Rift: Free 2 Play

So Steam did this big splash screen about having Rift Free to Play. So I decided this is the perfect time to try the game. No start up cost, just jump in and play. I played the game for about 6 hours then uninstalled.

Not because it was a bad game, but because I started seeing potential issues with the game, and didn't want to invest deeply into it. For one thing, I played it for six hours straight. I can't even pull off doing that with League of Legends. This was mostly due to discovery and experiencing a new game, but there was a feeling of constant activity in the game.

The final 2 hours were spent in this sort of random group questing, where you are piled together with several other people, and just rampaging across the countryside finishing off quests. I'm not even sure where the quests were coming from, just that I went from killing spiders to plants to boars without batting an eye. Rewards in this were fast, and I didn't feel like I had earned it.

The Rift system is interesting, but at one point there were 30 guys just bashing some rock or something. Again, rewards were easy to get in this. Because of the easy rewards system, I was able to get pretty good pants and weapon for my level (7 dps jumping up to 14 or 21 or something, can't remember the exact numbers).

I didn't get deep enough into the soul system, but I was annoyed at the auto-leveling that it tries to trick you into (I thought pressing the pop up would let me go set the points, but it automatically places the points).

Questing was a brain dead endeavor, where you don't read anything and just follow the mini-map (very much like WoW). Which really put me on edge with the game. I did like the everyone has a pet kind of thing (my Teleporting Rogue had a pig from the hunter tree, and my warrior had a pet cat).

The other negative was that the races just felt like different flavored humans. The only MMOs I have played where I enjoyed the race selections where EQ2 and WoW.

So, if you want to try out a F2P MMO, Rift is very decent. I never felt forced to pay, though they do a good job of letting you know you can (I didn't play long enough to need more bagslots btw, but that would be one reason to pay). The RMT in the game seems reasonable, though it does the one thing I dislike, which is converting real money to their play money. Though that seems to be the standard, so there's not much to do about that.

This is a recommend to check out, though in the end it wasn't for me, because I can't afford to lose myself for such long periods of time.