Let’s start with the fact that I am not an MMO player. Sure, I’ve dabbled. Experimented even. WoW. Anarchy Online. LotRO. But the genre doesn’t really speak to me unless I am running around a world with people I already know. Scheduling sucks (as any 3MA listener knows) and all of my friends are adults with adult responsibilities, and unless we can all agree at the beginning that we will kill monsters on a specific night of the week, then it’s not going to happen. Kudos to Julian Murdoch for always being able to raze Azeroth on Monday nights.

So when Bruce Geryk said “Hey, let’s play Rift,” I was not immediately excited. First, though I love playing games with Bruce, his schedule doesn’t lend itself to structured play. There would be a lot of “Are you able to play now?” talk and then we would get tired of that and we wouldn’t be able to find out where any of our other friends were…

But it’s Bruce. My homeboy. And when he says “I want to be a chloromancer”, you can’t exactly say no. It’s just too ridiculous to not want to see that even if neither of us really knew what a chloromancer was.

So we have started playing Rift. We’re both playing dwarves – he’s a cleric, I’m a warrior, and we’re both around level 7. We are dying a lot and deciding whether or not we really like this game, but so far so good. We will both be reporting every now and then about our adventures and impressions of the game.

First things first, though – Trion did a great job with the look of the game even if the quests themselves are kind of rote FedEx stuff. Yeah, they go the cheap and easy route by making every female in armor look cheap and easy, but the world looks alive and full of danger. Rifts themselves are dangerous public quests and the first one that Bruce and I encountered led to a lot of soul walking and respawning. The rifts will send out creatures and take over areas, knocking down wardstones…it’s all a mess that Bruce and I need to clean up.

Later. So stay tuned for this. It could get very, very ugly.