RIFT is still pretty anyway

Well, on the plus side, I got a neat costume for the six months that I had been subscribed before I canceled:

On the down side...a lot of things. The shard that I am on right now is completely dead. Like, not a frickin soul. OK, actually, there was one other guy in Meridian running around talking about how there was no one else there except for me. Apparently the PvP servers have gone to shit and for some reason (I'm guessing stubbornness) Trion hasn't just condensed them all into one server yet so that there is at least a small pile of people together.

There are two PvE servers that remain at "medium" status which is a long cry from what the game use to be, but at least all of the servers aren't on low. I was going to play around in PvE for the month anyway, so it worked out for me. Of course I naturally picked the one out of the two that wasn't the most popular server in NA and now I have to wait 7 days (the limit on how often you can transfer) to plop all my characters in one place.

I still love to look at this game. Even though I have to turn down the graphics because my card is a piece of crap, I still get to enjoy the ethereal beauty of the cut scenes.

There have been quite a few changes since I first started, all of which from what I've gathered are complete carbon copies of World of Warcraft. This genuinely saddens me because the entire reason I played RIFT for the six month streak that I did was because it was such a unique game with ingenious systems of play.

I hated going through the starter area. It use to be that you could choose your first two souls (sub-classes within your specific class) and then you had to use those two until you got to the main city where you had to go on individual quests to grab each of the other souls. It set up the soul system incredibly well and it gave players a feel for how much you had to participate in closing a rift before you would reap rewards.

Now they basically play the game for you. It asks you what sort of thing you'd like to do after you pick your class and then it assigns you three souls and highlights each skill that you should pick for their "optimized" build. I'm not sure if you start with all the souls or not, I clicked stupidly on my skill tree before I experimented to see if I could change it to the souls I actually wanted. Now I'm stuck until the damn game lets me do a skill tree reset.

While I like some of the aesthetic changes--like big bars floating overhead telling you your health and your targets health with combo points but suspiciously not your pet's health--the whole thing is severely dumbed down. I will have to spend some time in PvP and wandering around with my main, perhaps jump into one of their new one and two man dungeons, before I completely judge this game as a loss. I am still impressed with all the content they have for post-level cap players. Unfortunately, I need a course in rogue tactics before I break my main out, so I'll have to muddle through with my newb and re-acquaint myself with the game.

Besides, I could use a high level rogue in both factions if I play beyond a month...also I didn't discover until much later that the Dwarf race on the Guardian side can fall from higher distances than any other race. That is their special ability, one that I could have used for my Eth Defiant rogue. I had so many deaths from falling off of tall cliffs...so many...the horror...the horror...