I like Rift, I do, but I gave up the subscription yesterday since there really isn’t anyone for me to play with.
I wasn’t really clicking with the Faeblight guild, and my Byriel guild is heavily focused on vent. I’m heavily focused on logging into vent with some friends, so I didn’t really fit in. Shatterbone, where I’d spent the most time just didn’t have anyone logging in. It just didn’t make much sense to continue playing by myself.
One of my main frustrations I think was getting SourceStones, one of the zone specific currencies. I have a baker’s dozen of SourceShards, but without the Stones, I couldn’t get the gear I wanted. Believe me when I say it wasn’t a lack of participation that was the problem. I waited in zones for hours collecting artifacts, checking rare mob spawns, working on achievements, long after having finished off the quests.
When zone invasions did pick up after an update, I participated in many, only to be rewarded with shards instead of stones every time.
A lot of the time this happened in Stonefield.
Stonefield is the second zone you come to if you’re playing Defiant and it is a disappointment of a follow-up if you ask me. From the first moments even the very direction I was heading felt wrong. You travel generally West, and a bit South. Yet the whole time I felt disorientated and as though I was moving North.
The steep crags and gorged mountainsides gave me a claustrophobic feeling throughout. I didn’t like being channeled through narrow ravines or difficult to traverse ridges. The dark grey rock everywhere you looked was depressing, ugly, and repulsive. There is very little to look at here.
The main city has some nice waterfalls that roll off the high bluffs of the surrounding mountains. Your first visuals of giants looming over the Quarry Basin camp is impressive. The scene where the Titan comes out of the portal is great. This is also where you’ll see you’re first earth rifts, which look pretty cool as all rifts do. Unfortunately, what else is there to look at in this zone?
Granite Falls
If it’s one thing I don’t like about Rift it’s the lengths I have to go through to avoid mobs. A lot of older gamers, nursed on EQ or other games that no longer appeal to anyone but them, feel like you’re supposed to be mired in a sea of enemies no matter where you go, not being able to travel more than a couple of steps before having to defeat some new enemy.
I don’t like it. Part of being in these games for me is the ability to travel long distances at will. I don’t need to be bogged down by the unfun activities. I want to do what I want, when I want. It’s spoiled, but I’m not paying $15 a month for nothing.
In a bunch of places in Stonefield, and in fact most of the game, I have to fight mob after mob just to get to my destination. What is worse is when I have to do quests to kill 6 Trolls, but by virtue of being in the place where I have to kill trolls, I end up killing 20 or 30 anyway.
It just feels like such an unnecessary waste of my time as a player.
I thought The Last Valley area of the zone was too far off the beaten path. It feels remote and unattached to anything else going on in the zone, even though it’s supposed to be the culmination. The Defiant are researching the power of the Titans and in The Last Valley they actually summon one. Honestly it should have felt more epic or more interesting, but I never felt all that compelled by the storyline.
I guess the problem was there just wasn’t that much to it. A couple of quests, some boring text to read and there was little in the way of strategy or difficulty. The Last Valley feels mostly empty.
Overall I would say there were too many of the same creatures in Stonefield. Trolls, troglodytes, rock creatures, and that’s about it. If they’re not a quest target they’re a rift creature. I got far too sick of the face of trolls before I was done with Stonefield.
There were positive things about Stonefield of course. I liked the idea of the Titans, the lore behind it, even if I didn’t enjoy the related quests. I liked the crypt area and it’s design, even if I’m not a fan of having to kill the undead there until the point of exhaustion. I liked the Titan structures like the well, or the gate. They were grandiose and ancient. The corpse if the Titan was remarkable too, a nice touch. I also liked the large number of rare mobs, virtually guaranteeing you’ll come across one at some point.
The rifts are okay, when the population levels are decent. I found that the closer you were to level 20 however, the more outmatched you were by invasions. Something I found consistent in most zones. The moment you enter a new zone at an appropriate level for the content, you were inappropriately leveled for the best part of Rift.
In particular I thought the invasions were more interesting in Stonefield than in Freemarch. They were more complicated with different win conditions. Harder bosses and I thought simply by virtue of their being hills and landscapes opposed to Freemarch’s plains, they were more interesting fights. The invasion where you activate experiments is over-powered for the zone it is in, but it’s also pretty fun. Defending the wardstones in another invasion can be a bit challenging when a dozen or more invasion parties show up. I enjoyed invasions here more than in Silverwood, Freemarch, Scarlet Gorge or Scarwood Reach.
Even if getting to all the places you needed to go was a pain.
I guess Stonefield is a mixed bag. I never want to have to fight another troll again, and certainly the earth rifts don’t help with that, but there are a few positive things. It isn’t just another generic zone exactly, but I couldn’t help but feel that glazed over feeling I got when staring at the gray walls of Fallout 3. There’s something I hope to never experience again.
