The “and back again” part of MMOs

As much as I’d love to revisit Lord of the Rings Online, a writer who goes by the name of Revious at Kill Ten Rats details exactly what I know will happen:

When I logged back in I was beset on all sides by system mailings, announcements of new achievements I had somehow started, resets to all my legendary weapons, and a new trait / stat regime. It was bad enough that I was in the middle of a book, with tons of other quests already started, in the beginning of a region I didn’t remember while staring at a virtual cockpit of skills. Like a strange, albino gangle creature emerging into sunlight, I just blindly stumbled around for awhile until I found something to kill. It took me way too long to kill the enemy (as I, in the madness of things, had forgotten to up my legendary weapon’s DPS because it had been reset), and frustrated I logged off.

I don’t mean to engage in duelling MMOs, but this is exactly why I instead jumped back into Rift, which is atypical among MMOs for how it’s generous with respecs. One of Rift’s unique selling points is that every character class is, at any time, eight different character classes. Actually, that’s not quite true. A character is technically a mix of skills and abilities from any three classes at once. That’s not even quite true. A character can have several of these set up at once, and can furthermore toggle among them at any point. This lends Rift a lot of variety in terms of how it plays, but it also makes for a relatively painless re-entry. Don’t understand your character build? No sweat. Tear it down and build a new one from the ground up. Build a few. That’s how Rift works.

But I recommend Ravious story, because it actually has a happy ending. Spoiler: you can get by with a little help from your friends. In the end, the main draw of an MMO is the social element.