Entering an online world for the first time, weak, unarmed and surrounded by thousands of players far tougher than you, can be almost as terrifying as a first day at a particularly savage senior school.
That goes double for the current reigning king of online worlds, World Of Warcraft, where any slip that reveals you to be a new player, or “noob”, can result in you being hurled out of your playing group amid jeers and catcalls. Warcraft has been going for seven years, so players who have grown up with it have no mercy for the inexperienced.
Rival fantasy world Rift is a little less like being a new boy at an evil version of Hogwarts. It has also put a dent in Warcraft’s market dominance, pulling in more than one million £9-a-month subscribers.
I’m already playing Rift so much that last week my girlfriend shot me a pitying look and said: “You’re wasting your life.” She was on the sofa “investing” her time in watching Great British Hairdresser.
Rift is even dafter than Warcraft, with holes in the sky appearing with the same frequency as clouds in Glasgow, except that interdimensional fiends pour down instead of rain. There’s time travel, immortal wizards, gigantic cloud-octopuses, mutant pigs and a lot of gadget- wizardry called “magitech”.
It is also, though, great fun - and gorgeous. It’s by far the best-looking of these multiplayer fantasies, and the game’s lithe warriors leave Warcraft’s characters looking like Lego men. It’s also densely populated with other players, and passers-by actually help, offering advice rather than abuse. The “rifts” of the title - sky-portals through which baddies pour in waves - mean you’re battling alongside other players right from the start.
Two hours after starting to play, I was racing around closing up rifts to the Plane Of Death, assaulting a Senior Death Commander and being showered in magical loot.
I haven’t had that much fun in an online game for months; getting that many gamers into a group usually guarantees raucous arguments, duels and players deserting in hissy fits. Rift, for now at least, lets you play alongside other people without too many outbreaks of nerd rage.
The character system is ferociously complex and customisable, but gives the game a fun, unpredictable quality. For example, my character can raise the dead, spread plagues and offer a power-boost to friends all at the same time.
Most games in this genre swiftly boil down to attack strategies that are so predictable you can do them in your sleep: I quite often watch films while playing Warcraft, which says it all. Here, you have so many powers that it’s like trying to play three musical instruments at once.
But the feature that makes Rift such fun for jaded fantasy fans will have action-oriented gamers fleeing in disgust. For this is a very complicated game. Tiny buttons showing your abilities appear on menus on-screen, and you soon have so many powers that your screen looks like the Space Shuttle’s cockpit.
To me, that’s gaming heaven, but I can understand why others might prefer to stick to Call Of Duty - or Great British Hairdresser. - Daily Mail