NDA was lifted on this today - and while some stuff has been seen on its own website:
http://www.riftgame.com/en/ - no doubt as a result lots more info will be forthcoming.
Its a mmorpg - 2 factions, pve, pvp etc Rifts that spawn across its world dynamically changing the regions around them for a random amount of time/npc incursion from rifts are fought back. Seems to take from a variety of the market mmos out at the moment.
Intro for each faction:
(Guardian)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ-4IPopXFQ(Defiant)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah31R8-ZHN4Basic features include:
Level 50 cap;
There is an achievement system;
Classes are known as callings. And there are 4 initially Warrior, Cleric, Rogue, Mage. On top of which each calling gets 8 souls (think of these as specs ala Wow/WAR etc) More on this here:
http://www.riftgame.com/en/classes/system.php Effectively it looks like 270 possible combinations to choose from when building a character;
Rifts (dynamic open world encounter) scale based on number of people in the area. (PQ's anyone?); More on Rifts:
http://www.riftgame.com/en/game/rifts.phpThere are dungeons for groups of 5, 10 and 20. A dungeon may have wings you cannot access when you are lower level. When you arrive at the dungeon at a higher level those wings will open up. The dungeon inhabitants may have changed, mob placement may have changed and there maybe new or different bosses. It will be a different experience;
Death Penaltys in the form of stat loss etc;
Heroic Challenges - "which are essentially miniature raid bosses that appear in instances and immediately act as quest goals"
Fly throughs of parts of the world:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBI2xgEhtgQhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNXq1JeJZXESome first hand info on the recent Closed betas now that the NDA has gone is showing up across the net, including several forums I use. So I'll post the first one that impressed me:
It's a fun, highly polished game that borrows heavily from WoW in class and combat mechanics. The soul system is a borderline brilliant leveling innovation. Leveling is primarily quest based using TBC quest style mechanics (Using clickies, kill 'x' quests, escort missions, loot 'x', etc.), and is the only way you get new soul trees for your character. Rifts are fun, lots of fun, giving you amazing experience and loot drops based on your contributions made (Healing, DPS, buffs) during a rift event, which consist of five increasingly difficult stages. If you don't close a rift in time it spawns a raiding party, which heads towards a player NPC quest hub and can take it over.
The souls are divided into four main categories: Warrior, Rogue, Cleric, Mage. Each category uses the same base mechanic (mana for clerics, energy/combo points for rogues, etc.), and has eight souls that each fill different roles in a fight (tank, heal, DPS, support). When you choose a soul, you gain access to their tree, and whatever base/default abilities are associated with that soul. I focused mainly on the cleric souls, so I'll go into detail on how those worked.
Clerics have access to the following souls:
- Warden (water based HoT healer. Base ability is a HoT)
- Sentinel (light based AoE/balanced healer, base ability is an instant heal)
- Purifier (Fire based direct healer. Base ability is a self damage absorbing shield, think PW:S)
- Druid (pet based support/melee DPS. Base ability is a pet summon that can cast a weak HoT or nuke)
- Shaman (Melee two handed DPS, base ability is a self+melee damage buff and a fast attack)
- Justicar (self heal/group heal tank. Base ability is a buff that heals you a % of damage done when using a damage ability)
- Inquisitor (ranged light/dark magic DPS. Base ability is a light based fast casting nuke and an instant DoT)
- Cabalist (ranged AoE dark magic DPS, Base ability is a 2 second cast time 'bomb' spell that does massive AoE damage once the NPC either dies or takes 'x' damage)
You get your first soul at creation, your second soul from a quest around level 5, and your third soul from a story quest near the end of the second leveling zone (between roughly level 17-20). You can buy alternate specs, which lets you swap to a different point allocation in your souls. So it is possible, for example, to have Warden, Inquisitor, and Justicar as your three souls, and be able to swap between healing, tanking, and DPS between fights. Mind you, each soul has synergy with other souls in terms of how the abilities and talents work, so while you CAN do this, it isn't optimal.
The classes all have interesting enough abilities and dynamics that I'm very intrigued to see how this is going to work out at level 50. You can already begin to see some exciting game play by 20.
Now, no one is saying this is a wow killer - noone uses that term anymore. Wow is the elephant in the room of the MMO market and nothing except Blizzard themselves will change that, but quite a large portion of their playerbase only plays it as there is nothing else about that they get a good feel for, to me it looks like 2011 will change that with Rift and SWTOR both releasing during it.
I'll certainly be keeping an eye on this and also trying to get into the more open betas/stress tests going forward and will report back here. It could actually be fun.