A Journey Concluded: Final Thoughts on Riftstorm’s Masterpiece
A journey begins.
A journey began on November 11th, 2023, within the world of Riftstorm playtesting, content creation, and streaming. It was a long journey that included meeting new people, playing this wonderful game, and growing until the end of the playtest on November 22nd, 2023. A true story with all the events to create and counterbalance the pathos was created in a short playtest period.
What exactly is a mythic protocol?
Before we can appreciate Riftstorm, we must first learn more about the universe in which it is set. Mythic Protocol is a group of organizations dedicated to capturing, studying, developing, and containing rifts, riftworlds, and mythics. Consider the Men in Black, but with more groups collaborating. These organizations could include the occult, secret societies, and various others centered on these events.
One of the factions issued standards and practices in 1954 to ensure that there were standard agreements on handling knowledge and actions toward these entities. The four major factions have validated these standards to ensure the proper handling of knowledge, artifacts, and alliance actions.
What exactly is Riftstorm?
Riftstorm is a top-down action roguelike shooter for 1-3 players set in the Mythic Protocol universe. You are an elite operative for this alliance, tasked with achieving goals. At the moment, the game appears to be focusing on the alliance’s containment side. In this playtest, we dealt with rifts and the Cult of Nennoth. Based on the universe, we may have to deal with various other creatures, such as zombies, werewolves, vampires, and so on. I can’t wait to try them all one day.
The playtest included four missions:
- Port Charlottetown is a dungeon-style map. You begin in the first room and progress room by room to the boss.
- Xi’an was a single-room wave system with a boss at the end.
- The challenge tower was a 15-floor dungeon of increasing difficulty with a speed completion leaderboard. There was also a mechanic who served as a difficult load balancer. The first five floors had a timer to determine a skip mechanic. If a player finished the 5th floor in under 10 minutes, they were eligible for a skip to the 11th floor.
- Ultimate Showdown was the game’s final, 5-floor, endgame dungeon. It was a difficult dungeon that rewarded the best gear.
Characters of Riftstorm
This playtest included three operatives to provide three different states of play.
Starling
The Assault Rifle Bullet Hell Queen is Starling. Her skills and playstyle emphasize quantity over quality. Her abilities combine to focus on a playstyle that transforms your assault rifle into a light machine gun with plenty of ammo. Her main goal was to create a realistic sense of bullet-hell damage. You flood the battlefield with buffed bullets, stun groups with her pepper bomb, and work your way up to a glass cannon mode of full damage and crit with infinite ammo active.
Atlas
Atlas is known as the Shotgun Immortal. His abilities and playstyle made it possible to imagine a close-range immortal tank. He had methods for pulling aggro cooperatively and obtaining invincibility, as well as the ability to debuff. His synergies resulted in invincibility loops. High mana production or status effect setups went a long way toward triggering his passive loop of attack status affected enemies to gain a stack of attack buff and reduced damage, which would roll a stance to proc his last passive, which will restore a charge to his main stomp abilities that provide widespread Area of Effect Damage and granting invulnerability. Atlas was designed to be a traditional MMORPG tank class but quickly evolved into a one-man army as well.
Icarus
Icarus is the demolitions/sniper expert and could also be the technological genius. His character design appeared to be the most haphazard yet. Passives that allow you to use two different types of weapons while also being a drone master. Starling and Atlas, on the other hand, had trees that catered to their weapons. Icarus’ overall build design was underwhelming. Icarus appeared to be a concept. A sniper with an AI companion to keep him safe. While this was excellent, the drone would only stay in your room, so you’d have to generate enough mana alone in the next room to get another ally. Players could use off-class weapons with a high fire rate to get the mana production. His passives were all designed for his drones, but with little uptime on his drones, his character can feel underwhelming at times. In the future, I hope they divide Icarus into three classes: sniper, demolition, and drone master, with handguns as his primary weapon.
The story of a playtest
Like many others before, this playtest was full of excitement and frustration, as well as the formation of new friendships and advancements in the community.
Steve the hugger.
Steve was the first of many stories. A creature that can be found within the challenge tower and final showdown. He’d run up to you and hug your character. All of your controls are disabled, and your movement controls are inverted, and he eventually explodes. It’s similar to the creatures in another anime, but you could either become a meme like that person or survive to carry on. His design was purely for coop testing and was meant to be a creature that a teammate would have to shoot off, but with many early testers being solo players in the beginning, he became quite a hindrance to many runs, especially for the solo speedrunner community, where one poorly handled Steve situation could make or break their times.
The battle for the top of the tower
With the addition of a leaderboard, the competitive speed-running community and players collaborated to achieve the best time for completing floor 15. The leaderboard caused some debate, but it was an overall leaderboard that was not split. Some positions are demoralizing for many people because a team beats them, but for others, they reign at the top as solo completions to enter a top position. The Riftstorm community, unlike many other speed-running communities, had a friendly competition. I’ve lived in many communities where the desire to be at the top brought out the worst in people.
What did we do?!
The players are what drive the Mythic Protocol universe. According to the team, all of our actions have consequences. At first, it was difficult to make heads or tails of what they meant. On November 17th, 2023, the leaderboard was updated with a mysterious counter displaying a kill count approaching 5,000,000. When I inquired about it, I received a cryptic set of responses. Even the public-facing side of the community team appeared to be unsure of the consequences. The community accomplished this goal in a matter of days, and the announcements stated that within a week, 5,000,000 kills were performed on this subset of enemies, which many would consider an extinction-level event. Again, the phrase “There will be consequences” is used, but we won’t know what they are until they happen.
In conclusion
The Riftstorms playtest was a fantastic experience. The community managers and development team outdid themselves on this one. The game performed admirably for a pre-alpha release. Many full-1.0 games would struggle to compete with how polished this game was. I played games with people from other countries who had little to no knowledge of netcode issues while live streaming. Normally, games with that much server latency have issues, but this game took advantage of the opportunity brilliantly.
With changes to in-game mechanics and character balances and, hopefully, more opportunities for the community to interact, engage, and grow, Riftstorm will undoubtedly become a part of my library once it is fully released.
