There aren’t many surprises left in this industry. Thanks to the 24/7 media carousel that finds itself powered on the backs of many a blogger, the mere existence of a new title entering the sphere finds itself catalogued, researched and stalked till release. As a result, many companies have taken one of two routes; either scorching the earth with hype or locking down the shop and letting a slither of juicy content leak out every month or so.

So it’s with great pleasure that I was introduced only recently to Rift, the debut offering from Trion Worlds, a developer/publisher so new and unknown that they don’t even have their own Wikipedia page. On the surface, the offering here looks like nothing more than another fantasy MMO, more fuel for the fire that keeps World of Warcraft burning for yet another year.

But instead, it seems the crew at the California-based studio have pulled some genuine innovation out of a bag of numerous tricks, carefully avoiding the obvious gimmickry of “new MMO” by under-promising and over-delivering. And boy, haven’t we been waiting long and hard for something to wean us off Azeroth.




Rift introduces us to the world of Telara, a land in the middle of a long and bloody civil war. Disaster strikes as The Ward – a device that keeps two fragile dimensional planes from merging – is destroyed, allowing the dark lord known as Regulos the opportunity to cross over and wipe out everyone and anyone who stands in his way.

As the world falls into spectacular chaos, two powerful coalitions form and take sides to fight back against Regulos and his army. The Guardians: a faction dedicated to the gods who deserted the world when they needed them the most, and the Defiant, who have abandoned the gods that left them to die and have instead embraced technology as their saviour.

Regardless of your race or faction, both sides have fascinating storylines that wrap around similar themes of armageddon, faith, honour and all sorts of fuzzy heroic stuff. You’ll more often than not find yourself actually reading many of the quests you receive to find out more about the world and the pretty nasty situation it’s found itself in. I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed a loose connection to a certain other MMO’s recent cataclysmic expansion, but it’s not the first, or the last, influence.

Creating a character is simple. In the beginning, you’ll be asked to choose one main class and one subclass. Subclasses allow you to customise your play style, similar to talent trees, but provide many more opportunities to refine your abilities. Do you prefer to focus on creating damage with a pure blade, or would you rather use elemental abilities to enhance your attacks?

Players can create, eventually, up to 3 groups of subclasses, called “roles”, per character, that can be changed on the fly without financial penalty. This allows you to switch roles between, say, damage per second (DPS) and Tank, depending on what your group or guild needs. Speaking of guilds, Rift offers a full package, including levels, guild quests and rewards.




Rift pulls its namesake from arguably the most exciting addition to an MMO in years, via the “planar rifts” that literally rip holes in the world, dragging invading mobs onto your doorstep. Rifts can open almost anywhere and at any time, and require ordinary “ascendants” (you) to defeat the minions and close the rift portals. What’s even more interesting is the consequences of ignoring them, as if left alone for long enough, these mobs will establish “footholds” in various areas, killing NPCs and taking over towns.

Rifts aren’t just public quests, Ala WAR, but an integral part of the game. While the standard quest trees, instances and professions exist and compete for your time, hundreds of rifts will spawn over the course of a few hours. Closing them is essential to the overall safety of the areas, but is also integral to scoring some of the best loot and providing a secondary path to gaining experience.

They’re also a hell of a lot of fun. While it doesn’t take long to notice a slight pattern in the variety of each rift, it’s exciting to hear the sky rumble, rip open and change the local landscape right in front of your eyes. It’s even more exhilarating to hear the booming voice on an incoming major invasion, where it’s not uncommon to see 30-40 rifts open at once, spawning not only basic mobs but enormous bosses and sub-bosses, requiring hundreds of random players to pull together to defend a zone.

Over time, you’ll gain the ability to open wormholes early, create defences, call in friendly support and a whole host of other tools to make life easier. Essentially, the choice is yours in how much time you invest in this public group PvE, and Trion have been clever in creating not only valuable rewards that encourage repeat play, but the ability to easily jump in and out of public raid groups to facilitate it.




In another innovative twist, Rifts also form the gateways to “on demand” raids at level 50 (Rift’s current level cap), which can be opened almost anywhere with the right mats and equipment. Any player that happens to be nearby can also jump in and help with the raid and although they won't be entitled to any gear, will still receive a reward for lending a hand. Although this raid content isn’t instanced, it still follows a similar format to that of other titles, with in-game cut-scenes and staged combat.

The California-based Trion Worlds has ex-staff from veteran MMO studios such as Blizzard, NCSoft, SOE and Mythic among their ranks, and it seems they have taken the exceptional presentation and design skills with them. There has been an obvious heavy emphasis on creating a simple, customisable UI, along with easy visual cues to find important NPCs, quests and questing areas. The menu screens, from the auction house to the professions, are so similar to their WoW counterparts it could almost be classed as graphical plagiarism.

But this is a good thing. Rift has taken almost every important improvement from its inspirational predecessors and implemented it with even more finesse. You can join PVP “warfronts” from anywhere in the world, and be dumped back when you’re done. The game detects when you’re in an instance and offers players fast travel to the entrance. Locating rifts, towns, quests and so on is a piece of cake thanks to a great map/minimap system.

It’s not only a functional game, but it’s extraordinarily pretty too. Utilizing a heavily modified version of the brilliant Gamebryo engine that was originally built for DAOC, Trion have crafted a gorgeous world, full of enormous mountains, great cities, ruined lands and vast oceans. Rifts look amazing, tearing apart the space with great long tentacles, creating a localised eco-system to support its inter-dimensional creatures.




As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve found it pretty hard to fault Rift, especially when it’s done so many things right. During my time in Open Beta, Headstart and finally the retail launch, I’ve played across both factions, closed hundreds of rifts and fought many a tough warfront battle. In that time, I’ve struggled to find anything I would call game-breaking. Sure, there were some problems with queues at first, but Trion’s quick addition of over 50 extra servers quickly solved many of those issues.

But it’s still very early days. Time will tell if Rift can keep up with the expectations of a very large player base, by keeping things fresh, increasing the raid content and expanding the feature set of the game with future expansions and events. Many players have been crowing for realm vs realm (RvR) play, which could make “rift” play pretty damn interesting.

There have been obvious comparisons made to WoW, with some even going as far as calling it a clone. But what makes Rift so special is that it goes out of its way to avoid falling into the same traps as the many that have fallen before it. It avoids the painful, mindnumbing grind, makes incremental patches everyday and listens intently to its rapidly growing community. If you’re looking for something to pull you away from Blizzard’s behemoth, this could be your ticket out.