Rift

[Ashe]

Well, of course its going to be very much like WoW. They openly made a point of going as close to the line of copying WoW as possible without actually getting into legal issues. I'm not just talking about standard MMO aspects but straight ports of things, things that would be rough to explain for anyone that hasn't played with the common parts of late game in WoW (stuff like the currencies for pvp going from honor to favor, the badge system copying over in perfect form, the exact same crafting dailies for craft tokens you exchange for crafting recipes system, etc, stuff that really aren't the actual standard core mechanics). That said, that's absolutely fine and they've built on top of that foundation. I would say that yeah, the UI and such seems like a reskinned WoW, although its more a "slightly updated WoW UI" as far as coding given that while placement and such is similar, you have the ability to move your entire UI around and adjust it. It doesn't actually play like WoW, in that it doesn't feel quite as crisp and polished on response, but instead feels very much similar to WAR in terms of how movement, mouse response, spell casting, etc feels.

Its obvious they were trying to essentially "port WoW" and then "update it". I don't even know about update it. I think they are more just creating a place for people to play something like WoW but with a different flavor and community for those just tired of the other setting and community. I don't feel that "its a lot like WoW" should be used to immediately write a game off, at all, but I do acknowledge the similarities. I think its entirely possible to have a game be similar and take a community and be totally fine with what is a relatively small number of subscriptions by today's standards but previously would have been a massive deal - remember that in the height of EQ it would brag about having a couple thousand subscribers and no one felt that game was barren by any means. A few thousand now and someone will say "WoW has over two million and growing, GG fail game." This shouldn't be the case. There are other DBZ rpgs out there that use our format exactly (or another RPGs format, just as an example). That doesn't mean they can't both be successful at what they are trying to accomplish and the communities will be different - and in the end, with any online game, the community is what people will remember and consider the most. Bad games with good communities grow and becomes great games (Minecraft is what many would consider a "bad game" given the graphics - yeah, I know that argument is dumb - and lack of "action", but is very successful) while great games with loathsome communities become something people say "Yeah, DotA is awesome, but there are so many douchebags every game that its just not worth playing."