Rift: Planes of Telara Review

Rift: Planes of Telara is a new fantasy MMO brought to us from the USAian shores by Trion Worlds. How does it fare against the big guns? Let's find out...

Released in March 2011 after a beta period spanning 4 months and an alpha period of even longer, Rift has exploded onto the MMO scene. Rift is one of those games that takes many well-working mechanics of pre-existing MMOs and brings them together into one beautiful game. Now, before you all cry "This is just WoW!", remember that many MMOs copy many mechanics from each other, remember that WoW also copied, and remember that Rift is NOT spelt "W – o – W".

The lore of this game revolves around the perfect world of Telara. Created by the gods at the centre of the 6 planes – Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Life and Death – and rich in sourcestone, Telara enjoyed prosperity for a long time. And then, the dragons came. Every plane has its own dragon, and each of them wants Telara for their own schemes, for example, Greenscale the dragon of Life wishes to see all Telara covered in wild forests, where absolutely every living thing must fight to survive in a game of "I'm a Predator, Get Out of Here"; Maelforge the dragon of Fire wants everything to be BBQ-burnt and charred; Regulos the dragon of Death simply wants to destroy the damn place.

Many many years ago the dragons attacked Telara but the people imprisoned and/or banished them all. The gods erected a Ward around Telara to prevent further misfortune, however... The dragons all had cult followers however, and these mean guys have managed to break the Ward with an event known as the Shade. Regulos almost came back, but luckily was thwarted once again, but the people became split. The Guardians swore their faith to the gods of the Vigil, and will do anything necessary to protect their world. The Defiant believe the gods have abandoned them, and that if any miracles will happen they'll be man-made; as such they use machinery that is blasted as heathen by the Guardians.

The player comes into all this as an Ascended – someone who was killed but revived, and all the more powerful for it. Now they fight to protect Telara, not only from the planes which invade ever more as the Ward weakens, but also from the fools of the opposing faction whose methods are obviously trite and need to be stamped out.

Lore out of the way, let's start moving into gameplay. Every Ascended starts off in their factions starting zone, for Guardians this is Mathosia (the place where the Shade happened), for Defiant it is Terminus (the end of the world IF Regulos has his way). Guardians learn how to play and are sent to the future to begin their fight; Defiant learn and are sent to the past to prevent the apocalypse. There is a tutorial system that pops up every time you encounter something new, however you are not spoon-fed all the info you may need. Trion leaves a lot up to the player to learn, while giving you the tools – for an analogy, it is like learning to ride a bike, anyone can tell you to get on and push the peddles but you'll have to work out yourself how to not fall off. Controls will be familiar to many MMO players, there is the usual WASD or mouse for movement, 1 through to 0 "letter-side" keys for default skills, and certain keys for certain UI windows (o for social, g for guild). These can of course be mapped to your own liking in the settings.

Moving onto characters and combat, there are two factions as already stated, each faction being split into 3 races. Guardians get Mathosians (humans), High Elves and Dwarves, while Defiant get Ethians (humans), Kelari (elves) and Bahmi (some kind of ogre-y model, which originally came to Telara as a planar invader but later settled). Each class has male and female counterparts, and no matter what mugshot you choose, any calling is still available to you. Warriors are the general melee attackers and tankers who wear plate; Clerics are all-rounders that wear chain; Rogues specialise in spike damage and sneakiness, clad in leather; and Mages are your flimsy arcane types in cloth. HOWEVER (caps intended), your calling is NOT an indication of your role. Every calling is further split into eight souls, each of which has its own set purpose. And the beauty of the class system in Rift is that you can combine any 3 souls from your calling to mess around with.

Let's take Clerics as an example here. Cleric souls consist of 3 healing types, 2 melee attacking types, 2 caster attacking types, and 1 tanking type. If you want a pure healer, you can roll the healing souls all together for one big wave of health, or if you prefer smashing monsters' head in with a huge hammer you can always take the melee souls along with the tank soul for a little protection. You aren't bound to specific soul-sets either, if you wish you could take a healing soul, a melee soul and a caster soul and go all-out randomness, able to heal and attack at any range effectively. The choice is entirely yours. Souls are split into different types: tanking, healing, attacking and support. Who says all Clerics have to heal! There are also choices for the other callings, of course: Mages can split into caster-attacking, support and healing; Rogues can go melee-attacking, ranged-attacking, support/healing and even tanking; Warriors can go melee-attacking, tanking, and one ranged-attacking type too.

Once you reach level 15, you get to unlock quests for the 5 souls you didn't choose at the start, so if you didn't like what you got – no problem! There is also a role system, every character gets to buy up to 4 roles, and every role can have its own soul set. Every role also has its own set of Soul Points (SP), which you can spend in any active soul tree you like – doing so opens up more abilities to use, both passive and active. Another way to train your character aside from SP is to visit trainers every so often, where you can purchase new ranks for your skills. Finally, there is the gear as usual, with the progression being white – green – blue – purple.

Moving on, the graphics are wonderfully done, even if not terrifically cutting-edge. The whole world has attention paid to every inch of it, even the places people don't usually go such as the tops of mountains or the bottom of the sea 5 miles away from all shores. The horizon is normal instead of just a cut-off at 200 metres away or whatever, and rifts can look truly great. Music however is a bit of a letdown, often there is only brief loops of background music, and all battle music is rather samey. One difference is that everything sounds different underwater, just as you would expect it to.

There is much to do in the world of Telara; not only helping people out of the goodness of your heart with the promise of gold and experience if you do it (also known as questing), there is also instanced zones (areas with several bosses which can be reset and re-run; also only open to your current party) that are split into normal/expert/raid varieties, artifact collections, achievements, crafting and Player vs Player (PvP). Artifact collecting is a nice on-the-side thing to do, and sometimes you may get some interesting items out of it too. Achievements are there for bragging rights and completionists.

Crafting is pretty standard in this game – there are three gathering professions and six crafting professions. Gathering is done as you roam around the world, and consists mostly of finding the actual items to gather, while crafting is simply choosing your amount and letting your character get on with it. Crafting is useful though, there are some very nice items one can use through levelling and even at the endgame, unlike the useless time-waste some games call crafting.

PvP is split into two types: open world, and warfronts. Open world PvP is just fighting anywhere in Telara, you see someone on the opposing faction and you can walk/teleport/charge/dance over and casually bash their face in, or similarly get your backside handed to you on a plate. Warfronts are instanced areas of PvP, each area having a different objective. There is four modes of warfront: Domination, where you score points for holding the control zones; Capture the Flag, in which you try to get the enemies sourcestone back to your base while not losing your own; Martyrdom, where whoever holds the "Fang" takes increasingly more damage, but scores points while holding; and Conquest, a PvPvE type of battle: Guardians against Defiants against npc mobs, along with varied objectives. PvP arenas unlock as you gain levels, from level 10 for Martydom up to maximum level 50 for the Conquest arena.

Whatever method of play you choose, or a mix of them, you'll find plenty of ways to progress and spend your time – which is just as well if you have an abundance of time to spend. Now speaking of spending, Rift is a subscription-based game: Telara is your oyster so long as you pay Trion your dues. At the time of writing, a subscription costs £8.99/month, £23.97/3mon or £41.94/6mon – getting some discount if you buy months in bulk.

Rift: Planes of Telara certainly has huge potential and will undoubtedly be a massive competitor in the MMO market for some time. The devs listen to the players a lot without bowing to their every moan, the game itself plays extremely well with few bugs, and for the first time in a long time I have fun playing an MMO again. If you're looking for a new perspective on the fantasy MMO, take a peek at Rift.