The market has been saturated with free-to-play MMO games for a few years now. we've had a lot of free games with amazing reviews and a loyal fanbase.Rift begs the question of how developers would try to attract players to a pay-to-play game, especially with the recent disappointment from Square Enix. Trion ventures forth on dangerous waters with a gamble that may have the potential to displace the other more popular subscription-based games out there. Enter Rift: Planes of Telara, Trion's magnum opus. Built up on a medieval fantasy premise, Rift is a mesh of different games rolled into one.
Rift's premise is simple. Telara was created, and the dragon of death called Regulos came to invade and destroy it. But to accomplish that, he and his other dragon gods have to tear through the dimensions and create rifts around Telara to send minions through. The story is simple enough to follow. And thankfully enough, almost every NPC players get to interact with have a piece of information regarding Telara and/or the invading dragons. Side and main story quests keep you afoot of all the happenings around the war-torn world. The quest format is naturally typical: item deliveries, monster hunting, item retrievals, and/or NPC poking. As the character levels rise, players will soon feel "flooded" with the chance of having more than 20 quests lined up in the logs. Each quest hands out fair rewards, which will do well for speed-levelers.
Judging by the look and feel of the game, it's unavoidable to label Rift with the magic words: "WoW clone." The game certainly has similarities with Blizzard's flagship MMORPG, but while the predecessor's near-perfect playability has been lauded for years, Trion certainly took this into consideration and learned from it. The polish found in Rift is by far one of the smoothest beta test phases in the RPG market. There are a few hiccups and server-downs here and there, but the bug fixes are done at the soonest possible time. Apart from swift servicing from the devs, Rift Gold Trion made sure that the mix of familiar tried-and-tested gameplay elements are blended together with impressive results.
