RIFT MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Fortunately, the shaman was significantly damaged by the time I joined the fight, and I was able to fell him solo during a short but intense battle. When I did, a server message hailed the end of the invasion, and I was rewarded not just with a pile of XP (including a nice bonus for helping defend a settlement), but also a few very handy consumable items. This all happened at level 6, by the way, so players will get a good taste of planar warfare very early in the game.

On the downside, since I couldn't save the quest giver and a few of the vendors, these NPCs were unavailable for a few minutes until the respawn. Even that wasn't much of a downside since I was happy to see that player action (or inaction) will affect the game world in a fairly dramatic fashion, even at low levels. One can imagine the scale of invasions later in the game, and the size and scope of player interaction needed to repel them. It will be up to the devs to deliver only what players in a given area can handle and what the penalties will be should players fail to defend the invasion objective, but the social and story benefits of the invasion cycle early in the game could be momentous.

Invasions bring out your inner Sun Tzu, as well. Planes dwellers of different types are opposed to each other (life, death, fire, and water are the planes revealed so far), so a valid strategy is to steer invasions across opposing rifts and possibly invasion forces (only one invasion was active at a time on the low level maps we played), sweeping up location-based bonuses along the way. Though we didn't see PvP in this early build, Executive Producer Scott Hartsman assured us that there will be competitive tie-ins to invasions. For example, as a defiant, maybe you clear the path for an invading planar army, using the invasion as a springboard for PvP hijinx of your own.

Invasions have all the hallmarks of that most golden of fun gaming moments, the high risk / high reward scenario that you simultaneously really can't wait for but yet part of you hopes doesn't happen. In the opening areas of the game, I satisfied myself that the dynamic content cycle adds to (rather than subtracts from) Rift's core gameplay. Whether closing rifts and stopping invasions might become full-time drudge work or a replacement for quality endgame content later in the game remains to be seen, but the Trion team seems to be keeping rifts in the proper perspective so far.