beta-testing

I was given a chance to test RIFT. and here are my thoughts after that beta:

Graphics are very nice, nothing mind bogging, but nice anyway. I like the dark mood, not too sweet, although it is a bit cartoony. Some places look slightly empty, as in only a couple of trees and a bit of mobs wandering over a flat green surface. That looked a bit "unfinished".
All in all it'd be a rather positive experience if not for one huge problem: I had to turn details to MEDIUM to be able to play. Otherwise the game became extremely choppy. And I do have two good Nvidia cards on board.

Gameplay is smooth, abilities fire as they should and when you expect them. Had only one occasion when one of my spells didn't fire properly and that looked like a lag spike to me, may have been my connection. Hard to tell. Other than that, I might say I was impressed. Both LOS and distance checks seem to work well. Animations of the abilities are good too. Not too flashy, with just enough variations to keep it interesting, and not cause brain damage.

Questing is a bit boring, as you don't even have to read quests to do them, hence you won't get deep into the story, so the RPG experience loses its depth. In other words: why am I here? why do I kill those guys exactly? who the hell is Regulos? Those questions may as well get never answered unless you REALLY want to know. That's bad imo. But a case of personal choice.

PvP - I've managed to queue a couple of scenarios/battlegrounds called warfronts here. Since I was only lvl 10/11 I was given a choice of one. Not much brain-work involved here. You take the "artifact" just as in and hold it. Point sare given for holding it, killing holders and ofc all other normal activities (kills, DBs, heals). No problems here. Smooth play, good animations and nice final warfront screen. Haven't seen much other PvP.

UI - Similar to Aion or actually any other MMO you've seen. I liked particularly the feature where you could turn on map and still keep running and the map just became translucent so you could see through it. Very nice and clear chat letters. Could use a couple of good tweaks tho.

Grouping - They should learn from war. Crappy. Really. You can't look for groups. You don't see them.  When invited you don't see who's playing what class, no icons or colours in group list.

Character souls - in other words your mastery trees. Interesting. Although given the fact that this game reminded me so much of wow I've tried a warlock as I've played one in wow. And guess what? It was almost exactly the same, maybe not as OP, but the abilities and all... SAME. A total rip-off.
Now the funny part is that I actually liked it as it made it easier to familiarize myself with the char.
The sheer variety of abilities you can spec into having so many souls is mind-boggling! And it's really what's setting this game apart. Some of the abilities are duplicating themselves (like for a warrior I've chosen two souls/trees and ended up with two starting abilities causing exactly the same amount of damage. The difference was then in following souls abilities, that were affecting the basic ones).
I'd say this is really fun, really interesting and I liked it a lot.

Summary
At this spot the game looks like PvE heaven, much better in some respects than wow. Not sure about other types of PvP than warfronts as I wasn't able to see any such action.
I hated the fact that every single char (pvp marked), every vendor or quest giver was marked with the same colour, size and type of letters (names). This made it slightly hard for me to find my way around.
And again I'll stress it out: at least during the beginning of game, soul system seems great.