I got on Rift the other day, in the early evening. Alas, I felt I was the only one there.
I went around the Defiant's capital city, and much to my chagrin I found only one other person hanging around. Surely, I thought, this is a mistake, so I went out into some of the low level zones and barely encountered another soul.
Well, if Gamigo thought they were going to get an active MMO, they've gotten quite a wake up call.
Even Wildstar and Marvel Heroes were more active than this before their shutdown announcements. (As is ArcheAge, which is often linked to being not long for the world.)
But this.... This just makes me sad.
You can say that the Trion's P2W strategy killed Rift, but what truly seems to have driven a stake in the game was selling the game to Gamigo. While I'll freely admit I could have logged in at just the exact wrong time, but it was truly disheartening to see what was a vibrant game turned into an empty shell.
It feels like only yesterday that Rift was in it's Beta, and disaffected WoW fans were leaving Cataclysm and giving the game a very serious look. I remember getting a Beta key and poking around the starter zones, thinking that although there were Beta issues the game seemed incredibly polished with a really good story to build upon.
And now... Well, I don't see much future for Rift. The dragons have won.
I went around the Defiant's capital city, and much to my chagrin I found only one other person hanging around. Surely, I thought, this is a mistake, so I went out into some of the low level zones and barely encountered another soul.
Well, if Gamigo thought they were going to get an active MMO, they've gotten quite a wake up call.
Even Wildstar and Marvel Heroes were more active than this before their shutdown announcements. (As is ArcheAge, which is often linked to being not long for the world.)
But this.... This just makes me sad.
You can say that the Trion's P2W strategy killed Rift, but what truly seems to have driven a stake in the game was selling the game to Gamigo. While I'll freely admit I could have logged in at just the exact wrong time, but it was truly disheartening to see what was a vibrant game turned into an empty shell.
It feels like only yesterday that Rift was in it's Beta, and disaffected WoW fans were leaving Cataclysm and giving the game a very serious look. I remember getting a Beta key and poking around the starter zones, thinking that although there were Beta issues the game seemed incredibly polished with a really good story to build upon.
And now... Well, I don't see much future for Rift. The dragons have won.
Did you check other shards/servers? I remember seeing a video from years back that pointed out that Rift's population could look very different depending on what shard it put you in. Then again, the theory at the time was that you'd always get the most populated one to make the game look lively.
ReplyDeleteEither way, I guess I'm not really surprised. It sounded like it had been going downhill for years, and I guess the bad PR of Trion folding may well have been the killing blow.
I'd forgotten that possibility, so I got on Rift and checked to see just how many shards are left. There are a grand total of 7 shards: 5 PvE, 1 PvE-RP, and 1 PvP. (One of the PvE shards is Oceanic, all of the other shards are NA.)
DeleteI switched to another shard and created a new character (Defiant Mage) and checked out the intro zone. There were a handful of people on, which was at least something. Switching back to my Defiant main, I logged back on and checked out Meridian, the Defiant's capital city. There were about a dozen people there, which was more than six times the number the other day. Still not great, but better than nothing. And not even close to ESO, although admittedly Zenimax uses singular megaservers to keep population high.
However, compared to an old MMO, such as LOTRO, Bree was pretty damn busy as usual.