A few days ago I was exploring the northern ridge of mountains in Droughtlands, partly looking for cairns and artifacts as usual, but also to see if I could peek into the forbidden gray area north of the zone. Needless to say, there were lots of invisible walls and of course an insurmountable final ridge. But much to my surprise, I did manage to get close enough to notice weird names pop up on the map of the forbidden Neverland. Actual roads? Real areas? Your guess is as good as mine.

What I’d really like to know is, why did the zone designers bother to add these names? Did they originally want to have more zones, but eventually had to cut back in order to reach a deadline? Or did they just start building a zone for an upcoming expansion (or patch) while having some sort of invisibility flag on, only to have someone like me discover a bug in the invisibility mode?

Maybe it’s caused by some sort of algorithm that dumps the names on the entire continent like salt and pepper. But does that really make sense in a world that has probably been handcrafted?

Perhaps they added them to see if blog posts like this would emerge, pondering their existence. 😉

I’m now level 41 and barely started in snowy Iron Pine Peak with lots of chilly winds coming out of my loudspeakers. Droughtlands and Moonshade Highlands are both behind me. Since most rifts are often conspicuously left alone on my shard, I decided to do quests in both of those equal level zones to avoid hitting orange quests. I also tried healing in a dungeon (King’s Breach) but soloing has occupied 99% of my time in the game.

The more I play, the more I have to say that Rift doesn’t rub me quite the right way. It’s indeed very slick, beautiful, it has an impressive range of features for such a young MMORPG, and the rifts are a lot of fun to do with many players. Soloing with quests drags the game down, however, and I’ve seen in reviews and on other blogs that the game generally gets a lot of criticism in this area. There’s something about the quests that feels like working in a factory. Here, have these five quests. Go to these yellow circles over there and complete them. Return and deliver. Get another five quests. Go to the yellow circles right next to where the other yellow circles were. Rinse and repeat.

Quest grinding is not a new thing and I’ve seen the like in other MMORPG too. It can be spiced up with more imaginative quests (Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm), intricate story lines like the book quests in LOTRO or just with enough variety to keep it interesting. In Rift, not only does it feel a little like a job, there’s also something about the game itself that feels shallow.

In both LOTRO and EQ2 I’ve been happy about the atmosphere because it actually feels like an interesting fantasy or alien world. Sometimes this can make all the difference. I played Morrowind for a long time after the quests were pretty much completed, merely exploring various caves just because the world felt so intriguing. In Rift, the world feels exactly like what it really is; a game world. Nothing more. When I’m climbing the mountains looking for artifacts, cairns and hidden puzzles, I’m not really walking on mountains. I’m walking on polygons and textures.

I finally dinged level 30 in Scarwood Reach, which is the zone following Scarlet Gorge. It seems I’ve fallen behind quests, as I’ve had to do a number of orange quests. I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong. There was a small batch of quests in Gloamwood which I skipped, but I went back and did them to make up for it. This did turn the quests yellow, but after a batch or two more, the quests were orange once again.

Orange quests, and thus orange enemies (i.e. 3-4 levels higher) is a big problem in Rift, at least for my Cleric even with heavy emphasis on the Inquisitor soul. Enemies up to yellow are easy enough to kill, but orange enemies resist a lot, take forever to kill, and hit hard. I met orange solo mobs in Scarwood Reach that could get me down to about 20% health before I managed to kill them.

That’s just not fun for a casual player like me, so I’ve decided that I need to go back and grind some footholds and invasions, maybe even try some dungeons. As mentioned in the previous post, rifts are mostly empty after Silverwood on my shard with its medium population. I was hoping it would catch up after Gloamwood, but it hasn’t been much better in Scarlet Gorge nor in Scarwood Reach.

Am I too fast and the public haven’t caught up? I don’t really think so. A lot of players in my guild are much higher level, and besides, I’ve actually not played all that intensively. An hour or two per day, perhaps. My guess is that people are concentrated on questing and dungeons while keeping rifts in the back of their mind as something they can always do later.

An interesting thing happened in Gloamwood, which perhaps I should have seen coming. Where rifts in the Silverwood (the starter zone) were zerged by players (which was great fun), practically no one is touching the rifts in Gloamwood at all, at least not on my shard (Quicksilver).

I’d like to do these rifts, but not on my own. This means that I have to settle with footholds (doable because the enemies rotating the wardstone are not linked when you tag them) and then there’s quests. This, together with the fact that Gloamwood looks a bit too dark and gloomy for my taste, means that the game is suddenly not as cool as it was to begin with.

I fear that the rifts will only be zerged by players in Silverwood (the starter zone) and whatever the zone is for level cap (level 50) as more and more players reach it. This could probably even be shown as a graph with a big bump in the start and end of it, together with a “flat valley” in the middle. Since I don’t have the exact numbers, I’ll leave it up to someone else to draw it (fat chance).

I too have been pretty annoyed by the fact that low-level mobs can one- or two-shot me off my 60% mount in Rift. I then read a few complaints at the official forum to see if this improves with faster mounts. Supposedly the 60% is deliberately fragile and the faster ones can take a beating. I’m not sure yet, however. Some claim it’s exactly the same (which is not acceptable) while others claim it does indeed get a lot better. Guess I’ll have to see myself when I get them.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking and I have an idea I actually think is pretty good if I may say so myself. One of the points of being pummeled and thrown off the mount is to make sure the players actually use the roads. Fair enough. Here is what I propose then:

All roads in the zones automatically give you a temporary buff when you enter one. The buff makes your mount a lot sturdier while riding on the road (it gets more “confident” because of the clear view of the road). While on the road, enemies will have a harder time throwing you off. As soon as you leave the road to ride through an enemy territory, the temporary buff is gone.

I also posted a suggestion thread at the official forums about this.