I wanted to play [RIFT](http://www.riftgame.com/en/), but I can't get it to work. After installing it, the only thing I see is a throne room with a nice music. There's a cursor, but nothing else. No key seems to work, either.

![Throne room in RIFT][1]

I've tried the following:

1. Nuke & reinstall (multiple times, with re-download of 10+ Gib of "patch").
2. Restarting the computer.
3. Searching the RIFT forums, support and google in general. There's a mention of someone having similar problems, but that is a red herring.
4. Changing server, windowed mode.
5. Downloading (apparently) different versions of the bootstrap client (`RIFT-Install-0-98lu20.exe` and `RIFT-Install.exe`).
6. Accessing as a guest and as a registered user.
7. Made sure I have a working OS with enough horsepower

> Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz  
> Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB  
> Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 
> Gaming graphics 4095 MB Total available graphics memory  
> Primary hard disk 131GB Free (349GB Total)  
> Windows 8 Pro 


I would assume there's a way of actually *playing* this game. Has anyone experienced this and found a way of fixing it?

---

Update 11-aug:

* Sometimes now I get flashing colored rectangles on the screen (a movie which plays in a broken way?). Pressing <kbd>Esc</kbd> sends me to the throne room.

* I've found a "[Loading Screen Freeze](https://support.trionworlds.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/888)" article on the NVidia support site, but it isn't very helpful and the suggested fix does not work at all.

* I've upgraded my NVidia drivers to the latest version. The drivers include a utility which automatically configures games to a supported standard. In my case it did discover RIFT and configured it. No change in behaviour.

  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/IQra9.jpg