I am not really good at the lore because I find myself speeding ahead to see the new areas and try out new builds etc, rather than read all of the text boxes. But here is my stab. The world of Rift is set in a strategically important nexus of planes in which precious planarite is found. Other planes (life, death, earth, fire, etc) are nearby and bump into this world to create tears in reality. From these Rifts spill forth invaders from the planes bent on conquering the world and laying claim to the planarite. The gods have created ascendants called Guardians who fight on their behalf to secure the plane from invasion. The Defiants have a Terminator movie theme in which they come from a future in which multiple souls can be bio-engineered into the bodies of people. Their interest is to avoid a future that is taking place, so they have engineered you to go back in time to solve the problem. Guardians hat Defiants because it was Defiant technology that was powered by dragon magic that went awry and caused a lot of harm to the world. The Defiants claim that technomagic was the only thing that stopped them from extinction at the hands of the dragons.

Please lore nerds, go easy on me.

Coming from WoW, here is what I like

1. Bye bye mods....no more busted mods on patch day rendering the game unplayable. The basic interface of Rift lets you move around stuff and customize your interface in the basic game, which required multiple mods in WoW to do. The only mods I really miss are an auction house mod (say hello to manual posting one at a time after manually scanning an AH which can only be sorted by bid price) and autobar. I really hope they work hard at making AH statistics standard (IE the game itself scans your shard for market medians and defaults that price as a starting point for buyout) and I would love to see a bar mod that auto populated with quest items, consumables etc and let you scroll up and pick what you want like autobar. The game is playable as is though...think of it WoW gives you a bit of an edge with customization, but it peridically crashes and becomes unplayable as mod makers no longer support their work. You can move stuff around in a layout menu, and you can group items together similar to the way you cluster things in powerpoint and move it as a group. When all is said and done, you can then import all of the settings for chat, interface, macros etc from one character to another. My only beef is the game wont let you import settings across servers/shards.

2. Open groups- this is the big hurray. You are out there questing, and the sky turns a different color, and a zone wide message goes out. Everyone in the zone gets a zone wide quest to thwart an invasion. All the roads are swamped with invading forces from another realm, and usually some population centers are under direct attack with NPCs leaving off from their usual quest giving business and pitching in. YOu merely have to move to another group of people when at the top of your screen a "Join Public Group" option appears. Click that button, and you are in the invasion raid group. Masses of people move towards objections with furious battle to throw back the invaders. I have not seen epic PVE like this ever, and it feels more like RvR from DAOC against the AI. You can level up and just spend your time fighting off invasions if you like. There is no headache over worrying about if you have curried enough favor with the guild leader heading the raid to get an invite....if you can click a button you are in.

3. Gaming CPU is on demand, going to where it is needed. In WOW and games like DAOC if you had a mass of people in an area, there would be a zone crash or impossible lag. This game routes CPU to handle that loading, and you can function just fine...never seen a gaming company do this well until now.

4. Rewards for open groups are based on your participation. So you can not turn on runlock and run into a wall while raid grouped and expect an equal share of the loot. The game apparently evaluates your performance verses the server/shard standard and rewards you based upon that. My son tried a pure support buffing class running rifts, where all he did was buff everyone, and he did no dps, and he got decent loot...he was playing his class as well as he could and the game recognized it and rewarded him

5. Portals work much like waypoints from Diablo, AC2. You have to discover and reach a portal to use it, but once you have one memorized, you can travel instantaneously to any other one for the price of gold. This cuts down on the tiresome 5-10 minute flight from Darnassus to Gagetstan. You have slow ground mounts and the world feels more lethal than WoW. In WoW you could ride through aggro regardless of level and usually make it through with little danger. Here if you try that you get a stacking debuff that hurts bad and you die. It feels more like getting around in DAOC, only the invasions can mean that a previously safe road is no not so safe, as invaders use roads to travel from A to B. I am on a PvE server, and I would imagine on a PvP server gettting around would be even more challenging.

6. WoW is much more goofy with things like Snottz landing and the Snazis, and Indiana Jones, er I mean Harrison Jones, popping up. This game is more immersive because there are not so many pop cultural references. WoW is brighter and probably more intense if you do LSD, and this game is gloomier. Maps really feel a lot like DAOC.

7. Much Much Much less grind...for instance say you make a Cleric. You can in one of your 4 spec/role slots do a tank (Justicar), melee DPS (shaman), ranged DPS (Inquisitor), or heals (Sentinel). There are 9 souls (think WoW skill trees) per role (think WoW class). So Rift is 4 roles by 4/9 souls, while WoW is 10 classes by 2/3 trees. This means I can go through and do a rep grind ONE TIME for my cleric, and play him with all of those reputation benefits in a completely different role.

8. Much better talent tree options...WoW moved away from talent tree complexity, forcing you to go all the way down a tree before going into another one. You can mix and match between 3 souls in any given role, which leads to a lot more interesting combinations.

9. Crafted stuff as you level up your profession is slightly better than quest rewards, but not as good as dungeon rewards. This is a big difference because in WoW crafting was all about grinding to max then making the end game items, as heirloom or quest items were as good as or better than crafted items. This changes how I play, making using a craft useful as I go along.

10. Easy transition to this interface...so much comes from WoW that if you think how you did it in WoW, odds are it works in Rift. There was really no learning curve.

11. Macros. I am a keybinder and not a clicker. A clicker has 5 bars with 10 buttons each and mouse clicks each skill he uses. A binder keybinds mabye 10 attacks and hits them blind. As WoW went down the road to make the game more "interesting" they made it so that you had so many skills that it was very hard to play as a keybinder without tossing out skills. Blizzard deliberately did away with multiple spells in macros to force you to have one spell per button, and this really screwed keybinders. This game lets you make a macro with one anytime spell and a whole bunch of cooldown/conditional (ie range, out of combat, reactionary to parry/dodge) above it in the list. When you press it, it will do the first thing in the list. This has let me compress the unplayable number of skills from WoW into the meager 10 keybinds I have and play the game I like. For instance my rogue has a single target combo point builder macro, an AE combo point macro, a single target macro to finish, an AE macro to finish. Skill that I would toss off my bars and never use in WoW I use with regularity in Rift because of this. I am a firm believer that the true test of game skill is not in how you manage a cumbersome interface that takes your eyes out of combat and onto some button array, but instead your tactical decisions in response to battle that make or break the fight. For me a macro lets you focus on what is going on in the game rather than what is going on in your interface. There is no staring at cooldown timers, there is no stupid eclipse cycle or some obscure priority system. The game simply is more fun to play.