What the HECK am I doing with Rift Online?
Or, Rift Online: A bag of Cheez-Its spilled all over the floor.
“Who in the actual heck do you think you are? Talking about Rift, like, ten years after it’s release? What are you doing, man? Get a hold of yourself. Take a look in the mirror and behold the terrible form creeping in front of you.”
Look… I just… There is this fantastic, in depth series on Youtube called “Death of a Game” and I eventually got around to their nice, long segment on Rift. I never paid attention to Rift before this point. But the video intrigued me. The gameplay looked snappy and fresh. The graphics were nestled sweetly somewhere between World of Warcraft and Tera.
Since the viewing of that video, I’ve been playing it for ten days straight. I never play anything for ten days straight. But Rift has me caught like an adolescent tuna in a fish monger’s tangled net. Maybe there’s other, less savory things in the net like sea urchin (some people eat and even enjoy sea urchin. Yikes.) or a knotted lump of mud and hair. I don’t know. What else is even in the ocean? Someone should find out.
Rift is a dappled, stout game mush. It has just enough friction in it’s flow to keep me paying attention. I try to just hang out or stroll around but I keep getting stuck on stuff. And it just doesn’t stop. I mean this in a good, videogamey way. I’m not getting stuck on environmental geometry or “getting stuck” in a way where I need to rip open a Brady Games strategy guide or something (although having one of those would for sure be nice.)
This sort of flow state makes me realize what may be appealing about mobile MMOs like Lineage 2 Revolution. It is only a few steps above Lineage 2 Revolution in terms of shear automated non-gameness. In L2R you literally just hit one button. You rub your finger on this one spot on your greasy little screen and everything happens, in sequence. You touch the button, and your character moves to it’s next quest, you hit the button and your character attacks enemies, you hit the button and your character equips new stuff, you hit the button and your character moves to the next quest. And, if I recall correctly from my five disgusted minutes with it, you can even AUTOMATE THE BUTTON and it all just goes on without you. Rift is the proto form of this. It at least gives you the illusion that you’re in control. It gives you the choice of which mindless semi-automated task to take part in next. And there are tasks ALL OVER THE PLACE.
And for reasons still kind of unclear to me it is so satisfying.
Maybe this is what I imagine it’s like when I hear about those old men in Pachinko parlors just sitting back, hitting buttons, watching the numbers and images swirling around. Just really taking it easy. Maybe there’s a hearty cigarette in their hand. Maybe a cocktail. Just thinking about it makes me want a cocktail and a filterless Nat Sherman in my hands right now while I click around in Rift.
So it’s surprising to me that I am pretty much enjoying this. L2R made my stomach churn at the thought of what the world may now be considering worthwhile time spent with games. And before I had tried that, the concept of auto battle in RPGs was already making me kind of queasy. (see my review of Arc Rise Fantasia) I mean, if I’m not here for the battles, and I’m not here for the story (95% of RPG stories give me nausea and make my eyes roll completely back into my head) then, honestly, what am I here for?
I don’t even play MMOs that much! I don’t consider myself to have an addictive personality. Generally, the moment I become aware of the grueling pattern of a game, and that this pattern may go on forever, I drop it. Sometimes I’ll check out the newest, gleaming thing just to see what the fuss is about and to inject a big gooey dollop of novelty into my starving veins. And it’s cool and fun, but I usually drop it after a couple days. Sometimes I’ll even discover and appreciate and claim I like something just moments before it shuts downs forever. *Scowls downward at Bless and Vanguard.*
The world of Rift is absolutely littered with ghastly hell portals from who knows where (If one pays attention to the story one may, indeed, know where.) The place is lousy with them. Lousy with Rifts! They spit out a handful of monsters. And anyone around can decide to take care of these things and seal them up.
Sealing a Rift is satisfying in the same way entering a room, finding a box of Cheez-Its spilled all over the floor, and then immediately and efficiently cleaning it up is satisfying.
The world of Rift is filthy and it must be cleaned.
Rift is a generous, gentle massage of my brain lobes. Paired with a charmingly benign podcast, it puts me into a pleasantly diverging half-comatose fugue state. So far it hasn’t nagged me to give it money. But I would. If there was a simple way to toss some coins at this thing for a gosh darn bigger bag to put my in-game shit in, I would do it. But just looking at the in-game cash shop makes me tense. Why are there like six different kinds of currency? I would pay a monthly fee to make this go away. Take my money, and make it go away, so I can ooze back into my chair and watch my surprisingly hot dark elf guy shoot arrows at stuff.
