I don't know about everyone else but im liking the complete character creating, it looks like you can actually have your character be your own screwed up creation. I'm liking your warrior you have set up, but what happened to your linebacker rogue?

i got that heroic leap thing and it's awesome sauce

A big big thing people don't seem to realize in the codex map is the power ups located on the map. There are 3 red power ups with a pretty quick respawn time that increase your damage by 100% for 1 min and a blue power up that increases your movement speed to max. I can't tell you how many times as an assassin rogue I've stealthed over to the red power up behind the codex and wiped out 3 gaurdians trying to cap it on my own. Those red wings make a huge difference.

Also on the gaurdian side (for now) they can easily jump over the rocks next to vault without needing any leap abilities. Hopefully this gets fixed because that's a huge map advantage for them. (allows them to get 2 caps started in a much smaller time than is possible for defiant)

Hey Fony aka MikeB, at first glance I hated Rift. How it comes across as a clone so strongly! But it's really NOT! I would say my first thoughts has been Rifted away. Not just by player hyping it up so much. I decided to checked all the aspect of game play for myself. To which I find 95% satisfactory with everything of how well it was put together!

Playing the PvP aspect of the game. Which is such amazingly fun! (I love Black Garden design of old game from P.E. growing up, called Smear the "- - - " which was awesome.) Even if you can't camp the graveyards in PvP!

Instances in PvE aren't that bad! As they oould use a little more polish, Yet they don't bore me! Y

The only problem I have with Rift with playing Beta 5. That dealing with the rifts in the game. (as I'm addicted to them as I try do the most I can.) How they say they are scripted, which is fine as your leveling with huge amount player around the areas. But not if your a late subscriber or leveling new alts. Then what? they answer of making the rifts spawn less often and less chance of an invasion! To me rifts are the best thing of the game obviously that why they name the game after it! I think they should go rethink that part and keep them spawning at the normal pace! By letting balance system with how adding NPC that will come to help the players close them! For how many players are near the Rift openings and balance the how many NPC are helping them! Because Rifts are the main attraction to the game! If you take the Rifts away kinda defeat the title of the game! Giving you the player ability to twink out alts and new players to feel the enjoyment that everyone else has when the game starts!

Beside that Can't wait for this game to go Live! As Blizzard will have to watch the development of this game!

While I didn't dislike the game, I didn't really enjoy it that much either. Beta is beta and things break all the time, but after waiting and getting disconnected constantly in Minecraft the entire week prior, the constant streams of d/c's and time it took just to get connected to the Rift's main server (not talking shards, where I heard it was sometimes in the 2 hour queue-timer range, respectively) was shoddy at best. I disconnected to show my girlfriend the intro (to show her a basic summary of both side's point of view) and was locked out of the game for upwards of an hour. A solid hour after the beta event was only up for about thirty minutes. Again, beta is beta, but really? Couldn't they predict a massive amount of people and hike up their server capacity *before* the errors were rolling in? The game has a month till release, this is basically a stress test now.

As for actual gameplay, it felt a great deal like Warhammer Online to me. Rift PQs, even animation of attacks and, in some cases, modeling style. Not to mention Defiant starting zone was like I stepped into the Chaos noob experience. Much of the fun seems to be had at higher levels, and while it could be a blast...I just wasn't feeling it along the way. D2 used to have a 'suck now, IMBA later' strat before LoD, so I'm well used to earning char strength over time invested, but I just was not feeling it. (Now that I think about it, Rift even had the 'cannot spend points in this tree until higher level' like D2 had as well.) I didn't even see the 'oh, the fun is just over that horizon!' urge to keep playing. Whole thing felt bogged down, not quite a grind but definitely slow, and when Rifts popped up the servers couldn't handle it anyway. The one potentially redeeming factor was nullified by the game itself. (This was after I started a new toon on a new server because the last one randomly went down and when it came back up it was already at High pop. The laggy event occurred on a low pop server, lord knows how worse off the High server was.)

I was rooting for the game because you liked it so much at E3, but it's just not for me. At least you can jump in this game, so I know it can't be all that bad. (zomgFFailReferencelawl) Best of luck to all those making the shift from WoW to Rift, but I'm not siding with either game at the moment.

Though, since I'm here, would you mind doing a BFF Report on EvE Online, Fony? I've been itching to play that on and off for years but never made the jump. Recently saw a few videos on Ninja Salvaging and it seems like something your Rogue-instincts might get a kick out of.

I come from a pretty weird background:

Everquest up to OoW
Guild Wars until the 2nd expansion

So my experience with modern MMOs is relatively limited. That being said, I really enjoyed this past Rift Beta. The depth of the world (In terms of quests, areas, invasions, literally everything) just shows how much work has been put into the game. Early on, it was pretty linear, but it really opens up after awhile. My one problem was that some of the quests sent you back to the areas you literally just cleared.

"You need me to go back and kill the leader of the pack of trolls nearby? What pack of trolls? You just sent me over there to kill 20 of them already. The dude's just a leader of a bunch of corpses now..."

Love your show man. Love the fact that your slowly getting away from comparing everything to wow even more. (It's a habit most are trying to break including me)

Best thing about rift is the cookie cutter build seems to be gone. Now I can see top lvls finding the one build that tops dmg/ healing/ tanks all that good stuff. However with classes being defined by Mage, Cleric, Warrior and Rogue... You don't rly know what your getting until you see the player play. Even when these cookie builds emerge who's to say another player cant take up the slack in some other aspect with a different build? How many people have you run with in the past that play a class/spec for progression that you knew wanted to try something off the wall, could only do this once it was on farm and they did well?

I LOVE Rift so far. The graphics are completely stunning. The rifts are exciting and break up the lvling grind. I am disappointed that there are only "4" races to play (Human, human, elf, elf, dwarf and the human like big blue guys). I also think it's lame that the starting area is the same for everyone within the same faction. Wow makes lower lvl areas a lot more interesting, however WOW really missed the mark by increasing the difficulty of raids in Cat and by creating battlegrounds that are blah. When Rift is released, I'm pretty sure I'm going to drop WOW for a while and play Rift instead.

Rift is awesome, it's new, it's fun, and it looks great. Nothing more to say about it. WoW is a game for soccer moms and emo 13 yr olds.

Peace...........

Love the BFF report.
Love Rifts it's exactly that, a lot from old games, and some of their own.
Graphics are great.
Characters are customizable and fun to play.
Pre ordered.

Oh yeah my Wife/GF can't get off her damn computer either lol.
House looks like sh*t!

Buy it try it love it!

Awesome game and yes i do agree with some of the WoW players calling it a clone, some of the spells are quite similar but have more perfection to it than some of WoW's spells.

Its a fun game easy to play and understand but does get annoying with constant Rifts opening up and Invasions poking your quest Npc's, it's only good when theres a decent population of players in the zone still a fun game its only in Beta so we just have to see how Trion pull through with this new game.

Trion actually listen to their testers by leaving server messages in game to inform us all if anythings being done about bugs and fixes.

In WOW I play a lot of alts so I can switch up my game play. So when I saw the talent trees for Rift I was going crazy sign up for the beta. Watch videos and Rift seems so awesome but I can't play cause I've been playing WOW since 2005 and have not really updated my PC since 2008 I have a beta invite but when I tried to play it after two hours of download. The was like nope go play some blizzard stuff. It looks like fun but I don't the money to get a new PC. So I keep play the 3 crafts (War, Star & Mine)

Its totally the greatest, after playing WoW for so long i had no idea what other mmo's were like because of their general crapiness, I got into rift beta then all of a sudden, WoW is boring, but its always been boring so it was time for a change and i really like rift, everything is awesome. I suppose i just needed a new game.

there's a few people who think this, But Rift is just looking like WoW all over again, Which doesn't Surprise me.. For rift i think its a cool game, Im liking the Pvp parts, The PvE from the last video i wasn't really liking it as much. Cause of the only 2 starting zones. But all together its a good game. Talent tree looks cool, How the set up is.. But i think its just a clone, OF Wow

My son, who does play WoW, initially thought that Rift was nothing but a WoW clone with some Warhammer thrown in, but I convinced him to sign up for Beta and last night he comes to me and says "Dad, I wanna preorder Rift".

He still thinks it is mostly a WoW-clone, but now he feels that Rift has captured/recaptured the fun of WoW-vanilla with those parts of Warhammer's PvP that worked, all updated, improved and "finished".

Rift is very stiff in terms of game play and targets the narrow audience that is sick of WoW.
As with most other new MMOs everyone that is sick of WoW will go, play it a bit, find a flaw, QQ and go back to their precious WoW. Rift will loose most of its core audience and by this time next year will go F2P.

Anyway at the first beta I got to level 23 and got sick of it then went to do some battlegrounds and as i said the character movement is stiff and annoying and honestly after playing the TERA kor OBT the whole game system seemed boring and done better elsewhere.

Another superb episode, MikeB.
Always humourous and informative.
You are too cool.

Well thanks to everyone mentioning Curse.com during the Tuesday after party I managed to get in on Rift and have been having a lot of fun with it.

I knew I was going to get it already, I just cinched it now being able to play it.

My favorite role is Rogue probably as it can be the most balanced using both ranged and melee attacks. Warrior though has a GREAT ability to keep attack combo points after the target's death, something Rogue's can't do. I like Clerics and Mages but they seem to spell dependent for my liking =/

I have come to see this as the game of ignorance. The Guardian story leads you to believe the Defiants somehow started this through their ignorant use of technology, while the Defiant story says if the Guardians ignorant belief in the gods hadn't led them to destroy Defiant technology the planet might have been salvageable.

The only thing I don't like so far is the 30g role. The way it looks is that would allow you to pick 3 new souls including ones you don't have. instead it is just another way to reset the ones you do apparently.

Looking forward to having fun with the guild.

Rift is a really great game. It could be better. The way souls are make the game different for everyone. I think that it could still be even better if they made the questing less go here then here then here etc. I do enjoy playing the way I want to and if I stop enjoying it for some reason. I just go and change. This game is amazing and still has room to grow. It is still only in beta so it still has some bugs. But for what I have played of it this game in beta is still less buggy than WoW is right now.