Said I would make it, so here it is:

So ya, Rift. First heard about it when the wife called and said she made it into the Beta (for a whole of 2 months) and she liked it. What caught me completely off guard is the fact that she said she was quitting WoW in order to play Rift. Now this was someone who lived and breathed WoW, had enough gold to be as rich as a gold farmer, had gotten the best gear for every high level toon including multiple builds of each class, I mean shit was real. So when she said that she was going to drop wow, that made me drop a brick. This game had to be some level of holy shit for her to do that right?

Now I've read the reviews, official reviews give it a high mark (as always with any largely advertised game) and unofficial reviews are mixed at best but nothing that jumps out and screams buy me or run the F*CK away. Well the wife started playing and since I stopped playing wow with her over a year ago, I figured I would give it a shot.

To be honest, the games first impression did NOT sit well with me. before I even got past the title page, the game took a dump on my exposed nipples. the intro would not stay full screen even if Jesus commanded it. so basically, just skipped the into by mashing the ESC key for the 2 seconds it would stay on screen until the login page showed up. so ya, why I even decided to go make an account after that bullshit is beyond me.

now setting up an account was fairly painless. no pretty lights or sprite exports of game characters to lead the way, just a simple this is what we need, hey your good. the forum account verification email took forever to get to me, but then again it was nearing midnight on the launch (I got my pre-order status with 4 hours to go and was playing 2 hours before launch LAWL) so I'm sure with all the hype that the servers were busy.

Now I finally got past the 2 hour patch (if the game JUST launched, why the hell do you need to patch it?) and the intro (I still have yet to see the intro movie due to the screen problem) and now I'm sitting logged in at the character creation screen.
Here, and you will hear this a lot, you will see what I would consider an industry standard toon builder. You first start off by choosing your faction, Guardian or Defiant. Sounds kind of grounded to good or evil right? Or barbarism and civility? Nope...this one is about the religious and the technologists. That's right folks, it's a game where the religiously fanatical have it out against the arrogantly atheist....angry kitten is going to love this one. Its new....I'll give it that much ground, and they pull it off fairly well. From what I understand of the story, this worlds version of an "Evil Chuck Norris" is Regulos, who is some sort of magical person/dragon/thing from the plane of death that rules the entire cosmos, except for this little pocket of love which was ruled by the Gods. I'll get more specific into the story later.

so the creator is actually a bit nicer than others I've seen. it gives a bit more customization than most MMOs but not as complex as say anything produced by bioware. As the game just came out, you have several options available but nothing noteworthy in quantity. You only get to chose from three races and each faction has different races. The races fall more in line with FF Online style rather than simpler DnD style MMOs, as in there is no Human, Barbarian, Orc. It's all funky named so as to make you sound like a virgin when someone else hears you talking about it. The different races are not restrictive to what classes you can play, which is a plus to me, and on top of that, you can COMBINE classes....that's right. You can be a Mage/Tank or a Rogue/Healer or Tank/DPS full on builds. This is probably what sets this game apart play wise, is the melting of classes into each other to create interesting combinations.

So, naturally, I selected the side that sounded most evil and peg-leggy....the Defiants! I was thinking I would be some bad ass guy fighting for Regulos, casing evil and bringing in much plunder and booty like a good pirate should.....no....not even close.
The intro movie actually does a good job explaining the current situation and gives a bit of minor history for what happened. Ok, so movie is out of the way. You wake up to find out that you're dead...wait what? Ya you heard me, you died. Then some Dr got a hold of your C*CK and raised you as a test tube baby. I don't remember him going into detail, but it seems like it was over the span of what...a day, right up to the point you were when you died. You are no longer *insert funky race name here* anymore, you are now an Ascendant! Actually sounds more like a title for the Guardians but whatever, still sounds cool. So you talk to your test-tube daddy and get your first mission. For me, I started off as a warrior focus. Figured this would be the easier of the classes to play. Just run in and thwack something to death (started off as a paladin to be specific). Alright so on to interactions.

Ok...before I noticed the GFX, before I noticed the sound, before I even noticed I was playing the F*CKING game, the first 5 lines of the general chat for lvl 1-9 is how much this game is/is not like WoW. This was to the point of annoyance. First off, yes this game shares a lot of similarities with WoW, but so does every other fantasy MMO of the day. They did not clone wow, nor was it made to represent it. I can see some influences from wow, but that's about it. When wow first came off the line, there were a lot of ideas it had that came from other MMOs of that day. They ALL have a quest system, crafting system, and ability system that is pretty uniform throughout the industry. Now I played wow for 6 years...and as much as I hate to say it, if you have played that game at all, you will have very little trouble getting into the swing of things. if you played EQ2, this game is easy as hell to understand.

So the controls are the same, right click is the action, left is the camera and selection. standard WASDQE movement for 3D games of the day. not much to say about controls, other than if you select the Brahim as a race, you will spend the next 5 mins doing nothing but your super jump and dancing. Dancing has a lot more viable options in this game, and for you ravers out there, you can purchase glow sticks (or this games equivalent) to an added effect. Kinda cool.
Anyway so the tutorial does a good job of explaining how to interact with everything, everyone, and explain the story so far. it's the end of the world as we know it, but you feel fiiiinnnneeee! that's right, the world is ending and you were brought back to life to watch it blow up! so you go through assisting your fellow Ascendants and Defiants, making your last stand at the Final Rift Gate, where when all said and done you get to meet Regulous face to face. some drama happens and you are told to run towards the light. since you have already done that and landed in a test tube, I can see some reluctance, but never the less you do. Wham! you just survived the end of the world. the prologue outro movie was a bit dramatic, but hey....that's why we play these games.

so now you are in the real world, well the real server world as it is...and guess what....McFly....you better go check on your flux capacitor cuz you just went back in time. 21.1 gigawatts?! GREAT SCOTT!!!

So the tutorial zone did a good job of explaining things and gives you a taste of what kind of quests you can expect and whatnot, as well as a very very small (if at all) taste of what is known as a Rift Event to get you going. BUT...if you were a dumbass like me and got sick of tooltips popping up for stuff you THOUGHT you already knew about, you will be left in the dark on quite a few things. Take it from me, those tooltips are annoying, but necessary. this game may look like wow, but a few critical mechanics of it are defiantly different.

Now from here, the beginner level area was looking kind of shitty after I redid the gfx settings so I quit, updated my drivers, set everything back to ultra, and when I logged in...I was blown away. Yes...the gfx are better than wow....by miles. In the beginning, before I updated my drivers, everything was comparable to old school wow gfx. slightly cartoony with a semi-realistic tone. after I updated and moved everything over to ultra...GAWD DAYUM! I only have 2 gripes on the gfx, water and enemy renders.
The water....they did an amazing job on everything else but when it came to the water, it's like they had a collective memory dump. The team lead for water physics and gfx ate an entire bowl of stupid and shit a giant load of duh all over that. While everything else is fine, the water itself is damn near static, bright baby blue in color and not transparent at all. I'm mulling over the options to see if it's just I have water effects off or something but I haven't seen anything like that so far. not to mention camera angles and movement controls in water just flat out suck. if you have to do any questing in the water, tremble with fear as the developers probably don't even know what's been encoded down there and although your toon can swim under the water, the camera seems to like to stay above it. it's a virtual camera you dumbasses, it won't stop working if it gets virtually wet.

on to the enemy renders. I have to give them credit, some of them are amazing and others look like the animator threw up on screen and that was his eureka. enemies like the bromin (yeah I loled too) are done fairly well. they look like a mixture of worgan and Egyptian anubian gods...really well done. the barking gets annoying as hell sometimes as it only plays TWO sound files for them but it seems like they might add more to them later. now the seacaps on the other hand, little severed penis heads with legs lookin things, just flat out look like they were made in microsoft paint. almost no depth to them at all. luckily, you won't run into them too much as they reside in the ocean. wonder if the shittiness of the water programming and the shittiness of the water based creatures have anything in common.

Ok so now all that is done, you got the jist of things, you put points in your two or three focus trees to make a role just for you and you are now roaming around and confidently killing shit when suddenly, you see a big bright light in the sky. while you grab your dick and drool going "oooh pretty" the light turns black, tentacles from a deranged anime porn shoot out of the sky from a big portal lookin thing, and all of a sudden you are surrounded by a shitload of what the wow equivalent of elite monsters that have rape on the mind. This is called a rift event, and although sounds scary, is actually fun as hell. the concept is simple, the rift spawns monsters, and you and your team must defeat the monsters to lure out the rift boss or boss event. once you kill the boss, the rift closes and everyone that participated in the event is awarded special currency, special crafting items, or if you scored high enough, special equipment. yeah you heard me, the entire thing is scored. now the scoring scale eludes me but I think it has something to do with who opened the rift, damage dealt/taken, mobs taken down, all that jazz. someone who has been in the event since the beginning will get better rewards than someone who rushed in at the last second and managed to get a kill shot on a mob before it ended, but regardless, anyone and everyone that participated will get something for their time. now this leads directly into the next thing I like about it...public grouping.

public grouping is like the LFG tool on wow....but made dummy proof. but you ask, "Turkey, how can such a simple thing be any stuid-der proofed roflumad?" Well pop a squat on a thumbs up, I'll tell you. All you have to do, is enter an area where the event is taking place and up at the top, you will see in big ass Helen Keller letters, JOIN PUBLIC GROUP. If you click on that, you are added to the party for that particular area. if two public groups are in the same area, the groups automatically merge. the ONLY thing you gotta do, is at the end of the event, right click your name and leave the party. this feature works seamlessly with all aspects of the game, and is really good in breaking the ice for meeting new players. this happens for almost any event in the game too, pvp raids, camp protections all that jazz. Now I have only been playing for one day, but I was drawn in, especially after a regional event took place that reinforced my e-peen as a tank.

A regional even where the lords of the death realm launched an invasion on a place called Freemarsh happened late last night. This event opened several death rifts (yes they come in all flavors of the rainbow) all across the region which out poured mobs. now normally there are enough players online at a time to deal with the rifts before they get to the point where they start spawning raiding parties, but as I said, this was late last night. So with too many low level players, and too many high level rifts, needless to say where ever the raids attacked, they gained what's called a foothold....meaning that creatures claim that territory and can spawn just like if a rift was present. ok so you know how this stuff works....since no one did anything about it, every npc outpost in freemarsh, including the capitol city was completely and utterly over run. what does this mean? it means that you can't turn in quests, nut-face, until those areas are liberated. how do they get liberated? well you take a tank, and a healer, and a SHIT LOAD OF LOWBIES, and you do it the old fashioned way, by using harsh language. after about 30 mins, we were able to liberate Kings Refuge, which houses the only F*CKING smelting point in the area (I'm an armorsmith/miner/butcher) and thus lowbies were able to quest again! HORAY!!! I'm telling you now, for someone who got sick and tired of wow, this shit was fun. and because I was the only tank of level and my guildie was the only healer of level, we managed to successfully tank and liberate amidst 34 mobs. I only had to use my panic button once and that was to give my cleric some time to recover her mana. I've never even had this much fun raiding in wow, it was epic.

now onto more things I enjoy. as you know, looting can be a painstaking process....you know with all that mouse movement and the clicking...man I tell you what. well guess what, they made it simple. it's the simple shit in games that can sometimes lure you in more than the major stuff, and this nifty little feature made me go "now that's F*CKING awesome".
pooled looting. wtf is that you say? ok say you kill like 4 mobs in a an area around you. instead of clicking on each individual mob for your booty, you click on one, and all the mobs which you have slain, are pooled into one loot menu. easy peasy. scare me near shitless thinking that my loots were disappearing on me until I figured out that little nugget. now you may not think this is great, but when you participate in a rift event and you have 20-30 or so bodies to sift through, it really saves on time.

crafting....ok...so far I've only done the ones listed: armorsmith, mining, butchery. armorsmithing is its own separate craft against weaponsmithing and each are self explanatory for any novice MMO player. Mining is also self explanatory, with a few tweaks. the ore order that you would be used to is not what you think, but if you think about it, makes more sense. as well there are no items to buy in order to craft. just collect the shit and run to the nearest tool shed. the third, Butchery, sounds pretty awesome doesn't it? I bet you want to know what it is doncha? you would think it would be carving up dead animals and people, cleaning the proper meats and cuts for vicious BBQers all around RIFT! WRONG! it's just a spiffy name for skinning animals, although you can occasionally get more than skins from them, like bones or teeth, or other things that only Jeffry Dahmer would be interested in. as for the other crafts, I'm getting around to them.
now the only drawback is that locations for enabling your crafts are hard to come by and take a long time to get to. the easiest place I have found, are the capitol city quartermaster areas. these places hold all of what I have named "Tool Sheds" for every craft as well as the trainers for each, and the quartermaster herself who will give you dailies for your craft, mostly just make these items and deliver. these earn you special currencies but ill cover that later.

travel! now if you look at the world map, it seems small at first....that is until you find out that even mounted, it could take you 15-20 mins to cross a zone. this isn't a lie or exaggeration either....it takes a good 5-7 mins MINIMUM to get form one zone to another mounted and twice that on foot. now because I have mAdz chetz called PRE ORDER ACCOUNT, I got a free mount as soon as I started the game....what was that?!?! a F*CKING two headed mutant turtle....yeah....that just screams fast travel doesn't it? regardless, your character can get access to mounts as early as lvl 5 I believe. I never paid attention to minimum level requirements for tier one mounts. now the second ones you don't get access to until level 50 (supposed max lvl.....for now) are 110% boost where as first lvl ones are 60%...maybe some variation in between but I haven't seen any at this early point in the game just yet. now the mounts themselves....are kinda cool lookin for the Defiants. Since defiants are atheist technofreaks, they have DUN DA DA DAAAAAA!!!! Mechano-horses! Tier one being regular ole horses....some camel like thing, and a two headed F*CKING turtle. they have pets and companions like most other MMO games and they function in much the same manner. I just know my wife is going to grind the shit out of the collector quests to get them damn pets (you wanna know more about him, go for the trial).

currencies. every game has em, and they are damn near all universal...sept for final fantasy. they have gil and they stuck with that. the currencies for Rift are as follows:
silver - Lowest
gold - mid
platinum - highest

yeah simple as hell right? WRONG! there is another set of currencies that you need to get regional rare equipment including stat focuses for your character, maybe some training. these currencies are called planar currencies and they also come in three flavors, but unlike the metal currencies, they do not break down. planaerite (could be wrong, can't remember the name off the top of my head) is the lowest form and you will use the shit out of it for anything from the best focus augments, to a glow stick from a faction vendor for your rave party in the cabalist tower. now the next tier is labeled as a rare item (blue) and is harder to get than planerite. where you get p-rite from just sneezing at a plansetouched enemy or a rift event, the p-shards (also can't remember name) are only awarded though the top scorers I think, either that or only for special types of rifts and events. now 1 shard is not equivalent to 100 p-rites and this will frustrate the living F*CK out of you if you find yourself with enough shards, but not enough p-rites. make no mistake though, hunting down those rites and shards is a fun, if not time consuming task in and of itself. anything event wise awards planear currency, so laying the smack down on some other rift dudes is definatly the best way to go to gather.
Side note about rifts, one of the cooler ones are the water rifts. if a rift is left alone for a period of time, it will warp the landscape around it. a water rift, if left alone, will start transforming the landscape into the ocean bottom and will look like a cube of water. unlike ocean water, this shit is actually rendered right and looks spiffy. just something I thought you would say oh cool. I'll try to get me some screenies to share with yall later.

now I've listed all this cool shit, but cool shit isn't cool if you can't get in and work with it right? well I'm discovering a problem...and it may just be me...when I cannot connect to any shard in order to play with a premade. it will load everything up to 99%...and then fail back to the character selection. although I'm sure there is a work around or something, this would probably have been brought up in the beta. I don't think it's because I'm on a high pop shard either, as it does the same thing when I try to log onto a low pop server. regardless, it is what it is. the game is still in its infantsy, so it's bound to get better and worse as more and more people bitch about the problems. ill add more parts as I get them, but for now I hope this helps give you a better insight into rift other than "the gfx are better".

so I've covered pretty much the majority of the major topics I've encountered so far, and trust this won't be the last time I post as I have yet to do any of the PVP events, raids, instances, guild quests, public masturbations, so I'll be posting more when I experience more.

*Reserved for part 2*

say sumthin joe...i dare you

yah, I'm not reading all of that. Is it good?

Fyi, you can buy 60% mount soonest as you have 3p and 75g I think. The next upgrade would be at level 40 for 90% which will costs you 35p 75g. After that, its 110% for 125p at 50 or if you're lucky with artifact turns in(110 lucky coins), you can buy it without spending your coins assuming you gathered all those artifacts.