RIFT No more...

I'm hanging up my RIFT hat for good.

I got into the second round of the beta testing for RIFT, which means that I'm under a second round of the EULA and shouldn't discuss my experiences until it's lifted sometime in the next few weeks. But that doesn't mean that I don't get to write about why I'm leaving the green fields and stony castles behind.

RIFT O.D. Plain and simple.

RIFT is fantastic, no question about it. I've written about it before and the new beta just shows what I'd imagined would be created in the vast game world before the official release. The game is stellar, and is a complete remake of WoW with some innovative twists. But at the end of the day, it's WoW all over again.
And while that might be a good thing for people who haven't played WoW before, it's going to be lots of the same and then some for players who have already gotten their fill.

My moment of truth was when I was accepting a quest while standing in front of a field of wild boars to kill. The quest said something like "Kill 10 wild boars", and then it hit me. Beyond the fantastic graphics, surround sound and special effects, the basic premise of the WoW fetch-quests just leaves me cold. Here you are outside a field of pigs waiting to be killed. You're there to kill pigs, and the pigs are there to be killed. When you've killed them, they'll come back for the next person who is there to kill pigs.
It's not a bad formula, and works to provide a framework of the environment. But it's also a situation which would exist without the player's involvement, or even if the player is there at all. For something to really grab me, really get me interested in the storyline, plot and characters of a digital world there has to be much more of a connection than just that.

Perpetuum struggles mightily, but does move in the right direction. So until that threshold is broken completely and a new way of engagement between player and world is fashioned, I'll be out on the rocky hills of Perpetuum, harvesting robot kernels and increasing my tech database.