Noob Wood

If a fantasy MMO doesn't start with a shipwreck it will probably start in a forest.

The tendency of fantasy MMOs to start off in heavily wooded areas is especially notable in human starter areas, like Elywyn Forest in World of Warcraft and Chetwood in Lord of the Rings Online.  Guild Wars 2 is an exception to the rule and I can only assume that all the trees in Queensdale were cut down by the ubiquitous centaurs to build seige engines.

The Standard Fantasy Forest will usually be populated with Standard Fantasy Enemies - bandits, giant spiders and assorted highly aggressive wildlife.  They will also, usually, be fairly dull places.  Silverwood, in RIFT, ticks most of these boxes, though there's a refreshing lack of bandits and giant spiders - though the spiders do show up in the next zone.  The bandits are, however, conspicuously absent, perhaps due to the lack of convenient hideouts in a world where there's an extra-dimensional portal spewing out monsters on the far side of every other hill.

That RIFT sticks to this formula comes as no surprise.  In setting and story the game does some interesting things during the intro sequences - time-travel shenanigans for the Defiants, and an unusually practical approach to divine favor for the Guardians, with the Gods granting their blessing not to the most devout but to those that can handle themselves best in a fight.  It's a criteria that would certainly add interest to the process of selecting a new Pope.

Once all this is done with though, within the first hour or so of the game, RIFT does rather quickly settle down into becoming a Generic Fantasy MMORPG, and that means a starter zone with a lot of trees.

I do feel slightly bad about criticising the game for this.  It is, after all, an original IP, and with so many MMOs being based on existing IPs drawn from books, film and television - or for that matter from games in other genres - the fact that RIFT is an original work should be something deserving of praise.  It's just that it's a rather unoriginal original setting, and I'm not feeling it at all.

The writing doesn't do a very good job of selling what original ideas there are in the setting either.  It's not bad exactly, but only because it's not lively enough to reach that level.  It's just bland and functional and almost entirely unmemorable.

Almost.  Silverwood does have a decent finale in the fortress of the zone's Big Bad, with whom Our Hero gets a face to face meeting in a fun sequence that leads up to the final set of quests.  There's also an interesting hedge maze where the Fay dwell, but these are rare highlights in a zone that otherwise trundles along in neutral all the way to level 20.

Perhaps the next zone might change things up a bit.

Or perhaps not.