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Well, Rift is finally officially launched in North America, and other than the server queues it was smooth sailing yesterday. Trion added a number of new servers to handle additional subscribers and to take the load off of the already-overflowing population on certain servers, Faeblight included. We’re still having queues during US Primetime, but they’re nowhere near the 1100+ queues we saw during Headstart.
The Faeblight experience has been a good one so far. Folks are generally friendly and talkative, and I’ve fought in several rifts where players were talking/RPing during and after the rift event. There have already been several world PvP events coordinated by various PvP guilds, which is really great to see, and we’ve also got a craft fair by Telaran Artistry coming up in just a few days!
Yesterday I hit level 21. I’m a bit torn on this, as I’m already far behind the main leveling “pack”, but at the same time I feel like I’m leveling too quickly. Granted, I’ve put in some pretty heavy playtime over the past few days, and I would guess that the leveling will start to slow down from this point forward. The great thing about being behind the pack though is that I’m finding a lot more shinies (artifacts) and when I do participate in a Rift, not only am I getting more rewards but I’m also I can actually see who my groupmates are. People seem to be more social in the smaller groups rather than in the big zerg groups.
I also “finished” Silverwood last night, or at least got to a good stopping point. I climbed to the highest point in Silverwood, solved the puzzle in Overwatch Keep, found the cairne with the prizes, and ran Realm of the Fae twice. Realm of the Fae is a fantastic lowbie dungeon. Just enough tricks to require teamwork, but not so much as to be overly difficult. I particularly like the progression through the seasons and the white-out conditions at the end, that was brilliant.
Syp has already been asking if we can call Rift a success. I’m going to say that we can certainly call it a successful launch, and that at this point it’s basically Trion’s game to lose. They have a solid, terrifically fun and addictive game, they have the infrastructure, and they have a shockingly large number of players. They have the talent and the experience in game design. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be a success, unless something just goes horrendously wrong in the next 6 months. Until we see retention numbers 3 months and 6 months down the road we won’t know for sure, but the future is certainly looking bright for Trion.
