp is too unbalanced.".
Though I will say 2011 was a year when a LOT of really amazing games came out, so Rift had some hard competition. Remember SKYRIM came out shortly after Rift.... not to mention: MINECRAFT, TERRARIA, Dragon Age 2, Crysis 2, Oh yeah and SWTOR which was a far better MMO game and which STILL crumbled in a couple months for exactly the same reason: Boring endgame. I know you clearly have some attachment to Rift, but thats no reason to convince yourself that reality didnt happen, that millions of players quit for something OTHER than their stated reasons: the endgame sucked.
instead you can just say "well I liked it." and move on and accept that you are a rare minority, and the majority do not like things the same way you do. its pretty simple.
To be fair, those DLC included a 12 month sub, so in actuality there was only maybe ~$50 worth of DLC listed there
also stated it as a "bundle" when that isn't what steam bundles look like, that is just a list of DLC.
12 months + 1 month for 9.99E. So total 13 months inflating that price
@@-------------764 maybe finish the video before commenting
Yea, that's what I noticed.
its 550 euros????
I spent hundreds of hours just decorating my dimensions, and still have super fond memories of 20 man raids. If there's ever a Rift 2, I'd play it in a heartbeat. A shame you didn't mention other amazing aspects about Rift like the dimension system.
Or the transmog system.
I like how giant two headed abomination that takes 15 minutes to kill gives 95 exp but some random humanoid enemy that takes 2 minutes to kill gives 110 exp
Chloromancer was hands down my favorite MMO Class I have ever played. Heal by dealing damage was great. Loved playing Rift when it first came out.
Same
And op as fuck lmao. I would top the pvp charts in healing AND Dmg. so much fun.
Such an amazing class, was absolutely my favorite in the game too.
I played Rogue. SabDancer was peak. Good times.
I was in the developer alpha of Rift and may have had a helping hand in that :P played Chloromancer/ Warlock/ Archon for most of it and most of my feedback went towards those. I am very happy with how it turned out. Early on the attacks felt too light, but with more crit camera shake and noise to the beam spells it felt better to play than most other awakenings
Me and my wife had so much fun in this game around 2011-2013. I remember loving this game so much... I still play it from time to time just top off my nostalgia meter. I do the same thing with 3.3.5 wow.
Solid choices there!
I remember playing it and finding it fairly enjoyable. I think it was much better back in the day, as was WoW
To me RIFT has always been the true "We have WoW at home."
Problem is, it was a great wow contender for some time, but it didnt hold on too that entirely imo...
Rift was better than WoW for a couple of years. I played WoW from WoD until Mythic Helya in Legion, and I can say Rift had more challenging fights such as Planebreaker Abominus, Inyr'kta and Binding of Maelforge. The various classes were also within 5-10% of each other at the highest level of play. The combat was not only insanely fun but also complex and deep, with room for innovation.
@@Ahov I think the best thing Rift had over WoW was my forum guide to 1-button Mage PvP builds.
This maybe the best comment on UA-cam
No way, Rift was Waaaaay Better than WoW when it first came out. They were the first to do world events right!
I was so excited for a second thinking I remembered the villain's name but you were talking about Regulaos or "Generico". I was thinking about the tutorial area's first "hard" enemy Frederick or "no one scary has the nickname Fred".
Same 😆
Oh man how much I loved this game. I was hooked the moment I noticed that my favourite thing in any game, exploration, actually gets properly rewarded. In my first hour of playing in the open world I decided to hardcore parkour up a huge mountain. There were quite a few jumps in there that couldn't have been intended that way but still somehow worked. And what do you know, all the way up there was a chest with epic items I couldn't use yet. It felt SO rewarding. I haven't come across another game doing things like this since then. I know GW2 has jumping puzzles but it's a fleshed out and advertised feature there which takes away from the whole experience.
Exactly this! And all of the secret puzzles and stuff. I really enjoyed Rift. Also all "Server first" messages when you crafted something etc was really cool :)
To be fair: The "DLCs" you found on steam are mostly the subscription options - that's not a DLC ;). Summing those up is pointless.
Thanks a lot for the vid though. It's been a while since I last played, gonna give it a go though. I was laughing so much when for the first few levels you just autofight everything and wonder how long the combat takes - it's hillarious. I wonder if that's a bug though. I thought if you autospend your points into your chosen soul combo it would place the relevant skills in your bar automatically (including those from level up). Did you accidentally swap bars or why did this happen?
Next to Vanilla WOW this was my favourite MMO, I just loved the class system. Playing a (low) dpsing healer in raids was huge fun. Leveling my rogue as a teleporting, high speed, tank - also great. I've tried so many MMOs since then and none had anything comparable - so sad.
Yea, pretty stupid he made a big deal about the price of the dlc without actually reading what it was.
@@touyuber-k8h I mean I don't expect him to be perfect with these videos, but certainly well enough. And I haven't been disappointed.
@@touyuber-k8h Yea, it was very strange and hyperbolic. I usually like this guys reviews but that was...dumb. And the combat; you get skills and he seems to be ignoring them somehow and just auto-attacking.
@@lindsywhiting3936 Even him realizing that wouldn't save this game.
He admits in the video he didn't find the abilities system until later on because they were not automatically in his toolbar
The rift event reminds me of the invasions in Tabula Rasa...
My god there were a lot of MMO's... I think the oversaturation of the 00's and 2010's is honestly what killed the genre. Speaking as someone who used to play UO, SWG, EQ 1 and 2, Tabula Rasa, Earth and Beyond (no one remembers that one lol) CoH and Vanguard Saga of Heroes, I know I personally became overwhelmed by the sheer number of new releases and the never ending stream of MMO's. While I was playing Vanguard I had a realization of how vapid and throwaway pretty much MMO's were, and realized there was never going to be that great MMO everyone wanted. Another one was just going to come along, everyone would get shiny ball syndrome, the current game would be abandoned and the cycle would repeat ad infinitum.
Now everyone's waiting on Ashes of Creation and Star Citizen to be the one to finally do everything right... when they're just the next shiny ball rolling past. >__>
MMO's just felt like an endless stream of mediocre time-sinks that never seemed to reach their potential and were depressing by design... Once the novelty wore off I realized I did not like the genre, and haven't played one since.Nothing instills a feeling of ennui quite like an MMO.
I also remember UO. Think I started with The Second Age? Mad respect. Still one of the most interactable MMOs made, which is kinda sad.
The problem was they all copied wow system so it just felt that you were playing wow but with a different skin.
This is the best post about MMOs I've seen. MMOs are "depressing by design." I was a GM with Verant, and an endgame raiding Shadowknight during the PoP era.
When I stopped playing EQ, I vowed never to play another MMO (I've since added gacha games to that vow).
But I've watched enough reviews to notice certain trends, and I'm convinced that was a good decision.
To be fair maybe once Star Citizen actually releases we'll live in a word where an MMO hasn't released in several decades.
While I largely agree with you, doesn't that describe _most_ video games? The only games that I can think of that even can keep people playing consistently for years, are survival games (Like RUST, Ark and the like) competitive games or MMOs. Most people put 20-100 hours into a game and never touch them again. _They're virtually all passing shiny rolling balls_ at the end of the day.
i played rift when it first came out, and from day one, i felt the same way. "it isn't bad, it is fine"
i LOVED the unique class system. that was the main draw for me.
A friend said it was awesome. I casually played several days thinking the same thing.
This was one of my favorite mmo's back in the days. I remember playing it with my much older sister who i had just gotten back in touch with. I dont remember the graphics being this mediocre but the game was great regardless. I had so much fun, the first ever RIFT i closed dropped me an epic lvl 50 mount that was worth a ton, and my sister had apparantly been trying to grind it out for some time when i started playing. I left when the game went f2p because they promised there wouldnt be advantageous or pay2win items in the coming cash shop and fast forward to it going f2p the cash shop introduced, came filled to the brim with a bunch of p2w and pay4advantage stuff. thats when i knew it was over. And its really a shame what became of it. I think it was one of those rare gems that had massive potential.
I feel like there is so many MMOs and eventually you move on for whatever reason but at least you have some good memories playing with your sister.
Try to look around for another game to play with your sister. Even if it isn't a MMO.
80% of the costs of the 'DLC' is a 12 month sub/patron pack. If you take that way it isn't bad at all.
a 12 month season pass and a 1 month season pass. The 12 month one is basically a discount for when buiying more.
And the other two were actual expansions, no different then WoW having made you buy BC and WOTLK separately.
*edit*
NVM, im an idiot and read the screen wrong, those were just mounts/cosmetics and a couple weeks of sub time.
I loved Rift for about the first 8 months it was out. Trion ran it into the ground with their management choices. Still one of the best leveling experiences I've had in the 40 plus MMO's I've run thru in the last 22 years.
I honestly don't even remember how long I played, I just remember sitting in a snowy town having long since got bored of going to the rifts as it was the same thing constantly and deciding "ye this is enough".
Like you I enjoyed my time with it, but just nothing about it really encouraged me to keep playing it beyond that. I can't even remember what level I got to now, so I have no clue if I just reached the end of the story, or the grind got to bad and I stopped because of that.
The one thing I remember about Rift was that you had fall-through macros. Meaning, I could put pretty much all my abilities on one or two buttons in order of damage done and just spam them and it would use whichever ability was off cooldown. I was able to take down hordes of mobs that way.
Scott harstman and team did a genius job. The game at launch was incredible. It sure didn’t stay that way for long. I still yearn for the class trees and combos of this game
Your analysis is spot on now. But it couldn’t be further from the truth when this game came out. I could spend hours talking about how awesome this game was, and I could spend hours bitching about the mismanagement that took place. This to me was the most badass game I ever played. I fucking loved it. The dopamine rush I got from this was on another level. Spending so much time going through raids, with our guild and finally taking down the final boss was absolutely awesome. The pvp was fucking awesome. And the people that developed this game should be dam proud of what they did. I was and still am emotionally attached to my toon, that I have spent thousands of hours conquering rift.
Was it your first MMO by chance? I feel like the first MMO experience is usually peoples best.. Mine was Everquest i fuckin loved that game
@@chrissears5482 Ironically that was not my experience. I played EQ first (and random graphical chatrooms like *shudder* Furcadia before that in the early to mid 90s), and then Lineage 2, and finally WoW was the one (in the early vanilla days) that really addicted me. I will say in some ways I think EQ2 was the better game compared to WoW, but WoW just had that... nice medium between casual and hardcore play before they nerfed it into the ground. In vanilla WoW you could get those highs of EQ while only needing to grind for 8 hours a day, as opposed to EQ or Lineage 2's 16 or more hours a day. (Yeah, it sounds insane now, but that was the hardcore expectation back then.)
@@zeriel9148 You were 100% right regarding EQ2 v WoW. EQ2 was the better game, and it wasn't really all that close. Unfortunately, the one thing Blizzard did right with WoW was made the game play exceedingly well on average computers. EQ2 absolutely did not do that. They gambled (and lost) on the idea that the speed of processors would continue to increase and that within a year or two their engine would run stunningly well. What happened was the change from single core to multi core systems as clock speed leveled out. EQ2's engine is heavily CPU bound, and it wants a CPU that runs around 10 Ghz. Most unfortunate.
@@chrissears5482 My first was Guild Wars which I don't see as a proper MMO but it was still really fun. And when Burning Crusade came out I got into WoW and that was a truly amazing experience. I would actually say my time in BC is my most nostalgic MMO experience. Then when Rift came out it just blew me away with how social it was and how fun the combat system was. There was just something about the combination of features it had that gave the game some kind of magic. So Rift for probably like that first year after launch holds the spot for my favorite MMO ever and the one I miss the most. I've actually accepted that no MMO is going to capture that again but I'm still hopeful.
@@Banditman i had a brand new top of the line PC when EQ2 came out and needed every bit of it to play that game. I was an EQ1 junkie for years and i didnt really like a lot of the things EQ2 did.. I liked WoW much better than EQ2 but I still have all the best memories with EQ1. The internet was still so new so you just had to figure things out for yourself. All the info wasnt just easily available and solved the moment it came out
Thanks for calling out subtitles/accessibility. I don't personally have a need for them, but it's so important. It's rediculous how hard it is to get on priority lists.
Great video but the first part of this was actual pain for me to watch, I wanted him to figure out to use his abilities so, so badly lol. Watching him die over and over was rough, poor guy learned the hard way
Yeah how can an mmorpg player not notice the red skill icon at the bottom skill bar
The thing with Rift is that it's like a girlfriend that does nothing wrong and there is nothing wrong with her, and she's perfect in almost any way, But it's her parents there is something very very off with her parents not sure if they will kill you at night or something but something is off... And that was Trion world's.. good at making games and bad at managing them and that is what is wrong with Rift.. it's parents
If you think rift is bad try both versions of archeage lol
@@morcossthegreat7960 Archeage is like Rift's adopted sibling Lol Fucked over by trion as well.
But who is the worst parent? Trion or Gamego?
@@morcossthegreat7960 I spent thousands of hours on AA and can agree, AA could've been the next big MMO but they fucked it over so badly with P2W it's almost unplayable now.
@@LikaLaruku Calling gamigo a parent is an insult to parents worldwide. Gamigo is nothing more, than an abusive pimp, who works his girls ragged.
this game had the most satisfying cleric I've ever played
i loved the traditional purifier/sentinel/warden healer build in raiding, and i played the hell out of inquisitor in pvp. using fanaticism into nysyrs rebuke was sooooo fun every single time man...
@@Qatch1140 Druid all the way bay bay!
On release the cleric was the best DPS class in the game. Was a lot of fun.
I played an assassin/rogue/archer character, and DAMN was it fun!
Honestly, I think their class system was one of the best, and still is. Watching this actually is kind of making me want to play it again.
Its so crazy how you described the issue Rift when I just clicked this video thinking "oh yeah, how did I completely forget about Rift?! I remember it being such a fun game."
To those of us that played at launch it was an amazing experience. Rift-ing through each zone with an army of mmo comrades, we conquered all the rifts. Unfortunately it didn't last. It was fun the first month, then it quickly fizzled. I still treasure that adventure.
I'm pretty sure I played it at launch. I still have some funny screencaps of bugs I reported, like when your face or torso went missing while riding a mount.
Rift was actually good when it came out. Then it went f2p, and became crap.
yep, thats pretty much what happened
I mean, I wouldn't have gotten into Rift if it wasn't F2P. But I get what you're saying. It became less of wanting to improve the game and more of monetizing it; I would say that was a problem with Trion and its executives in general, not necessarily a problem with a free to play model. WoW and FFXIV are popular and sub-based, but I'd hesitate to say they're popular *because* they're sub-based. Even then, there's still lots of microtransactions on their end. Shareholders are no longer satisfied with revenue from subscriptions. While costs have gone up, I doubt that game costs have exploded so much, and that it's more of a case of the money being used to pay executives (while often letting go or lowering the pay of those actual working on their products).
Sure, I guess it was good if you liked: Broken PvP, Everyone playing the same specs, PvE joke compared to WoW etc.
Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuure it was "good".
@@BoisegangGaming I would much rather pay a sub fee for a game that i know is good, that gives me all the tools i need to succeed without spending extra money (wow, ffxiv) than play a game with a model that DEPENDS on my swiping my credit card anytime i need something.
no trials, no tricks, no traps, truly free thats what they said but that didn't last long shortly after its ftp migration it went ptw
28:47 This dialogue is funny enough that I'm vaguely tempted to give Rift a try
It's had the opposite effect on me, makes me want to never try it
It's cheesy but not in a good way, it really takes you out of the moment since it doesn't match up well with what's going on. It's a prime example of why this MMO failed: It's not the worst voice acting, but it's placement and tone is off. It's a veneer that wears off almost immediately.
I just rewatched this and remembered what you said about the raids and the voice acting.
That wasn't always the case with bosses. But Nightmare Tide was a horrible monster that gave us that one thing. An overarching villain that didnt take himself too serious and actually was super sassy towards us. It was great.
I miss Rift.
Come back and play, I just started.
I can't believe how incredibly sad I became watching this video. This game had so much potential, and it was really fun when it came out. It's absolutely a shell of what it once was, but I do login every few months and play a bit for the nostalgia.
Is it a shell because you never see any other players? Or do you mean the gameplay has changed since launch? I haven't played this since probably 2012 and think it could now be a fun mostly-solo experience, unless the gameplay has actually been ruined somehow.
Man I miss this game. Literally named my channel after it, and the years of fun I had with it. Not just one of my favourite MMOs ever, but one of my favourite games, ever, period. What happened with Rift Prime, Trion's Fall from one of the best MMO Companies to well....dead. And Gamigo. So sad to see Rift with them.
Since most of the games core is still intact, I firmly believe that in the right hands it can be saved. Itl never get the attention back, but the game is still good and hasn't been gutted.
i found some of the designs pretty odd. but the game in itself was fun. i was playing a year or so and had to stop because of movement for work, less time etc etc. then i remember it went f2p. i never tried it again
The whole "Rift mechanic" spawned from Warhammer Online's Public Quests. These same sort of quests sorta carried forward the "theme park" dynamic questing we would see in Guild Wars 2 and ESO. Kinda cool how this stuff evolved over the years.
I played Rift from 2010-13... even had a wallpaper from the game as my desktop BG. Sad to see how hard it fell. Watching this makes me feel both the urge to play it again, but also the knowledge that I'd just be disappointed and would be better off not bothering. May as well leave it with the positive memories I had instead of ruining them.
That Regulos bit reconnecting at the end to sum up the entire review is a brilliant piece of video scripting that I adore. Well played, good sir.
I’m sorry, but the first fight that took that long, I would have immediately been looking through every hot Key binding to find abilities...I get that the game should mention it, but come on... you had to know you should have some abilities. How could you call auto attacking through 5 levels “fun”? lol
Was thinking the same. I would have looked through my spellbook as soon as i logged in.
The issue there was, he thought he had and that there simply weren't any offensive abilities available there yet, only utility stuff, because he had looked in the wrong place.
Well, that's what happens when you close the tutorial as soon as it appears.
He had to remove the abilities from his bar just to have the meme for his video (or to whine about the delay for the skills/talents tutorial), as soon as you choose one of the presets it auto-fills your bar with the level 0 abilities
@@brianbates212 Actually I just had to see so I made a Triumphal Warrior. They do not get auto Skill placement on your Action Bar. However the Character Info button was pulsing/highlighted as was the sub buttons of Abilities to show they were important and should be pressed. Just like in his video, though he never pressed them.
Regulos sounds more like medicine for constipation than a world destroying villain. Wait, maybe he was trying to destroy the world with constipation.
he is a bad ai that had the task to ride humanity from constipation and so he chose that the best way was to destroy the world
The name sounds like he is just some regular guy with bad breath.
But they probably went for something like "the regulator" as in he regulates the universe or whatever...
Regulos or Regulus is latin and means something like "small king" or "lower king" which makes sense though ^^
I don't know where you're getting that from, "Regulos" just sounds like a generic fantasy name to me.
@@LasherTimora i had Latin in school for years, also you could just have googled it: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulus_(disambiguation)
Most "Fantasy" names have their roots in other languages
I had a similar experience. I remember a slow crawl to level 10 or 20 (I can't remember) and then I joined a raid at the suggestion to people in zone chat. I was powerleveled so much that I was just LOST after I got out of my string of raids. I don't think I logged in again after that day.
For me to play an MMO I have to care about the setting. For games like WoW and SWTOR they have pre-existing settings that I am already into. For games like Rift and Tera, they need to snatch me up in the setting right away or I lose interest. I can collect 8 wolf pelts after killing 12 spiders in plenty of MMOs, that's not what keeps me there; I have to actually care about the story and the setting.
A bit late to the party but this is what I try to tell everyone when talking about MMORPGs. They need to be a _world_ a fun, living world for you to explore and play within.
You can have the best raiding on the scene, your PVP can be top notch, your character customization could be so in-depth you can customize each individual hair, your combat could be the finest on the market... but if your _world_ in your MMO is a dry, empty, meaningless place that's nigh-impossible to get attached to, your MMO will be forgotten as soon as the next flashy example of mechanical fluidity waltzes by.
@@DuskEalain I don’t know, WoW still exists and granted I haven’t played retail in a couple years but even when I did I legit couldn’t tell you ANY of the zones I put hundreds or more of hours into. I wasn’t attached to the zones I was attached to the group content.
@@NotSoSerious69420 Yes but if you were thrown into the thick of Icecrown Citadel with 19 other random people like Josh was here... would you really care? Yeah sure you got loot and XP but there would be nothing building up to it.
It's not about the individual _zones_ necessarily it's about the _world,_ and you being invested in what's going on.
This game was so amazing at launch. There were so many people online that you would be running towards world bosses in a huge army of players and it was such an epic experience. It had a grouping system that automatically put you in groups with people if you were near each other doing the same events and this made it feel like the most social MMO I've ever played. People often stayed in the groups and went on to tackle other content together so it was so easy to meet new people. Ah I really miss that.
It makes me sad that people don’t get to experience their childhood game quite the way it should be. Games being poisoned by bad business practices will continue to plague the industry and game preservation.
So true.
Their will always be indie games not plagued by this
This one always makes me sad, because this game had probably the coolest class system to ever appear in an MMO. Being able to choose your own build, putting specs together piecemeal style, was so damn cool. Being able to play every role as every class (tank, heal, dps, support) was awesome. The very fact there are support classes in general that aren't just healers, but actually exist to provide buffs and debuffs. There was so much that was just really fun and interesting. I really wish this game had done better.
This was one of the few games i remember playing where healers were dangerous. I had a build that could res and heal half a raid party (12 people) in 3 casts
I remember the instance finders. It was cool being in thrown into groups with others and then smashing enemies all across the map - for a while at least. You quickly start to realize that, as usual with these things, nobody talks to anybody, because nobody is dependant on anyone. You become a part of a voiceless, faceless horde that might as well be bots for all intents and purposes. And the fact that it instantly teleports you somewhere else is also bad. The moment you can access something through a menu and be taken somewhere KILLS the world immediately. Suddenly you're no longer in a digital "physical" world, you're playing through menus. Sure it's more convenient but the prize for it is a dead and much less immersive world.
The different rift invasions were great when they took over the entire zone and you had to group up to fight them back.
This was a good mom then it went p2w.
I love how you advocate for accessibility options for every MMO you play.
I'm seriously struggling to believe anyone with MMO exp wouldnt realize there would be abilities somewhere.
Yeah i couldn't watch the whole video because of this. How am i supposed to take someone who refuses/can't find the skills/ability window seriously? It may have been a long joke, but it wasn't funny/entertaining just frustrating. Because MANY mmo's don't hold your hand to the skill/ability window.
Yeah I stopped shortly after he just auto attacked instead of putting his skills on his bar.
The problem is that you have to treat the tutorial as if the player has never ever picked up a video game before in their life, so missing a way to point players to an ability book can and will confuse and frustrate them and they're going to experience the game in the exact same way as you see in the video, which will only turn them off the game right at the start.
@@Keyce0013 So I went ahead and downloaded Glyph and installed Rift, just to see what is up. Followed the same path he did. As soon as I was in the game various buttons were pulsing/highlighted. I clicked on them and it showed me character info, abilities, and skills. Also at 6:25 he X'ed out of the Combat Tutorial which discusses how Warrior abilities use Power to Build and then Spend.
@@Enarei Didn't think you'd go THAT far to prove your point, but it's commendable that you've done so. I guess that makes him as bad as the Cuphead guy?
Your opinion of this game is exactly mine; The game is fine.
But it never really sparked that "must play" feel to me. I played it 3-4 months on launch.
I loved this game when it was released. Even have the physical Collectors Edition in my shelf. I miss the old MMO days.
The early combat problems was strange because I started playing just after this game came out and I had abilities on the hotbar from the moment I entered the map
I had the same impressions of Rift. I wanted to play the regular game, but there was no one around and really nothing to do. All of the remaining players were doing endless, disconnected raids. That's just not my thing. If you enjoy that sort of thing--Rift still has something for you.
"What was his name?" Regularus? Wasn't that it? "I rate this Regulos/10" AAAAAAAH i was close
My head when to generico so I think the joke made more impact on me than the game
Harry Potter had a character name Regulus and that made the name stick with me.
I also thought it was Regularus.
My mind instantly went to "standard", because it was something unremarkable. Just like the game is nowadays.
I had regulon in my head
I actually played Rift for quite a while when I had a break from WoW, and I liked it.. the problem lies in what you said - its good, but its not really great or special
A lot to like, little to love
no offense but both of you played the game for how long? if you don't remember the name of Regulos ofc you didn't play nearly enough to scratch the surface. You didn't feel drawn in, that's fair, but don't use that to justify the game not being special. You simply didn't experience a fraction of what the game has to offer.
It will stay in my heart as the first MMO that allowed me to play my favourite class, a rogue, and do my favourite activity, tank. And just for that I'll always cherish my memories.
Why do I now want to return to Rift more than ever. I recall the game being the first HD game and the sound so amazing. I hope I will not be disappointed.
I returned after watching this. It seems that since I've been gone, they've added a system where you no longer have to buy dyes or store costumes in the bank & can wear anything you've ever tried on in any color you want on the fly. Damn, Aura Kingdom needs this so bad.
I am convinced the giant demon crotch boss was intentionally made to be at that very specific level just so you'd constantly be thinking that you're fighting his dong.
Rift was amazing . Respect one of the first live events mmo . Rift is super dated now but I'm fairly sure still better than half the crap out now .
Remember playing this game with my grandmother. Ill never forget her bouncing around on these huge orbs (Jellyfish?) and reaching level 60. I remember her moving onto this area where you fell down into an area that had water all above it and eventually making it there myself.
I actually loved its soul system when the game came out, it allowed for so much experimentation.
I played the crap out of this game, and my most active period was during the Storm Legion expansion. The wardrobe system was incredible! The cloth armor in particular made me angry at WoW for re-skinning the same stupid robes over and over again. You nailed something I could never articulate... I just never felt invested in the world, and never felt truly attached to anything in it, including my own characters. So many awesome systems & visuals, but in the end I just never felt anything connect me to the world it was set in! Thanks for the video, I can finally articulate my feelings 10 years later hahaha. :P
When it first came out, Rift was great. It had decent lore, great quests and a pretty decent character building system, which even innovated certain things. Trion itself killed the game over the years - they murdered pvp, nerfed and buffed classes at random and then started to recycle raids and other content, which crapped the game out. Now one button macro'ed builds are king and there hasnt been anything new in years.
Vanilla Rift PVP with Runner Specs is still the most fun I had in PVP in a Themepark MMO. I felt like a Star Running Back when I enter Whitefall Steppes lol
@@marshinz5696 Whitefall was the only PVP i liked. Sat in the middle as tank was good fun, though getting one shotted by a fire mage was never fun :P Very enjoyable until they nerfed warrior tank.... well warriors in general into the ground.
@@spwicks1980 I remember when mage pyro was super strong also but I made a counter class with my warrior. It was a reaver/riftblade build that had super amount of self heal and huge range on spells as riftblade burst was carried by my reaver dots. I would stand on top of hill in codex and nuke them with dots where i am out of range of most of there spells then teleport behind them and finish off with melee lmao.
@@adriansmith5241 Reaver was an amazing tanking class back in the day. I loved my reaver tank. It was hard as nails. I left at the end of the second tier of the vanilla game and was absent during 2.0. In that time they turned reaver into a dps. Damned shame...
@@spwicks1980 I was just using the reaver dots to carry my rift burst and makes it to where riftblade can fight at 35 meters then when they low hp you port behind and finish them, soul feast gives you some goof self heal also.
You didn't use your starting abilities. You ignored the soul points popup.
So I am a bit late and I havent combed through all the comments but I wanted to answer your curiosity or anguish regarding the "raiding" experience. They added the instant adventures to open world originally, which was just a questing alternative as you observed. What you ended up discovering or joining was a method that they introduced to make 1. Instant adventures more interesting 2. They wanted to cater towards the casual players. In the sense that they wanted to allow the casual players to experience the art and hard work that they did put into these raids. These raids were very difficult. The instant adventure raids give you the RP, mobs, etc but really removes majority of mechanics and insta kills. If I remember correctly they only did instant adventure raids for 3 raids. So there was a lot more raids/dungeons you didnt get to see. The final boss fights like Arak, Akylios etc had phases where you could attack them in a more realistic manner. If curious look up Maelforge or Volan.
Also thank you for this video, gave me a little piece of nostalgia that I cant get from just trying to play it anymore. Been BIS from launch to the current patch so... yeah problems letting go ./shrug, cheers.
Volan was legit the best zone boss ever.
I loved Rift when it first released. It was my favorite MMORPG for a good bit.
Rift was good, Chloromancer was one of my favorit mmo classes I've ever played.
me too!
Damn, seeing the patreon page on this video, and then the one of the most recent videos. Such an impressive growth. Well done, Josh.