What went wrong with Rift?

Rift had huge promise. And for a while it seemed like everything I wanted in an MMO. Nice graphics, immersive story, clever setting, great gameplay, non-trivial instances.

From being a doubter before the beta, I was a true believer by release.

So much so that I rallied the old EQ1 troops, and reformed our guild that dated from early 2001. Eye of the Manastorm took its place on the Shadefallen server. With numbers greatly increased by friends and members of House Stalwart from the Argent Dawn WoW server, we were one of the largest Defiant guilds on Shadefallen.

And things were good. We grouped regularly, chased rifts and zone events, socialized and enjoyed the game.

But something strange happened quite early. Guildies made it to 50, started running expert rifts, then after a couple of weeks they’d stop logging in. I would check in with them. Invariably they’d have something going on in real life. They weren’t bored. They’d be back.

Except they weren’t.

I’m sure that it wasn’t just that they were avoiding telling me they’d quit the game. I’m sure they believed themselves that they’d return. Yet weeks went buy and accounts lapsed. And while at first I thought it a coincidence, by the time we’d had a couple of dozen people vanish, I was convinced that there was a pattern.

Tam, one of the first officers to bail on the game, eventually came up with a reason that I started to believe was at least part of what was going on. At first, he also vanished for real-life reasons, but I checked with him (via Belghast), since I was holding materials to make him some crafted gear. And by the time Bel spoke with him, he’d started thinking about his lack of motivation to play.

Tam has some insight into the industry, and I think it helped him nail an issue that had also been bothering me, though I didn’t know why.

It was this: there was no in-game society. The NPCs didn’t exist as part of the world. They populated quest hubs. That was all they did; they each had a specific purpose towards players.

There were no towns, no buildings, no sign of life except the quest hubs. No-one lived there. For all the activity in Meridian, there were no houses. Nothing outside the city – except for quest hubs.

Contrast that, say, to Ironforge, with all its taverns and housing, with flavor NPCs like the bread seller. Or Qeynos, with houses in rows, with street names – player characters can even buy them to live in! But many are purely for appearance, too. NPCs greet you, salute you, gripe at you – you feel there’s a vibrant world that continues apart from you.

Meridian – and Sanctum – are sterile. They just don’t feel real. And the other, smaller quest hubs, even more so.

The effect of this was anti-immersive. Greatly so. The game began to feel like only a place to receive instructions and perform tasks. And that made it hard to play casually. Sure, there was always something to do, but once the level grind had ended, and I didn’t feel like the quests were progressing my character significantly, the lack of immersion became a killer.

It’s tempting to see MMO immersion as something that only roleplayers and geeks really care about. It probably is true that immersion means much more to roleplayers than to others. But we’re all roleplayers to some extent. We’re taking the part of elves or dwarves in saving our world. Without immersion we lose purpose. There’s nothing distinctive about this game that will keep us involved in it. In the case of Eye of the Manastorm, we were not primarily roleplayers, but I think that we wanted to feel part of the world, and when we didn’t, we drifted away.

Add to that a lack of replayability. There were two starting areas, one per faction. All of your alts of the same faction would do the same quests, talk to the same NPCs, repeatedly kill the same ten rats. There are no alternative progression paths. You can choose Droughtlands – Shimmersand or Moonshade – Iron Pine Peaks in the upper 30s, but you’ll probably wind up running quests from both paths anyway. So when you’re burned out on your level 50 character, taking a break to play an alt doesn’t open new horizons for you.

The last straw for me was cross-server grouping, which is guaranteed to leach the last of the fun out of getting to know server-mates and treating one another fairly. I had just returned from vacation when it was implemented. The guild had begun to collapse with the 1-to-50-to-burnout phenomenon, and I’d run some random groups and enjoyed meeting other Shadefallen Defiants. Then Trion added cross-server grouping. Exploiting game mechanics and other players on your path to maximum loot with minimum effort just isn’t something that interests me, and I canceled.

To be fair, cross-server instances weren’t the unmitigated greedfest that they are in WoW, although they were still too disagreeable for me to enjoy, and since they’re the only way to run endgame instances, the entire endgame became off-limits to me. However, I was on the point of leaving even without cross-server instancing. I was mostly trying to convince myself that it was worth staying to keep the guild together; maybe the game would improve with more 50s and more raids.

Really, that had been our precise problem since the first day a guildie hit 50. We needed to get enough people to 50 and starting to get geared up so that we could raid, opening up new and interesting aspects to the game. But since however many guildies we got to 50, as many dropped out, we never had more than 1-2 groups regularly available.

There were other problems, too – balance, pass-through targeting that never quite worked, silly rules that were clearly inherited from WoW, but had no real benefit to Rift – but the number one problem for me was the lack of immersion. And so I apologized to what was left of the guild and walked away.