Rift Delivers

It lacks the lore characters of Azeroth that people have become familiar with. Aside from that, Rift beats the pants off of World of WarCraft in almost every way.

At first I took a look at Rift (a soon-to-be-launched MMO from Trion) as something to do and explore the limits of in place of Warcraft, which was feeling more and more like a box game and less like a sprawling world. The interface for Rift was extremely similar to WoW, which allowed me to jump right in. I can't emphasize enough how important this was, because as an older player I am less and less able to acclimate to different sets of keybindings. I bound the middle mouse to toggle autorun and I was set.

Running the game even on an ancient laptop with limited graphic ability I was able to navigate well, engage in combat, and use my abilities. The quests were understandable and not meaningless, the zones that were highly populated were not cumbersome, and the battles were winnable. When grouped with different classes, tanking, damage-dealing, and healing roles all shined. It was clear that this wasn't an Age of Conan debacle, this was a real MMO.

What happened after that was unexpected. Normally, I have no reason to really care about NPCs or even the world I'm playing in, I'm just a sword and a bag of gold. After playing WarCraft for so long I learned all of the NPCs - if only to just be able to solve quests - and I had a huge mental database of people, places, and things. I was worried that I would miss my investment in WoW lore and knowledge. It didn't happen. There's two reasons for this.

First, WoW blew itself up. The whole world changed, and what I realized I valued most was my knowledge of where to go and what to kill in order to farm items and craft with them. All of this accumulated information was now worthless. Monsters had all changed, dungeons had changed, zones were mutated, and I found myself relying on the auction house to obtain goods (which is a sure-fire recipe for poverty on most servers). I wasn't interested in re-cataloging all of my information, I just wanted to know where, and how. Wowhead had a fairly decent database of new drops, but I got tired of tabbing out and asking a website for every little question. In short, it became tedious. I was starting to lose my attachment to the world.

Second, Rift doesn't hold still. The world is constantly under attack from elementals shifting in from different planes, wreaking havoc on the countryside and putting yourself and your allied NPCs in peril. If you don't beat them back, they'll grow stronger and destroy you! I don't have much interest in defending the world, but the guys who are teaching me to fight and to do crafts are pretty important, and I'm not about to let them get crushed by some elemental army. So I fight! I join the dozens of other adventurers in an impromptu raid and beat them back, so we can continue on our quest to grow stronger.

The "uh oh, look out" instant raid group events bind you to the game in a way I wasn't expecting. It felt somewhat like the old days of Tarren Mill and Southshore in WoW, when you ended up in a battle due to proximity, not because someone gave you a quest to go there. It makes the world feel alive, and it gives the game an extra level of energy.

And I'll be playing Rift starting the 24th, in the final 'headstart' beta. No server decision yet, but probably as a Guardian on a PvE realm.