Rift, a new MMORPG looking to make a big splash on a scene dominated by World of Warcraft, has been available in open beta for a few days now. Ars sat down to get a read on how the game is shaping up in advance of its launch next month, and, while it may draw some resentment for stepping on Blizzard’s enormous MMORPG toes, Rift is shaping up to be a unique entry into the world of online gaming.

For better or worse, WoW is the de facto standard in the MMORPG world, and Rift has not forgotten this. On startup, old WoW salts will notice that the hotkeys are currently mapped exactly, and we mean exactly, the same as in WoW—O for social, P for spellbook, and so forth. While this gave us a sense of copycat-related foreboding, once we got into the game, Rift proved to have dynamics and gameplay that stand apart from WoW.

Combat, graphics, and interface

The most impressive aspects of Rift are its graphics and combat. The models and landscapes aren't flawless, but at full graphical settings they make a pretty good play for realistic, with waving tufts of grass and characters that behave like they're really engaged in battle—when a character swings a hammer, it actually appears to make contact with the enemy.

Fights are quick enough that characters aren't left standing around while waiting for their auto-hit to kick in again, but not so fast you can't keep up. The combat sounds are also nice—a weird thing to be enthusiastic about, but the game's sounds of hammers and swords landing blows put WoW's chintzy sound effects to shame.

One character, multiple roles

What really has the potential to keep players around is Rift's class system. In Rift, players can choose from six races and four classes—Warrior, Rogue, Mage, and Cleric. This may sound basic, but once in the game, an encyclopedia’s worth of class customizations opens up to you.

Each class has eight available “souls,” roughly the equivalent of WoW's talent trees, that can be filled with points enhancing different aspects of the characters’ performance. Each soul is one of four archetypes: damage dealer, healer, tank, or enhancement. A character can have up to three souls active at once, and can store up to four three-soul configurations. The math is confusing, but once worked out, the system seems like it will make for extremely flexible and adaptable characters.

Because there are so many ways to configure a single class, each has at least two roles available to it—for example, warriors are able to act as damage dealers or tanks, while mages can act as damage dealers, healers, or enhancement. Everyone's a hybrid, so there's no penalty for not being a "pure" class. You can put all your points into a single soul and be a pure class if you wanted to.

There's also room for subtlety. For example, since a warrior can have four builds, it could have one full tank build, one hybrid build weighted to tanking, one hybrid weighted towards damage-dealing, and one full damage-dealing build, and can switch between them at any time out of combat based on what would be best suited to the next fight.

The system can be a bit overwhelming at first, and theory-crafters are going to have a lot of work to do before they figure out the best soul builds and combinations (though the game gives you combo suggestions). Rift may be able to maintain a large number of "best" builds for any given role and class, and present a diverse enough set of conflicts that call for the fine tuning afforded by the class/role/soul system. To make good use of all the options will be a lot of work, and it's a challenge we hope Rift's creator, Trion Worlds, is up to.

An MMO where the players interact, you say?

The class system and combat aside, Rift is a fairly standard MMO—the bulk of the game revolves around quests that ask you to kill and collect things. As far as game mechanics, one of our favorite concepts is the actual opening of rifts themselves. Every once in a while, a "rift" will open up in the game world and let enemies flood in, and characters nearby need to kill the enemies and down a boss that comes through the rift in order to close it.

When your character enters an area with an open rift, a "join public group" button pops up at the top of the screen, and you will spend a couple minutes helping 10 or 15 of your new friends beat a bunch of bad guys back into another plane of existence.The rifts make for cool little world events, and while they seem like they could be too much of a diversion from questing, the enemies that pop up in a rift appear to sync up with quest goals in the area, counting towards your kill quotas and dropping needed rewards. At minimum, it's nice to have something that motivates players to interact in the game world outside of raids or instances, an aspect of WoW that has diminished considerably in recent years.

There's quite a bit we haven't experienced yet in this game—the crafting system is supposed to be quite robust, and there's still instances, PvP, and all of the various planes to explore. And of course, this is still the beta version, so everything is subject to change. The beta is open until February 21, and players that preorder the game can get a gameplay head-start beginning on February 24. Rift officially launches March 1 for $50, and will cost players a monthly fee of $15.