We're not in Azeroth anymore, but you can see it from here

My enjoyment of RIFT is fuelled by nostalgia, but it's not nostalgia for this game.

This second 24 hours of /played time in RIFT hasn't done much to change my opinion of this MMO. If anything it's only reinforced my initial impression of the game's faults. It's visually uninspired; the writing not only doesn't add to the atmosphere of the world but actively detracts from it; the music doesn't mesh well with the action or even with itself. I've said all of that before and all of it is still true. There are moments when RIFT does excel in one or other of these areas, but these moments are few and far between. Most of it isn't actually bad, it's just bland.

If I'm perhaps inclined to dwell once again on the negatives it's in part because I've spent my regular questing time during this run in Iron Pine Peak, which doesn't have a lot to recommend it. The zone is visually uninteresting - everywhere looks like everywhere else - and has a layout which, while not as restricting as the levelling zones in Neverwinter or those of early Final Fantasy XIV, becomes tiresome to navigate when you have to go back and forth from one hub to the other, which you do. A lot. Story threads are picked up and dropped and picked up again which leads to a lot of running around, as well as robbing the narrative of any momentum it builds up, or any coherence.

It all concludes in an ice cavern, and then it concludes again in another ice cavern which is identical to the first, and then it does it all again in another one. Reused environments are hardly uncommon in MMOs, but Ice Pine Peak takes it to extremes. The final ice cavern is slightly different from those that preceded it, but this quest is part of a separate chain and has level 50 mobs, so in effect there's no finale to the zone story, because at this point those enemies are unkillable.

This isn't intentional. It's a level 50 quest which is erroneously available at level 35, and my understanding is that this is something that was never fixed after the level range for the zone was lowered some years ago.

That I'm still having fun with RIFT despite all of this only underlines how good the game is on a mechanical level. The Soul Trees remain a lot of fun to experiment with and while I've mostly stuck to my Paladin-Champion-Reaver build I love that I don't have to. The core gameplay is also solid and well balanced, and there's plenty of additional challenge offered up by the rifts and by elite enemies.

Then there's the dungeons, which have been a high point of this run. They're very well made and my forays into them have been very reminiscent of when I used to spend a lot of time running the dungeons in World of Warcraft. Even the journeys into zones belonging to the other faction to access a couple of them took me back to past expeditions into Alliance territory to reach the Deadmines and Stormwind Stockade, though thankfully neither the Iron Tomb or the Deepstrikes Mines are anywhere near as hard to get to as the Stockade was on a Horde character in WoW.

RIFT isn't World of Warcraft, but then again these days even World of Warcraft isn't World of Warcraft, and in some ways RIFT does offer an experience that harkens back to the glory days.

A classic MMO experience, so to speak.