I used to play Rift for 9 months since launch. I may not remember the name of the location as it's been a while, but I still remember, with so much glee, the first day of launch, when the servers were full and every area was so crowded that people will fight over each mob spawn just to complete a quest. After the starting quest line (until level 5 or 6), I was taken to an area where, nearby, there was a broken bridge separating the two rival factions. Casters would hurl projectiles and spells at each other from above their respective ends of the bridge. Because the game was overpopulated back then, the scene was so reminiscent of the flyovers in EDSA during the infamously labeled EDSA Dos.
WOW-killer, though? Nope. I played Rift simultaneously with WOW and logged more hours with the latter.
Rift only brought two things new to the MMORPG table. One of them were invasions coming from, well, rifts, hence the game's name. Periodically, rifts will open up and out will come armies of hostile mobs that would attack friendly towns and NPCs. Periodically, as well, rifts will be able to allow players from opposing factions to go to hostile towns and join the attacks.
Repelling these invasions and closing these rifts were fun... but they got boring really quickly as they provided no variety save for the landscape where they open up. The fact that the player base dwindled made the tasks quite arduous as well.
Everything else? Well, PVP was a "capture the base" sortie much like WOW's Arathi Basin. Public quests were ripped off from Warhammer Online. And the rest are your usual "point, click and attack" MMORPG fare.
Elder Scrolls Online isn't the reason why it's going the F2P route. Rift peaked at 2.2 millions subscribers during its first month (an amazing achievement considering WOW's dominance of the market during those days),but quickly lost steam after the third. If you were a regular player during its first few months, you would've noticed the queue times for PVP matches getting increasingly longer, and the decreasing number of "tambays" in capital cities.
Rift was supposed to go F2P after its first year when its subscription base was reduced to 200,000, more or less. The fact that it took 2 more years for them to abandon their pay-to-play model is a marvelous feat in itself. The reason for this? Rift retained a very, very, very loyal and passionate player base that refused to leave the game. They kept the title alive.
I don't know what happened since early 2012, but I suppose those 200,000 plus loyal players dwindled yet again, forcing Trion to finally take the F2P route.
But enough of the bad news as I am just stating statistical facts.
Will YOU enjoy Rift now that it's free to play?
The answer is a simple "yes."
For all its MMORPG cliches, Rift is a great MMORPG if it has a huge player base, and they will get this once it goes F2P.
But the thing you will love the most if you'll stay until the level cap is the insane number of customization possibilities you can have. Rift offers the deepest talent trees in the genre, with 4 classes and 8 souls to mix and match. You can experiment all you want as respecialization wasn't really an issue (but you might be asked to pay for this once the game goes F2P). Eventually, you'll discover a combination that you'll love and you'll stick with it and you'll brag about what it can do.
It will be a huge download. I just looked at my folder and it stands at 13.8 GB (yes it's still in my HD as I'm hoping to come back to it someday), but this is minus 2 years worth of patches and the expansion that was released early this year or late last year. I think the current size will be around 18 to 20 GB.
But it's a good game, and if you'll invest your time on it, it's one that may actually call your fantasy home.
