Telara's story is twofold, depending on your viewpoint. There are Guardians and Defiants, with the Guardians acting like religious zealots and the Defiants acting like mad sceintists. They even come from different time periods. Guardians come from the past, where they were used to prevent Regulos (the dragon of death) from entering the world through a puppet ruler. The Defiants come from a future where the Guardians destroyed all technology in a religious fervor, and in doing so doomed Telara to the hand of the very same Regulos. There is no clear faction in the right here, as both have wronged each other and both are essentially a collection of elitist jerks.

The overall mythos of Rift is fascinating on its own right. Each element has an associated plane (life, death, fire, water, earth, wind) and dragon. Currently, only one dragon is actually killable in-game, Greenscale, and they are part of a max-level raid encounter. Trion has obviously put a lot of careful work into their baby, and it shows. It's a setting that, despite its rather generic fantasy backdrop, intrigues us. Maybe it's because the game is gentle in introducing you to fantastic concepts, or maybe because the conflicts are grounded so well, but the end result is that nothing really feels forced. Storylines are set up and resolved, although not usually until zones later in order to keep the player on track. Likewise, all players are given tantalizing glimpses of the dark future awaiting Telara, which only pushes the urgency of ascension even more.

Once you've picked a faction and begin your fight to rescue Telara from the elements, you encounter the first of the two major selling points: the customization. Rift is a supremely customizable MMO, and nowhere is this more self-evident than in the character classes. Each class generally falls into one archetype: Warrior for tanking, rogue for physical damage, mage for magical damage, and cleric for heals. There the game truly gets interesting is in the souls system. In short, you can essentially be any 3 classes at once, with each soul acting like a mixture between talent tree and traditional classes.

For example, as a Rogue, a typical leveling build might be a Ranger/Marksman/Bard. The Ranger has access to pets to tank enemy mobs, the marksman has impressive damage output, and the bard can heal and buff to reduce downtime. To level the classes, all you do is use the points you accumulate each time you level up, with the more points in a tree unlocking more abilities for that tree. A sample talent in a tree might be something that increases your critical rate, while a sample ability might be a buff that gives all your party members extra attack power. It's a system which encourages players to be off the wall in trying new and bizarre combinations of classes and abilities. There are certainly recommended selections that feed off each other (if following the recommended builds only, you can create roughly four different unique classes per archetype), but nothing is required. We like that a lot.

The combat and questing is what you've come to expect from MMOs since World of Warcraft. Go to a location, kill X enemies or use X objects, press number keys to use your abilities. Aside from minor unique class mechanics (rogues have combo points, warriors have energy, mages have charge, clerics are normal) there's not a whole lot to distinguish the mechanics. Most of the uniqueness doesn't come from the classes themselves, but the soul selection. Most abilities are fully detailed in their tooltip, although a few here and there are a little ambiguous. Some additional information on abilities that are affected by a talent would be nice as well. For example, if you have a talent that causes an attack to cause 30% bleed damage, the tooltip just shows the damage's normal bonus damage.

Questing is a fairly standard process. In each zone there are between 5-8 quest hubs, with each hub giving you around two or three levels. There is also a major town in each zone that contains trainers for all of the classes (necessary to buy new ability ranks and new roles). You generally only have to make the trip to town maybe twice (discounting quest trips, of course) per zone, which means that you have almost no downtime. Those looking for a continuous and engaging leveling experience will definitely love the layout of the zones. There are a few issues, however, Towns are spread very far apart, and the normal ground mount feels exceedingly slow. You can also be dismounted if you are struck twice in combat, regardless of monster level. The major town is also the only town in each zone that has a transporter, which means that running to and defending minor towns is far more of a hassle than simply waiting in your main town.

The reason to defend said towns, however, is the core of the Rift experience: the titular rifts. Rifts act much like public quests in Warhammer Online: players are ranked according to contribution and given a reward at the end. Those that rank better get more goodies. Unlike Warhammer Online, however, rifts are an actual threat, both to you and the zone. Rifts which are left alone spawn invasion troops and warp the landscape around them, and while they close after a while, the time limit is massive (at least an hour, usually an hour and a half). Invasion troops can then attack towns and take them out, removing the quest NPCs and vendors. While this sounds irritating, the result is that you simply have to clear the stronghold and wait maybe 3 minutes for the NPCs to come back. It's not truly dynamic, but it also prevents the game from being frustrating.

Rifts beget invasions, but the truly catastrophic occurances are zone invasions. Heralded by a brief change in the environment ("The air grows warm and stuffy"), they are when a large number of rifts spawn, invasions pour out, and some zone-wide objectives are added to everybody's quest log. Most zone invasions boil down to closing rifts and defeating invasions, but there are a few with different objectives, such as hunting down large guard-like elites or destroying certain spawned idols. The real pleasure of these zone-wide invasions are the spontaneous raids that spawn, with people teaming up to end the invasion as quickly as possible. It turns what could be an annoyance into a gleefully sudden shift from solo questing to grouping. Most games make you wait until you start experiencing the social aspect, but Rift shoves it in your face as soon as you leave the starter zone. There's also the bonus of significant amounts of loot for participating, which gives you an early edge in questing. Anything to spice up the slow grind to max is a welcome addition, and zone invasions do just that.

For those looking to do things besides grouping and questing, there's a few alternatives. You can collect artifacts, which can be turned in to a faction collector that gives you experience and a special kind of vanity currency. There's plenty of achievements, with a good portion of them granting new titles or items. PvP is, as always, present, although it's nothing special (same old battlegrounds, with slight tweaks such as a flag that actually damages the carrier). There are daily quests and banks and auctions and guilds (with levels!) and everything you would expect from a game that draws inspiration from modern MMOs like World of Warcraft. The artifact system is the only thing we found new, although it roughly corresponds with the Archaeology profession in World of Warcraft.

In general, Rift caters to those looking for minor improvements from games like World of Warcraft. Crafting is more involved and more serious, the lore is more expansive, and the combat has little tweaks to make it overall more enjoyable. You can have up to four different talent/soul configurations as opposed to the traditional two. The character's tab is arranged in a much more compact fashion, with almost everything being available simply by pressing C. You automatically loot all enemies near the one you are currently looting, instead of having to loot them all one by one. Towns are so helpful as to almost make the capitol useless, as you only need to travel there maybe once per every other zone.

Despite being a welcome improvement, Rift suffers from a few very nagging issues. The most glaring is how painful dungeon grouping is. Spoiled by World of Warcraft's dungeon finder, we went into Rift with the expectation that it would have something similar. We had quite a shock when we found out that, in fact, grouping was done the classic way: spamming global chats with requests for character types. While the developers have stated that this is intentional to encourage groups to pre-form, in practice it makes dungeon grouping nearly impossible. Most groups that are not comprised entirely of guild members are usually missing a healer or tank, and they have to sit in the dungeon begging for another player until one joins. More often than not, another player (or the one that joined!) leaves shortly after the dungeon group downs a boss, leaving the group to flounder. This is only at the dungeon's original intended level, however; we are not sure how dungeon grouping in end-game works. Pick-up groups have a notorious reputation in most MMOs for being filled with awful crybabies, and Rift is no exception. The only difference is that there is no alleviation to the issue.

The other is the disparity between factions. The Guardians have fairly standard religious lore which makes playing them very uncomfortable. They are, after all, misguided religious zealots, and while that gray area makes them more nuanced, they aren't really charaterized beyond it. However, while the Defiants have more interesting lore based on magic technology and gray morals, they also have much less interesting starter zones and an irritating capitol. While we love the Defiants and their story, we found ourselves mostly playing the Guardians for the better overall game-like experience

It's been said that Rift, and pretty much any MMO that comes out now, will be a World of Warcraft killer. Trion knows, however, that World of Warcraft will never die. Instead, they've created an excellent alternative. A game which incorporates a lot of familiar elements while drastically adding to other areas. We'd say that the invasions and character customization alone are enough to warrant a purchase, but it really shines as a collective, holistic experience. It has been polished to such a mirror shine that one might be surprised it came out so recently. The developers are also incredibly responsive to bug reports and balance issues, and our time in the game was mostly enjoyable. In the end, an MMO is defined by the experience more than anything else, and Rift gave us a great one.