Soon Horse promised, and Soon Horse has delivered. Soon Horse also tried mounting the neighbor’s cat, but that’s a tale for another day. Anyhow, on with the RIFT goodness.

Those who play will recognize this zone as Freemarch, the “starting” zone for Defiants (not including the short intro zone). I’m playing a Bahmi warrior and being the sucker for punishment that I am, I’ve chosen to go down the tanking route. I figured I’d take one for the team and be the guy who facerolls his keyboard full of aggro-building abilities while the rest of you “OMGERDZ, I’M OVER 9000 DPS” types stand back and pew pew while alt-tabbing out to your favorite porn sites. Oh, and I’m hoping it’ll get me groups quicker, thus allowing me to level faster and check out what end-game is all about. So before going further, I present you my level 16 (ish) warrior, in his regular armor and the cultural set I’ve unlocked for accumulating a total of 6 months subscribed to the game (not consecutively, I’m ashamed to admit. Sorry TRION!)

So my leveling journey continues through Freemarch, made even more glorious by my blasting of Engelbert Humperdinck’s greatest hits in the background. There is nothing more satisfying than shieldbashing a foe for the 76100th time to the tune of “Release Me” from Mr.Humperdinck. Ok, end of sarcasm. On a serious notes, the questing is nice and easy to follow, made convenient by a quest tracker and map indicators of your objectives. Certainly not a new feature in an MMO, but nice to have and one that I think is expected by today’s MMO standards. Now, as I’ve been running through Freemarch I’ve had the chance of taking on a few easy rifts, but as I approached this Fire rift, I was certainly impressed by the visual:

Anyone who has played Rift knows that it’s graphics and visuals are of quite a high quality, although not on par with say Age of Conan (although  what Rift lacks in comparison graphics  wise, it makes up for in gameplay tenfold – imho of course). The thing I love about this game is that about 10  minutes after finishing off that Fire rift, an Earth rift opens nearby, and  outcomes this massive elite boss thing that takes about 15-17 players a good  5 minutes to destroy. It’s nice to be able to bounce back and forth from questing, rift hunting, tackling  invasions and using the instant adventure  (more on that later) to break up the grind of leveling. There’s also PvP of course, which I will dabble in a bit later.

After killing the boss, 2 more elite bosses popped out of that same rift before we finally managed to close it. The best part is it earned me quite a bit  of the currency used to buy some  of  the high quality rift gear for my level. The coolest part is you have a chance of earning a little extra of this  currency  while not playing via an iPhone app (more on that later) that  has  scratch & win type games. +1 for TRION in this department, although a  full featured armory app like WoW has would be nice.

Alas my journeys needed a break, and my questing brought me to the Defiant city of Meridian, which you can already see from afar while running  around Freemarch. Visually its  nice,  but it seems to be your standard fantasy MMO city in design. Next up, I will post about Meridian and try to give somewhat of a tour of the city and the different key locations. In  the meantime, its time to find me the nearest brothel and get me some of that virtual poon for being such a massive fucking hero!