Rift: Planes of Telara Beta Preview - Tentacles From The Sky!

Before I go on about Rift, let me just say, this comes from someone who isn’t a huge MMORPG player. I have never played World of Warcraft more than a few days and the only other MMO I spent more than a month playing is the Free to Play Lord of The Rings online. Rift: Planes of Telara is an MMO by Trion World. It has a unique premise and a lot of cool ideas. Impressions after the jump…



First thing right off the bat, you’ll be asked to pick a side. There a two sides in Rift, the guardians who are the supposed good guys, chosen by the gods themselves to save the world off the corruption. And then there are the Defiant, turning away from the Vigil(I suppose the government/authority of this world), they have decided to take matters of their own fate into their own hands. The defiant are seen as sort of heretics by the guardians but there are no real bad guys in Rift, other than of course the actual bad guy in the storyline.

Regulos, the bad guy of Telara.

The world of Telara is threatened by this demon called Regulos and his dragons. Some Defiant apparently broke a seal and unleashed Regulos. Now, Telara is facing apocalypse and it seems all hope is lost. Regulos and his minions will eventually destroy the world as we know it. This is where you come in. You are resurrected from the dead as an Ascended and are tasked at going back in time to warn Telarans of the impending doom. To stop it before it happens.

In the character creation screen, you’ll be given the option of choosing from six races, the Kelari(dark elf), Bahmi(giant men), Ethian(human), for the side of the Defiants. For the Guardians you have the Mathosian(human), High Elf and Dwarves. There are only four classes available for both sides, the warrior, cleric, mage, and rogue. While this might seem limiting, what’s unique about Rift is that you can customise your character to a fine degree to make more balanced class roles rather than just specialists.

The soul/talent system in Rift is very flexible. You can essentially craft your own type of class.

Rift: Planes of Telara uses the concept of what they call souls. Think of these as sub classes you get to pick from the major class. For instance as the warrior, you’ll get to pick a soul from either a Paladin, Champion, Reaver, Warlord, Paragon, Riftblade and potentially more(it’s a beta so there could be more types). You can get up to three souls max.

Each of these souls come with its own talent tree. You could really customise your own type of class with a bewildering number of combinations here. If you are unhappy with the combinations or want to try something new, you can always reset your souls and re pick your talents or even new souls.

The combat is the usual combo system. Hit a guy enough times, unleash a powerful attack.

In terms of gameplay, I found the quest design(at least in the beta) to be of the quota ‘get/kill so many creatures’ variant. The type I hate. And they don’t even balance this out as well as The Lord of The Rings online(which does have it’s fair share of quota quests, but at least there are a healthy amount of other type of quests). Maybe Rift just isn’t done yet and all the quests aren’t in yet. Not terribly impressed.

Where Rift really shakes things up is in the events that crop up in the world. For one, the world occasionally has these Rifts opening in the middle of nowhere. These are events anyone can join in or leave in the middle of it anytime. The Rift events remind me of the God of War arena type stages where you’ll have waves of enemies you need to deal with until you take down the final boss enemy. Once the boss goes down, the Rifts closes. Unlike the God Of War arena stages, you aren't locked into it. These are all dynamic and not preplanned events. Very cool stuff.

Rift events are super cool. Oooo look at this Dragon getting lasered to death.

The other event are invasions. Also dynamic like Rifts, these feature roving bands of bad guys moving about to an end point. It’s quite frustrating to have an invasion run through a quest area you’re currently questing on. It’s even more frustrating to be ganked by one of the invasion bad guys when you’re in battle with another enemy in the quest area. But what’s extremely cool about this is that due to it being dynamic, you can have such experiences like these that never happen in other MMOs.

These sort of underline the fact that Rift is a very combat heavy MMORPG. Its quests are weak for now and the combat is the now defacto combo system in MMOs. You hit a guy with a certain attack enough times you can unleash a more powerful attack. Nothing completely revolutionary.

The game looks quite stunning.

One things certain though, Trion World has put a lot of effort in crafting out the lore of the world. You’ll find a lot of back story on the war between the guardians and defiants and the threat of Regulos to Telara. Seems interesting enough, remains to be seen if they make much of it.

Rift: Planes of Telara promises some interesting new dynamic events with a strong emphasis on combat. If they made the quests a lot more varied it wouldn’t feel that repetitive like it is right now. The betas pretty stable for an MMO(the game looks great but I’m not a fan of the art style they went for). Rift: Planes of Telara is a wait and see for now. There is potential for it to be something special. Rift: Planes of Telara will be released sometime in 2011(no specific date).