Yes, you read right. This weekend was spent mostly in Rift, with slight incursions to our beloved WoW. Just to relax my twitching muscles after intensive Rift sessions I visited Deepholm with my priest, made some business in AH and even levelled Gnomore a bit more (more on that in days to come).
Rift. For me Rift is like WoW in steroids, adding working and good bits and pieces of other games into a coherrent whole. It's a mix of WoW in polish, EQI/II in collectibles, Lotro in graphichs, WAR in public quests and many other pristine and working things from other games. The world and concept is original IP, very intriquing and compelling as whole: there is more lore than you want to conceive, like in all of the others.
And the main thing is to kill and kill some more.
The amount of collectibles (Shinies, whee!) and crafting material makes the world worth exploring, though. I didn't realize how much I had missed the concept of shinies which I was introduced in EQ2 till I came across it here again. It seems that Gnomore fills that concept as well, being extremely compelling and intensive as such, without killing at all.
Rift isn't ground breaking nor innovating anything new: it's just refining the working parts of other games into something new, doing what Blizzard did with WoW. Making something new from the parts used in other games and making it their own.
There. I fear that if I go and pre-order Rift, that will be the end of my WoW career: I cannot compare the games in any reasonable way, except that Rift is new and has so much to explore. Will that love last? I don't know. For the time being Three Stooges are keeping me in WoW, as well as my dedication to level Gnomore at least out of Old Azeroth to flying mount and Outlands.
Till the next Rift beta, I... must... resist...
C out
.
