Rift News & Events & Guides

It’s hard to imagine, but RIFT has been on the market for almost six months now. It’s been an incredible half year for the MMO and its developers Trion Worlds, catapulting them and their game from obscurity into an overnight success and virtual world juggernaut. It’s well deserved, as RIFT is arguably one of the most polished and complete MMOs ever released. A game that doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel, instead opting to polish the cogs and grease the gears of everything that makes a modern day MMO great, before slotting them back in. It achieves something remarkable in the process – Luring tired and bored World of Warcraft players by giving them roughly the same game, just in a different world.

An unfair accusation to make some might say, but there’s no denying the similarities between the biggest MMO in the world and the fastest rising. Rift Gold came along at just the right time. A lot of players greeted Warcraft’s latest expansion, Cataclysm, with a decidedly “meh” response, and the thought of a brand new MMO encompassing all the things they know and love from Azeroth was an enticing prospect indeed. Fortunately despite all of their similarities, RIFT isn’t a carbon copy of its gargantuan peer. The sparks of originality that are here make this game feel modern and best of all – fresh.

Two factions inhabit the lush, detailed world of Telara: The Guardians and the Defiants. Each faction has its own set of three unique races, which can be moulded and shaped in the game’s strong character creation system. The actual interface is your standard MMO collection of action bars and slots, with a quest tracker on the right side of the screen underneath the map. A series of story driven tutorial introduce Rift Gold narrative, in which the Dragon Regulos has brought destruction to the land of Telara in the form of rifts from otherworldly planes.

These rifts form the basis of the game. They are huge tears in the fabric of the physical world and can appear anywhere and at any time, spewing beasts all over the map and disrupting travelling, questing and the day to day activities of both players and non-player characters. The world of Telara dynamically alters depending on how well these rifts are dealt with. Leave one open for too long and they grow, invading local towns and settlements impeding player progress significantly. Quests can’t be completed if the quest giver is mincemeat.

Players are encouraged to group up and take on these invasions, battling their way through the hordes and defeating bosses that appear. A useful Public Group system helps put other willing players together to fend off the attacks. These appear whenever you are in the vicinity of an invasion making for a spontaneous but smooth PvE experience. They are a very fun and exciting addition to the game, making the world feel alive and dangerous.