Rift: "Planar War" Beta Impressions

Trion Worlds held their sixth beta for their upcoming MMO, Rift: Planes of Telara, this past weekend. The beta event, called "Planar War," focused on content for levels 1-35 of the game, and thanks to the folks at Massively for sharing beta keys, and Trion for letting us in, we were able to spend some time with this promising MMORPG pre-release.

The best way to describe Rift is as a traditional-style massively multiplayer online game with an innovative class system and a host of features that rejuvenate the MMO gameplay experience. It's traditional in the sense that everything you'd expect to be in an MMO is there, such as creating characters from a number of races and classes, two factions that oppose one another, hotbar number-based combat, quests, grouping, dungeons, guilds, PvP, and more. Yet, Rift gets everything so right, it has the potential to remind MMORPG veterans why the genre has become so popular in the first place.

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As with most MMO's, your journey in Rift begins with character creation, and you've got two factions to choose from: the justice-loving Guardians and the might-makes-right Defiants. Depending on the faction you choose, you'll be able to select from a total of six races, including Rifty versions of humans, dwarves and elves as well as other non-conventional races, such as the giant-like Bahmi. The character creator is very robust, allowing for all kinds of alterations to your character's appearance, ranging from facial features and hair color to height and tattoo markings. We suspect that more additions will be available at launch, allowing you to personalize that bow-wielding high elf named "Legolass023" to your heart's content.

Choosing a class is a deceptively simple affair in character creation, which we'll talk about more in a second. Before you jump into the game, you get to select from one of the four traditional archetypes - Warrior, Cleric, Rogue and Mage. Little do you know at that point how the incredibly deep "Ascended" class system will have you in its clutches in like 3 levels or so (we can hear you laughing, Trion).

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After creating a character, you get a quick and cool cutscene that whets your appetite for Rift's lore, which generally surrounds the two factions defending Telara from annihilation at the claws of the Dragon god Regulos and the planar rifts that keep threatening to destroy everything ever. Then you're dropped into the world seeking your first quest. If you're an MMO veteran, it'll quickly become apparent to you that questing is one area in which Rift shines. At least in the beta content, quests are grouped together intelligently, the quest tracking guides you easily to where you need to go, and you're moving pretty consistently from one hub to the next. The quests themselves are pretty standard in format but have enough newness and variation to feel exciting and fresh, and the lore behind them makes you feel invested and important in each task.

Graphically, Rift looks extremely polished and is very easy on the eyes, leaning towards stylization over photo-realism. It's kind of got a Warhammer Online grittiness to it, matched with a little bit of Aion's fantastic sensibilities, and of course, its own great art style that makes it feel familiar and unique at the same time. The UI is very clean and streamlined, with some neat additions to the traditional user interface and inventory, such as achievements that are already built into the game at beta and a place for collections of books that you can find in the world.

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As mentioned, combat is pretty standard and hotbar-based, with traditional combo systems, threat management, spells, cooldowns and the like, but is pretty seamless and has enough additions to be exciting and fun, like teleporting at level 1. TELEPORTING AT LEVEL 1! Also, unlike combat in a lot of other MMO's, which can feel very slow and repetitive, Rift combat is FAST and sometimes very furious. Trion has found a way to make the hotbar system very fluid, and it goes a long way to make combat feel quick and responsive in Rift.

Rift combat also has the potential to be very complex and different from anything you've ever experienced in an MMO, depending on your choice of "soul" combination. This is where the Ascended class system, and Rift itself, really shines. The lore of Rift pits you as an "Ascended" soul from the great Shade War, and you've been resurrected to fight against the forces of Regulos. Depending on your class archetype, you have eight choices of "souls," or subclasses, to choose from, and you get to pick three during the first few levels or so. This combination of three souls is called your class "role," and as you level, you get skill points that you can put into your soul trees to earn bonuses and new skills. It's a very flexible system, and we think that you can swap out souls and change your class role at any time if you're in a party that needs specific skills, but we haven't seen how that works yet.

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The Ascended class system is probably the freshest, most innovative addition to traditional MMO gameplay that Rift brings to the table, and it's pretty incredible. Think of it this way: let's say you're interested in playing the Cleric archetype, because you love seeing "hael plz" spammed in your chat channel and ignoring it. So you select the Warden soul at level 1, which specializes in heals over time. You decide that you want to get in the middle of the action too, so you select Justicar as your second soul, to bolster your healing with combat. Then you add Druid because you love nature, and you've got your first class role. Obviously, combat will depend heavily on the souls that you choose, and can change whenever you want it to by switching out souls or altering how you allocate your skill points.

So far, the Ascended class system really has the potential to set Rift apart from other MMO's on the market. It's incredibly crunchy and customizable and has a little bit of the flavor of Guild Wars' multiclassing system, but in a traditional MMORPG framework. True, some of the souls seem to have a lot of overlap, and balancing all of the different soul combinations and class roles must be taking a lot of work on Trion's side. Still, so far it's crazy fun to play around with and infuses the game with the "it" that turns Rift from being simply a highly polished MMO to a fresh and unique gameplay experience that deserves playing.

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Trion's sixth beta was only open for the weekend, so we have yet to poke around any of Rift's other features, such as public quests, PvP, or any dungeons or raids. As with all other MMORPG's, the real long-term selling points for the game will be having higher-level content that's as polished as the earlier material, compelling endgame raiding and PvP, and an active community that will support post-launch content. We can say that the beta is incredibly polished, far more so than many MMO's tend to be at launch, and we're itching to get into the game itself and romp around in all of Telara's glorious content.

If Trion Worlds has followed up with the rest of the game in the way that they have produced the early beta content, then Rift is shaping up to be a new, exciting take on a traditional MMO format that is worthy of your (and our) $15/month subscription. We can tell you this so far: before playing the beta, we were mildly interested in Rift, and now we're so interested, it's become one of our most-anticipated MMORPG's of the year, along with Star Wars: The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2, and we're pre-ordering it. We'll need people to battle Rifts with and argue about best class roles, so you should too!