Battle of the MMO's: Rift Vs. World of Warcraft

     Rift, the supposed game that is to finally end World of Warcraft's reign over the MMO market certainly lives up to it's name. The game itself plays well, with decent graphics and a nice, new talent tree system. This new system basically allows you to customise your playing  style by choosing three talent trees. Once you have chosen those ( for instance, I chose to start with a Warrior class, and then chose Champion for my first "soul", the Beastmaster soul as my second and the Riftblade soul as my third), you can place the talents within the trees, so that it gives you not only things that make your spells better, but the more talents you put in that certain tree, the more spells you are given that link to that tree. Basically, you only need to go to the trainer for new ranks, not new spells.
     The Rift invasions is an ingenious idea. They make it so that even the lowest of levels new to that zone can aid partially and gain things from it, rather than everything being only for end game players. As well as that, if you don't defend a questing point's "wardstone" from invaders, they take it over even after the invasion event finishes, so people have to work to start questing again.
     An unfortunate thing, being a roleplayer, there is only one language for both factions. Meaning that, not only can both factions converse, the races don't have their own languages, either. This makes privacy hard to gain, especially when the chat radius is rather large for just talking, as though the characters were practically yelling as they talked.
     I don't really like the fact that basically there are only four races, but two are split into two factions on either side. It seems a bit lazy to me, since playing World of Warcraft before Rift, that even the two Elven factions have the same choices of skin colour, hairstyles, even tattoo's and hair colours. I at least expected the two Human factions, Eth and the Mathosians, to have different choices of skin colours, the Eth travelling the deserts and the Mathosians living in the northern regions of Telara.
     Overall, though, I am glad I moved away from World of Warcraft. The new expansion wasn't as good as I expected it to have been. They changed some of the good ol' zones, and the completely new zones made a little part of me die inside. Making Cataclysm after Wrath of the Lich King hard wasn't exactly the best idea, seeing as most people who started in Wrath found that learning from their mistakes as impossible since you never had to before anyway. I really do hope that more people see the light at the end of the cataclysmic tunnel of World of Warcraft and journey into the much more beautiful universe known as Rift.

Ingenuity-6
     I gave it a six due to the fact that, though it had what seemed to me like completely new systems and quests, there was still a bit of what seemed like copying with quests and spells and the like.
Graphics-8
    The graphics themselves are beautiful, vibrant and just generally not an eyesore to look at, even if the thing your looking at is supposed to be big, evil and about to kill not only you, but the rest of Telara.
Gameplay-5
    The quests are fun, but become repetitive after a while, along with that the things the people decide to tell you about the quest isn't really enough, nor is the information of what to do and though you get storyline quests, it explains little of the actual story aside following the basics of "we must kill that bloke because he's evil."
Story-6
     As mentioned earlier, there really isn't much of a storyline even though the quests tell you whether it's for a part of the story.
Overall-7
     As I said, it really is a nice alternative to playing World of Warcraft, despite the generic kill quests and the basic storyline. Of course, being only around a month old, it could still learn a lot from the brother it would call "WoW."