A comparative analysis of this month's hottest title.
The class system is similar to WoW's only in the sense that you have 3 talent trees. You have the choice of which three talent trees you get though, and can mix and match them with ease. Some trees are lifted wholesale from WoW's classes like Assassin for rogue. But there are several classes that WoW doesn't have anything even remotely comparable. Riftblade, Riftstalker, Bard, Warlord, Archon, Necromancer, Saboteur, these are just a few examples of classes that fill roles you won't be comfortable with right away coming from WoW. Riftstalker for example is a rogue that tanks in leather. It survives by using survival finishing moves with its combo points and putting up several barriers. It also has the ability to constantly teleport, with each teleport doing something different. Its a tanking experience you won't be familiar with unless you know how to play a blink tank.
This system also leads to several interesting class options. For example, always like your backstab assassination types? You can slot in a Ranger and even if you don't invest a single point in the tree, you get the boar tank pet. This thing will hold aggro on anything you can dish out, so feel free to use your backstabs and positional combat even when soloing. The more you think outside the box, the more interesting the options become.
The questing system is the questing system. Mostly go here, kill x number of mobs. You aren't a grunt or a low level soldier so usually these quests have significance lorewise. You play an Ascended, basically a deceased hero who has been brought back as a super soldier capable of calling on the souls of dead legends from the world's history, and every townsperson you meet knows it and treats you as such. Quests almost always involve something of dire importance to the denizens of the zone you're fighting in. I don't know what kind of questing experience quest haters would consider fun, but it seems like the only system that ever gets kudos is a system like WoW where the most popular quests involve NOT playing your character (vehicle missions for example). I like playing my character though, so these quests are my preferred method of leveling.
The character customization system is extremely detailed and you can control everything down to the highlights in your hair or your character's skin tone using color palattes as opposed to preset color selections. This is detracted somewhat by the lack of races to choose from, and in my opinion the alternate races are so hideously ugly I'd never play anything but human. Maybe a Bahmi, but only if I was playing a Warrior. If you're playing an Elf, pick a girl you'll be doing yourself a world of service in the long run.
The rift system adds a new dynamic to the game, and mercilessly pulls you into the zone wide war. This is both a pro and a con. If you just want to quest in quiet solitude, it can be hard if a rift invasion just swept over your quest hub killing all the NPCs. This leads you to getting involved in the war whether you like it or not, since at the very least killing the invading mobs will get you your quest hub back. This isn't without reward, however, as doing these rifts gives you special currencies you can use to buy gear, augments for crafts, and reputation with numerous factions to buy their gear as well as bonus EXP for each invasion or rift you stop.
The dungeons are well done and will feel very familiar if you've played MMOs before. Crowd control is needed in some areas but this isn't a problem since there are no classification limits on CC. Incapacitate or Hopelessness works on demons, undead, horses, mechanical, pretty much anything susceptible to CC. The dual spec system allows you to multi-spec into 4 different classes, and Trion considers this a strength to their game and don't penalize you like WoW does. Switching specs is a 2 second castable ability that lets you keep all your resource (mana/energy) and nearly every class within your role runs on exactly the same stats so you usually don't have to worry about swapping out gear (only exception is possibly the tanking classes who need a lot of toughness). This makes it very easy to cater classes to specific encounters so you never feel useless or at a disadvantage.
I won't be covering PvP because I don't feel that PvP has a place in games centered around PvE like Rift. If you want PvP go to Guild Wars, Warhammer, DCUO. It doesn't make sense to me to play an MMO with a mandatory PvE experience (like 60 hours of leveling) if your only interest is player combat. I don't PvP much but I've been told that its imbalanced and very similar to WoW but with less BGs and no arenas.
All in all, Rift is a great release, amazingly stable, and very creative. It seems to have learned from all the mistakes and strengths of the MMOs that came before it and was designed to be an amalgamation of the best of every franchise. With regular content updates, you can expect this game to be a primary contender in the MMO world for years to come.