How much does RIFT actually cost?

Free to play (F2P) games are all the rage, but the F2P MMO, RIFT is unusual in that it's basically still a subscription game masquerading as a F2P game. So... how much does it cost? About the same as WoW is the short answer.

The long answer is that you pay nothing to get started, but access to much of the new content for higher levels requires some degree of purchase. Fortunately (and craftily) there's the equivalent of a boxed set that gets you all of the important bits up to, but not including the most recent expansion: RIFT Essentials Edition. For  $50, this gets you everything that you really can't play on the same level without (additional skill trees, an extra calling (class) and two  additional gear slots among other goodies). Once you have that, you should probably play the game for a while and see how you feel. Becoming a subscribing "patron" gets you some nifties, but nothing that's essential. Then there's the most recent expansion ($40) which usually buys you the extra features, levels and content of the expansion.

So, for the complete functionality of the game, once the new expansion, Starfall Prophesy comes out, you would pay a total of $90. The ongoing patron subscription really doesn't add much to that,  but if you wanted to do that, it would be an additional $11/mo. if you buy the annual version.

It's cheap entertainment at that price (especially when compared to going out to movies or dinner) but it's certainly not the free game that they might tease in their ads.

Back to RIFT: The Hybrid Support DPS

The Soul Tree for this build...

Way back in my RIFT raiding days, I developed a hybrid spec that I was very fond of. I wasn't the only (or even first) to develop it, but it was my own creation and I was very happy with it, even though few others seemed to share my joy for it. When Harbinger came out, it got even better and today, it's basically the only leveling spec I'd really want.

While leveling, I routinely out-DPS people who are fully DPS specced because it's so much easier to keep up a full rotation in hectic situations with this build, but I'm also throwing heals that aren't enough to keep any one person alive, but definitely makes everyone just that much more survivable.

In raid situations, this spec is a nice "fill healer" which is to say, someone that keeps everyone's health constantly ticking up so that a main healer can keep up. I've also got alternate builds that have more Chloro for more raid utility (combat rez, decent spot-heals and so on) and a PvP variant that has more control features. I'll publish those when I have the time. This version is mostly for soloing with a bit of dungeon support and maybe a raid light-dpser designed to supplement an undergeared healer while not gimping the raid too much.

What follows are the build details, try and enjoy!

Path of Exile updates and how the game has changed

An exile's hideout

I've been playing PoE for a long time it seems (not as long as some!) It's a great game, and I highly recommend it, but I think it deserves an overview for those who might have heard of it or played it a while back, but not kept up on what's going on.

The game has evolved substantially in the past year or so and there's lots you should know. For starters, the amount of content in the game increased dramatically.

Diablo 3 and Path of Exile compared

I've played a whole lot of Path of Exile, but until recently, I'd only played through Diablo once just after launch and I knew the game had changed substantially since the expansion (Reaper of Souls) was released. That all changed a few weeks ago when I started playing in the recent "Season 3" event of Diablo 3. I leveled two new characters from scratch to max level and got them both geared out for the end-game content: greater rifts. What follows are my impressions of the two games now that I have some more context.

Looking in on World of Warcraft

It's not a good time for MMOs. The PC gaming market, which has always been the core of the MMO world, has become the toy of Steam, and that's not likely to change terribly soon (unless Humble Bundle opens their own game service...), but MMOs are still out there. RIFT is just coming out of a period of re-tooling and will likely have a second expansion in not terribly long; EverQuest Next and Elder Scrolls Online have been announced to much fanfare; and, of course, WoW keeps chugging along.

World of Warcraft 2009-present
Source: WoW Insider

But WoW isn't what it used to be. Its subscriber numbers have gone from a peak of 12 million to less than 8 million in just 2.5 years. So, you would think that they'd be looking at what's changed and trying to move back toward the state that brought in those 12 million? Um... well, about that...

I stopped in to MMO Champion, today, a WoW news site that I used to frequent when I played. I saw, there, all of the same arguments that the Blizzard community managers and devs were having with the community back when I played. "Squishing" the itemization so that damage numbers don't overflow the database; response to claims that the game is being "dumbed down"; and the ever-popular cry of aging games, "why can't I just have vanilla back?"

Building your own Pinball FX 2 table

Pinball FX table

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I might actually do it. Pinball FX 2 is a great game from Zen that combines modern, hardware-based physics simulation with incredibly well designed tables (see my review of several tables, elsewhere on this blog). I also have friends who are into Raspberry Pi hardware hacking and others who enjoy collecting physical pinball tables, so that gave me some ideas...

What if you picked up a junk pinball table from eBay or Craigslist and then put a TV screen on top of it? A 50 inch TV that's fairly thin should fit well, but you should probably measure the specific table and get something that will fit correctly. The junk table should not cost more than a few hundred dollars, and you'd pay that much for any decent piece of furniture.

Administrivia: I've moved to Google Plus comments

This blog is now using Google Plus comments. Mostly, I'm doing this because Google Plus comments handle spam better than Blogger, so it makes sense for maintainers like me to switch.

Pinball FX 2: Table DLC reviews

Star Wars Pinball logo

On my Google+ feed, I've previously reviewed Pinball FX 2 for Steam, but I've been playing quite a lot of it recently, and thought it was worth a line-by-line review of the DLC that I've purchased for it during the summer sale. Below, you'll find reviews of 4 out of the 10 available DLC packs which includes 11 tables. I'll review the others when I have time.

For those who are new to Pinball FX 2, here's the short version: Windows-only (Microsoft, so not likely to change on that point) Pinball simulation with some "fantasy" elements (that is, events during games which are physically impossible on a real table) where the first game is free to play and each subsequent table comes as part of a 3 or 4 pack for $10 or alone for $3 when not on sale.

Warlock: Master of the Arcane on sale

 Warlock: Master of the Arcane (along with it's DLC) is on sale in an Amazone Bundle this week. This is a really nice game that's kind of like a fantasy version of the classic Civilization series of strategy games.

Update on RIFT free-to-p(l)ay

Well, it's looking good for RIFT. They've had too raise the caps for number of active players and have started splitting servers! Great news for the community! Rift Junkies has the whole story...

I'm particularly pleased to see that they have not offered any of the best PvP or PvE gear for purchase on the ingame store. True pay-to-win is the  curse of MMOs, and I'm glad to see that Trion isn't falling for it.

RIFT: Free to Play first impressions

RIFT Free-to-Play launch page

I tried out RIFT on my far-too-old living-room entertainment center laptop last night in order to see how free-to-play was. I was kind of blown away, but there were negatives too, so let's get into it!

First off, in case you haven't followed it: RIFT, a popular second-tier MMO with a peak of an order of 1-2m users has gone free-to-play. I think that this is largely a result of their having lost user-base after the first rush of new users during their first expansion, Storm Legion... I'll cover why that was in another post. Free-to-play isn't the end of RIFT, though, if last night is any measure!

RIFT plays a lot like early WoW, before it got all of its sharp corners filed off. This is both good and bad. The game is far more dynamic than WoW, and presents the player with many more choices in terms of character development and play style. However, it also leaves casual players at the bottom of a deeper chasm of learning curve than the modern "just make it simple" MMO. As such, RIFT is much more of an MMO fan's MMO, and if you haven't played MMOs before, you might check out one of the simpler ones first (like Guild Wars or Star Wars... WoW is an option, but it's high-end grind is a bit too daunting in terms of time commitment for most new players right now).

Anyway, so RIFT is free-to-play; what does that mean? It means that you can log in (sort of... paying customers or "patrons" get priority if the server population is too high during peak hours), create a character, and do just about anything in the game, just like a paying customer. Paying customers get some bonuses like extra goodies, resurrection is a bit more convenient, etc.

Rift: Mage guides and raid info

A guild I used to be an officer and mage class lead in just dissolved. I don't play Rift anymore, but I wanted to preserve all of the stuff that I spent so long writing up for them.... I don't really have time to make it all pretty, so below you'll find a quick dump of each of the forum postings. Feel free to search for anything you need using Ctrl-F in your browser.

Buying video games in packs

The Humble Bundle changed everything. Sure, back in the day, you would see companies sell a "gold" pack of all of the previous versions of a game at a low price, but the idea of selling massive bundles of downloadable games was seen as a good way for a company to turn its product into a cheap commodity and slit its own throat...

Then along came this little idea: gather a bunch of indie games together and "sell" them for whatever people wanted to pay while giving incentive for those who were willing to pay a bit more. It didn't just take off. It made a large enough pile of cash that the big boys noticed. Today, every game company on the planet is scrambling to figure out how to be seen as a "bundle". In the end, it's probably a bit of a fad, but that doesn't mean you can't take advantage of it.

World of Warcraft's next expansion: Exsanguination

No, Exsanguination is not the title of the next WoW expansion (that I know), but it is the trend. WoW players have been abandoning the game, and interestingly, they're not leaving for the WoW-killer MMO that we've all been predicting and waiting for. Instead, they seem to be going back to single- and multi-player games on services like Steam (which is mostly where I've ended up after a roughly year-long detour into Rift, which was great and all, but I lost my taste for the MMO grind) or its console equivalents.

But to look back at WoW, what could they do that would bring their players back and make the MMO interesting again? Well, sadly, I think it would take a roughly 180 degree turn from what the Mists of Pandaria expansion was. They would have to address the "grindy" nature of the expansion, but at the same time expand what's already interesting and fun.

Replayability is a word

I just read the (2010) blog from ben abraham (lowercase from his blog name "ben abraham dot net"), "`Replayability` is NOT a word, so stop using it idiot!" I feel the need to reply to this, because it's a concept that I've come across before, and I'm kind of tired of dictionary thumpers. I don't want you to get the wrong idea, however. I'm glad that he wrote this article. It shows that he's at least thinking about what the video gaming community is. That's a good thing. I just think he's wrong about his conclusions.

How might Google monetize Ingress?

The first question I had when I heard about the Ingress beta was: why is Google doing this?

Face it: there's a real dollar cost to anything Google does, so it has to do one of the following:

1. Generate more revenue than it costs
2. Enable other Google products and services to make more revenue than it costs
3. Improve Google's positioning relative to its competitors, in order to generally benefit their other products more than it costs
4. Meet one of Google's non-monetary goals in a way that they feel is "worth" the cost and is offset by other income

Ingress: Google's augmented reality MMO

Ingress logo

+Ingress is Google's new augmented reality game that's currently in beta. It brings together a few things: first off, it's Android-only at the moment and has a strong preference for players and developers communicating via Google+. This is an obvious play for increased adoption of both platforms.

That aside, however, Ingress is the first MMO that I've played where the first step is, "go outside," and as you play the game you get a definite sense that Google isn't kidding about that. The game won't allow you to set your phone in location debugging mode (I suppose if I loaded a custom Android image, I could defeat that, but realistically it would be self-defeating) and they choose locations that are artistic or historical for elements of the game.

Rift: Ways to level, 1-60

Leveling in an MMO is always a challenge. Often,  it's more of a challenge just to stay awake than it is to actually succeed, but more often than not I find myself poking around to see if there's any cool ways to level. In EverQuest, grinding was all there was. Quests weren't really a way to level and instanced dungeons didn't really exist (they were added late in that game's evolution).

In WoW, your options were: dungeons or quests. If you had some friends with lots of spare time to help you, there was also a grinding method that worked well, but it required a tolerance for boredom that was nearly superhuman. Later on, PvP also became a lesser, but viable option.

In classic Rift, the options exploded. You had rifts, quests, PvP, dungeons, zone events and the usual grinding strategies. Then Storm Legion landed.

Rift raiding video collection

As you may know if you've been reading this blog, I'm in the Rift guild, Ascended of Corthana, on the Faeblight server. For a while, now, I've  been doing a series of videos for them. Some of them are funny. Some are semi-serious. I've collected four of them into the above playlist for your viewing pleasure. I'll add more to the playlist as I create them, so feel free to subscribe for updates.

The music is all free, mostly from Jamendo and a few indie netlabels. If you're interested, you can check out my free music blog for more.

Has Blizzard given up on WoW?

Perhaps I'm spoiled by a shockingly productive development and design team on Rift, but I was stunned today when I read the patch notes for the upcoming 5.0 patch that's going to land for WoW. This is the first patch since 4.3 which introduced a bunch of new features including a new raid, 3 new 5-man dungeons and the Raid Finder feature. That was a good, solid content patch. Then, eight months later, you would think that they'd have something new to throw to the players while they wait for the September patch, no? Yep... a world event involving Theramore.