Is there a term for the opposite of buyer’s remorse? Where you get or do or buy something and are increasingly satisfied with that decision? That’s kind of how I feel about RIFT as of late.
I’m tremendously glad I’ve gotten back into the game, although those feelings may well be from that returning glow that one gets (and causes us bloggers to gush about titles we haven’t played in a while) and the excitement over the upcoming Nightmare Tide expansion. It’s certainly not all I play, but the fast load times and the bite-size nature of questing and rifting lends itself well to short play sessions.
What’s making me happiest is seeing/realizing/re-realizing how friendly RIFT is to players. There are several legitimate paths to leveling. There are free server transfers. Everyone gets housing almost right out of the tutorial and it’s a pretty good system. There is a good amount of account security (coin lock, two-factor authentication). There’s a great mentoring system that will soon allow you to scale up in levels as well as down. The LFG finder works wonderfully for dungeons. Artifacts are still addicting to collect. There’s a decent mobile app. The soul system allows for a lot of playstyle customization. And I’m hearing word that there will soon be a unified currency to allow endgamers to save up and buy gear whether they raid, run dungeons, or PvP.
Sure, there are drawbacks. RIFT wasn’t very sticky to me the last couple times I came back, although right now I’m level 32 and still trucking. Storm Legion is excessively long and leveling through it is slow. There are a lot of mindless quests, although a few are genuinely engaging and full of great story. I’m feeling as though the newer souls are so much more powerful than the old ones, which makes me hesitant to use the older ones (and that’s a shame). And man am I glad for the wardrobe system, because so much of the armor is (and this is a professional writer’s term) icky.
I’m ridiculously excited about the minion system that’s coming with the expansion too. I know it’s silly and not a huge game-changer, but I like collecting NPCs to order around on tasks (such as Neverwinter, Star Trek Online, and SWTOR). I really want to hear more specifics on where we can get these minions so that I can start planning to do so even at my level when Nightmare Tide hits next month.
Bio Break 
The positives you list are, by and large, accurate. All of them together, however, don’t outweigh Rift’s central, intractable problem: it’s dull. There are worse problems, true, and the level of polish means it can take a while to notice, but once that bland feeling sets in it’s very hard to shift.
I had a good six months with Rift from launch but since then I’ve never been able to go back for more than a few hours at a time before I start thinking of all the other MMOs that just have more flavor, more bite, more spice.
Still, I’m curious to see how the forthcoming expansion turns out. It has to be better than the last one.
Yes I love Rift too, dearly. But nothing compares to ArchAge….
Was playing Rift recently, got two characters to 60, I think they increased XP from story quests so the levelling went quite quickly. The expansion has some lovely looking zones, Dendrome is one of my favourites, more interesting than the vanilla zones anyway but the story is rather lacking, or at least is doesn’t add up to a coherent or engaging narrative, if they were to ditch it completely and put all their efforts into zone events, variations on the rift formula or instant adventure I’d think it would be a much better game.
Much like Bhagpuss, I find Rift to be pretty bland too. It has a lot going for it, but the world is meaningless to me.
I played Rift and found it not to be too bad, but it runs out of steam after a while, especially once you understand it well enough. The game is nice, the soul system is fine and it still can be clearly seen how good it formerly (before the Storm Legion) expansion it must have been.
Why i differentiate here: look at the current 61-points abilities. They are just way too powerful to be skipped and the game by now is balanced about everybody having one of those. Thus by now every player at the top tier uses one soul at 61 points and dabbles into two more souls at very low levels. I very much think this was an intentional design decission as it in effect turns every soul into what a class is in another game and makes balancing much easier. In contrast to this, the top abilities pre-SL were in line with other abilities and could reasonably be skipped in favour of more points in another soul. While there also were some “community advised” setups, it’s quite obvious that a much higher variety of combinations was out there without those must-have top tier abilities.
Out of a players point of view, the pre-SL system must’ve been awesome, as the game really encouraged a huge varieties of setups. Out of a developers point of view, of course, this was balancing hell, no matter what you created, the players sooner or later were able to come up with a creative new setup which trivialized your hard content.
On contrast, when i consider what some people say about TSWs combat system, i don’t get it why the even simpler combat of Rift (only one ressource, build up 5, consume, repeat) got no criticism at all. (As a sidenote, i also don’t understand why nobody is blaming Wildstar. I mean, yea, my Engineer there did not build up points, but rather built up the ressource bar from 0 to 100. Big difference… )
Anyway, im my book the combat works and for some time even is fun, at least as long as you also use your plethora of additional abilities by yourself. At some time you’ll learn that macros, the game supports, can do the job better than any player, though. Once you learned that and set up your macros, you’re down to two button combat. (1-1-1-1-1-2)
And last not least, what others already mentioned: the world somehow is meaningless. Certainly, there is a lot of story and lore hidden somewhere, but the presentation is so weak, most players don’t even notice it. To be fair, Rift was released before SWtoR, TSW or GW2. So while there were some MMOs out there which communicated the story well enough (e.g. DCU or the the later episodes in STO), the reference material the developers of Rift looked at was just as bad, so what Rift delivers is “market standard” of that time, avoiding innovation to reduce risks.
So all in all, if you look at it in the context of when it was created, the world, quests and lore are nothing special but still allright. Unfortunately i by now am used to the high quality of TSW and no other MMO out there can even get close in how missions are designed and how the world and people are presented, although i am also aware that it’s very unlikely that we’ll see another MMO of this quality again for years to come.
With hindsight, my biggest issue was the expansion of the world by such a large margin in SL. They trippled the size of the playable area so that the playerbase was suddenly even more dispersed than before. For a game that has open world public quests as one major selling point that’s a bad thing. I never can keep up with the leveling zerg in MMOs and don’t expect to, but it meant leveling through the new expansion in quickly empty zones – where the difficulty of new content and much higher gear levels meant it was a horrible slog to complete events. Looking back, perhaps they should have added more and more content to the old world and kept the game concentrated and the playerbase more together. It’s a common enough problem for MMOs I know, but for Rift it has signficant extra negative consequences…
Yea, Storm Legion totally killed Rift for me. I remember returning at lvl 50 and played the tropical island with the volcano to prepare for SL, loved it and then SL hit and i didn’t even make lvl 52 before i felt like i was now grinding mobs here. The SL zones are huge open landscapes without any real detail, where if you look the the lvl 1-50 zones , each had a rather unique flavor going for it, i still remember that spooky zone quite clearly. To make matter worse, the quests in SL was literally of the “kill 25 of this” and “kill 30 of that” variety, not even disguised in some story, it was just plain grind quests with the convenience that you can pick them up right there (still didn’t hide the fact that i felt it was a massive chore).
So i kept trying to go back and every time i log in my lvl 52 character, taking an hour to figure out what’s going on with my souls that was reset for the zillionth time, and start hitting these rhinos that takes forever to die and then i realise i need to kill like 20 of them for some arb reason and then i just drain of all motivation to continue…
I honestly don’t know if i want to grind it out to 60 to play the expansion unless they rectified what they did in SL somehow.