Tag Archives: Lord of the Rings Online

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February 14, 2017

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My House In TESO vs. My House In LotRO

I’m really glad ESO has added housing. I always love seeing the things players do when given creative freedom. But seriously, guys, I ran all the way to a public instance in Shadowfen from Ebonheart (because it was the closest wayshrine I’ve been to), and all you give me is the “deed” to a hotel room? (Who sells a deed to a room in an inn anyway?) They weren’t even nice enough to start me out with any crappy starter furniture; I have to go buy it off of a vendor before I could claim it. Oh, and I can put my pets and mounts inside for some reason, so if you’ve ever wanted a horse for a roommate you’re in luck. I suppose I should be grateful that I can run all the way to Shadowfen and unlock housing at level 15 thanks to level scaling, but until I get 40k-50k more gold, and then some more for a reasonable amount of furniture, it looks like my choices are between a tiny hotel room or a slightly larger hotel room. Granted, I’ve been playing LotRO a lot longer than I’ve been playing TESO, but I feel like I should be able to get something larger than a prison cell even at this point.

LotRO, however, has housing that is much more accessible to low-level players. Several of my characters’ crafting professions have several housing decoration recipes–something I have yet to run across in TESO despite my obsessive habit of checking every box and barrel in sight–in the first two or three tiers of crafting alone, and I commonly get animal skin drops that can be taxidermized into trophies for free. A few weeks ago, I would have complained about LotRO’s total lack of position controls, but recently (on the same day as TESO’s housing patch, oddly enough) they added in sliders that allow players to move items on the X, Y, and Z axes, allowing for much more freedom. It feels like a super quick-and-dirty fix to a clunky old system, because that’s precisely what it is, but it’s so much better than what we had before.

I guess the difference between the two is that TESO’s housing is geared toward endgame players and LotRO’s isn’t. Maybe level 50 me will look back at this and laugh at the fact that I’m complaining about shelling out 50,000+ gold for a house. We all know that inflation is unavoidable in MMOs (the gold cap in WoW used to be an unimaginably high 37 gold at launch, which is positively destitute by today’s standards), so it’s probably best to aim high on this sort of thing. But right now it’s frustrating that I technically have access to this cool system, and can see screenshots and videos of all of the fun things people are doing with their housing plots, but can’t really do anything myself. I almost wish it was level capped.

So which system is “better?” The answer is that I like the accessibility of LotRO’s housing, and it’s much better than it was, but TESO’s objectively has more potential. There are more decorations allowed, there’s more freedom of placement, and it’s simply a newer game with better design. I also think some of that potential will be tarnished by a system that’s designed to tempt you to just skip the fundraising stage and just buy a furnished house from the cash shop, but with cash shop house packages ranging from around $20 to well over $100 (!), I think I’ll stick to saving up my gold.

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January 3, 2017

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2017 Predictions, Hopes, and Resolutions

Well, here we are, another trip around the sun and the world hasn’t exploded, civilization as we know it hasn’t come to an end, and the MMO industry hasn’t completely evaporated. I know 2016 was getting a lot of hate, but as for me, I had a pretty good year. And I think the gaming industry–especially the MMO industry–had a pretty good year as well. I thought I’d use the first post of the year to talk about what my predictions and hopes are for next year, and what would a New Year’s post be without resolutions?

Predictions

A New Guild Wars 2 Expansion
This isn’t much of a prediction; we’ve heard very strong rumblings of a new expansion to Guild Wars 2 set in an area from Guild Wars 1. Sadly, I haven’t played much of the original Guild Wars, so I have no specific predictions there, but it seems reasonable given the direction the living world story is going. I predict that it will include a new class, probably something revived from Guild Wars 1, and a new zone that’s less vertical/gliding-focused (and, by extension, hopefully less awful to navigate). As much as I’d like to see a new race, I don’t think that will ever happen; it would be a lot of work to fit them into the existing storyline. I don’t think raids are going away, but I think we’ll also see a couple of new dungeons in 2017. I could be totally wrong on this one, but I think the community hasn’t been as thrilled about raids as ArenaNet thought, and I think they’ll finally break down and give us some new dungeons.

WildStar Sunsets Near the End of the Year
It really saddens me to make this prediction because I love Wildstar, I love its combat, I love its setting, and I love its housing, but I just don’t see WildStar lasting much longer. What’s worse is that it becomes kind of a self fulfilling prophecy; everyone keeps saying it’s dying, and nobody want to get invested in a game that’s going to shut down in six months, so no new players come in, and the game shuts down. But hey, it’s possible that it’ll just downsize and put content out more slowly than before and keep on keeping on for years to come. I really hope so. Only time will tell.

LotRO and DDO Flourish Under New Management
Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online recently went indie with developer Standing Stone studios. While the fact that they’re being published by Daybreak isn’t exactly comforting, as Daybreak has been making some weird decisions ever since it changed hands from SOE, not the least of which was the media silence and eventual demise of EverQuest Next, I think the fact that Standing Stone was willing to pick up development of the games says a lot about its future. I’ve popped my head into LotRO a few times over the last few days, and the community seems cautiously optimistic. I’ve talked to a few long-time players that say that the game was better when Turbine was indie, and hope that this is a return to that standard. It seems like the excitement is even bringing some past players back, which is always a good sign.

Kickstarter Falls Out of Favor
To say that 2016 was not kind to kickstarters would be like saying that a few celebrities died in 2016. Mighty No. 9 was a colossal failure, VR was (predictably) not as game-changing as Oculus et al. claimed it would be, the Pebble smartwatch sold out to Fitbit and canceled most of its Pebble 2 preorders, John Smedley’s Hero’s Song failed it meet its Kickstarter goal and then closed its doors just after Christmas, a variety of kickstarted MMOs suffered from setbacks, delays, and disillusioned backers, and that’s just to name the ones I was following. I think people are starting to realize that making a video game is a very expensive endeavor, and that maybe paying for it before it’s even produced isn’t the best way to motivate inexperienced developers to release a quality product. I really like the idea of crowdfunding, but I’m going to need a lot of convincing before I back anything else.

Hopes

A Strong, Traditional, Western MMORPG Appears
It doesn’t have to come out in 2017, but we really need an announcement of something to fill the void that EverQuest Next left. I’ve played EQ2 for maybe a couple hours total, and even I was extremely disappointed in EQN’s cancellation. I’m not saying that if one of these games doesn’t materialize in 2017 the entire MMO industry will be doomed to stagnation and death, I’m just hoping for this because I enjoy playing new and different MMORPGs. All of the scrappy Kickstarted indie MMOs floating around out there are nice, but I don’t know if they’re going to have the presence, impact, and drawing power that EQN would have had. I think we need a big AAA studio to come out and make a statement that, scoff all you want, but there’s still lots of money to be made in MMOs, and plenty of life left in the formula.

SWTOR’s F2P Gets Better
Star Wars the Old Republic has always had one of the most restrictive free-to-play options. I know of no other game where you have to pay to hide your head slot or have enough hotbars just to have access to all of your skills. But with the addition of the Galactic Command and the removal of weekly content passes, they’re basically telling free players not to plan on doing any endgame without subscribing. I was really hoping that SWTOR’s business model would get less restrictive over time, not more. I’m really hoping that there’s enough negative feedback that at least some of it gets reevaluated, but I’m not holding my breath.

Resolutions

Play More Mobile Games… While Exercising!
I have a desk job, and my MMO hobby isn’t exactly the most active one, so my wife and I have been looking at putting our Christmas money toward an elliptical, and I really like the idea of motivating myself to exercise by finding a game that I only play while I work out. I’ll probably be looking for something turn-based like Hearthstone or the various Final Fantasy games available on Android, so if you have any suggestions, let me know.

Spend Less On Steam, More On MMOs
I have over 350 games on Steam right now, and I’ve only finished a handful of them. Generally, the average Steam game I buy gets played for a couple of hours at most, yet I’ve spent countless hours this year playing MMOs. Why, then, do I tend to spend way more money on single-player games than on MMOs? I want to make a conscious effort to spend less on Steam and more on the MMOs I play. I just wish MMO cash shops had as many sales as Steam does.

I’ll pull this post back out a year from now and see how I did on everything. Happy new year, everyone!

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November 3, 2016

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My End Goals in Various MMOs

I’ve been playing a good amount of Star Wars the Old Republic lately. I’ve been meaning to get back in and see the last couple of expansions’ stories if nothing else, and Dark vs. Light gave me incentive to do that. Then recent announcements about changes to endgame that basically say that they don’t want my money unless I subscribe (cliffnotes version: no engame gear for F2P players, F2P players can no longer buy weekly passes for dungeons, raids, PvP, etc.) had me ready to ragequit, but, when I thought about it, I realized that I have literally never done a raid in SWTOR, and it’s been years since I did a dungeon with anything other than a PUG. Sure, this means that I will never expand beyond this kind of occasional, casual play that means I will give them little to no money, but still, it doesn’t mean much for the way I play right now. This got me thinking about what I really want out of my MMOs. The answer I came up with was that every game’s end goal was unique. Here are a few, in no particular order.

Star Wars the Old Republic
Since we’re on the subject of SWTOR, let’s start here. Since BioWare has basically told me the only thing I can do as a free to play player is story, that’s all I’m likely to be playing. After all, it’s what BioWare is best at, and what their focus has been on for a while now. If I skipped this expansion it wouldn’t be the first, but Knights of the Fallen Empire has me interested, so I’ll probably stick around at least enough to see the story once. I bought a couple of character slots while they were on sale, so I’ve been playing some vanilla content I’ve never seen before along with the newer stuff, which has been fun. It’s not likely to keep me in the game for long, but it’s fun for now.

Guild Wars 2
I created a new guild with some friends, and, in the first couple of weeks, the eight of us have done more as a guild than I (and several others) had done with their much larger guilds. This, combined with running the Halloween event (I finally got the Hexed outfit!), has, strangely enough, renewed my interest in the game. I’m looking to get enough hero points to finish off my elite spec on a couple of my favorite characters (necro is mostly done, working on my revenant now, as well as my healing ranger a little) and I’ve been running dungeons with friends more often. I’ve somehow never done fractals, so I’m looking to do that soon. Maybe even get into some raids eventually?

Rift
I like Rift, and I finally have a couple of characters that I like, but I’m still not sure what my goals are for this game. I’m certainly not playing it for the story, and I’m not sure I’m dedicated enough to want to get into endgame dungeons or raiding. I guess I’m just playing for the sake of a new game to level in? Nothing wrong with that, I guess.

WildStar
I actually have a decently geared Esper healer, and I was signed up to go raiding with my guild shortly before they fell apart. Finding a new guild has severely decreased my interest in playing, which is sad because WildStar remains one of my favorite MMOs, and it needs all the players it can get right now. The death of my guild has, however, freed me up to finally check out the opposite faction. I’ve been slowly but surely leveling a Dominion engineer, which has been a fun experience. I may have to level one on the Exile side when I’m done. I like the Exile faction a lot better in general, but man, their capital city is a dump. The one for the Dominion is so much prettier.

Elder Scrolls Online
This one is almost the same story as Rift. The story is a little more interesting, but I don’t have any clear goals, and the angst that comes with building a new character is paralyzing. I decided to put this one on the shelf until One Tamriel came out, but now that’s here and I haven’t decided on a character to play.

Lord of the Rings Online
Really, all I want is to simply walk into Mordor.
Seriously, though, my only goal is to see all of the world/story content in this game. I keep getting right up to the gates of Moria and stalling out. The rune-keeper class really clicked with me, and I want to get back to this one as soon as possible.

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August 29, 2016

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LotRO: Three Reasons Why I Hate Angmar

Areluin 43
Every MMO has that one zone where characters just absolutely stall. For me in Lord of the Rings Online, it’s Angmar. It’s funny, I just passed the exact spot where my Beorning is parked. In a way, it’s discouraging, because he’s still several levels higher than my Rune-Keeper, but in another, it’s a reminder that this new character could easily share his fate if I don’t push through. There are a lot of reasons to hate Angmar, but here are my top three.

The Lore Is Boring
I’m no Tolkien expert, but as far as I remember from the books, Angmar was basically just “that place where the Witch-King is from.” I’m not sure if all of these tribes of hillmen are a real thing in some obscure scrap of Tolkien lore, but if they are, The Professor didn’t feel the need to burden us with the details the way LotRO does. Don’t get me wrong, expansions upon existing lore are one of the reasons why I love well done licensed IP games like LotRO, but if I thought of Angmar at all, I’ve always pictured it as a mini Mordor, ruled by a Nazgul and crawling with orcs, not a land devoted to a couple of warring tribes that feel completely disconnected with the rest of Middle-Earth. I read most of the quest text in LotRO–a lot of it is really well written–but once I hit Angmar I skim at best.

The Quest Structure Is Awkward
My biggest complaint about LotRO is not the awkwardly lumpy player character heads (although, for goodness sake, could we get an update to those? NPCs look better than player characters in the newer expansions!), it’s that the quest tracker only holds five quests at a time. I’m sure there’s some legitimate technical reason that they haven’t fixed this, and I guess it’s better than nothing, but it’s really annoying in a zone like Angmar where most of the questgivers are packed into one corner of the map and not really arranged by area at all. What I end up doing is picking up everything I can while I’m in town, finishing the five quests that fit in my tracker, then taking them off and adding five new ones back on, and hoping I don’t end up doing too much backtracking because I didn’t know I had to pick some flowers in the middle of a field overrun with Duvardain half way across the zone that I just ran through to do the last quest I finished (no seriously, there’s literally a quest to pick flowers in the middle of this barren wasteland). Add to that the fact that 40 is when you really start to feel the level curve ramp up, and the whole zone really drags on.

The Setting Is Just Plain Oppressive
The zone is mostly desert with a little bit of swamp mixed in. Just look at the screenshot above; dead trees, scrub brush, and ruins. That pretty much sums up the scenery. And what’s up with the sky? It’s red all day long, with some kind of weird magical glow that I haven’t ever found an explanation for. Even the music is almost nonexistent here, replaced by some creepy ambient noises.

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August 17, 2016

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LotRO: Rune-Keeping

Areluin 29I’ve never been a big fan of elves in any universe, and it all goes back to Tolkien elves. After all, basically every modern fantasy story can trace its roots, directly or indirectly, back to Tolkien, especially anything to do with elves, which, prior to Tolkien, were depicted mostly as small, mischievous pixies rather than tall, beautiful (arrogant, know-it-all), and graceful humanoids with pointed ears. To be perfectly honest, though, I’ve always been a little torn about Tolkien elves. On the one hand, they have a cool culture, and Tolkien went to all the trouble of writing a whole history book and an entire language for them. On the other hand, mostly what we see of them in the Lord of the Rings is them saying “Oh, the greatest threat Middle-Earth has ever known is returning? Yeah we’ve known about that for ages. Well, we’re packing up our army of immortal supersoldiers and sailing west, see ya.” And let’s be honest, cramming a weird dwarf-elf love triangle into the Hobbit movies where it didn’t belong didn’t improve my love for elves either.

All that to say, of the multitude of characters I’ve made in Lord of the Rings Online, not many of them have been elves. I made Areluin (the Sindarin Elvish words for “royal” and “blue” run together) a while back because I needed another character for crafting, and I made him and elf because I hadn’t done the elf starting zone in a long time. I didn’t think I would ever end up playing him, but somehow I ended up doing a little questing with him one night when I was bored, and quickly fell in love with the class.

The Rune-Keeper is a really interesting, fairly unique class. They have an attunement bar that moves toward either DPS or Healing as you use spells of each type that increases the potency of those types of skills. I’m not sure why I haven’t played the rune-keeper sooner, since it’s practically nothing but HoTs and DoTs, and that’s been my favorite class archetype over the last few years. It just feels so “right.” I’m super squishy, with not much health, but I feel like I have a lot of power and survivability because I can DoT my target up and then hit a button to switch to healing, put a bunch of HoTs on myself and finish with a bubble that resets my attunement, then go back to damage before my DoTs expire. That requires constantly thinking a few steps ahead–you have to estimate when you’ll need to switch to self-healing, especially since some of my attunement resets and switchers have long cooldowns–but that makes it all the more interesting for me. I’d be lying if I said I died less than on my Beorning or Captain, but I don’t feel nearly as helpless as, say, my lore master. I’d love to try the healing game, but low-level dungeon runs are hard to come by in LotRO these days. Maybe I’ll ask around some time to see if any guilds do lowbie/alt dungeons on a regular basis. (Let me know if you know of any guilds on Gladden that do this!)

I feel a little bad starting yet another character on LotRO. This is the game where my altaholic tendencies were born, so I’ve done the Lone-Lands so many times that I could navigate it in my sleep, and the beauty of Lake Evendim now looks more like a painfully slow swim to the island of Tyl Ruinen (I just heard the zone referred to as “Everswim” in world chat). Also, as much as I’m loving the rune-keeper, I said basically the same things about the beorning just last Febuary. Will this character suffer the same burnout? Only time will tell, but it would be nice to get at least one of them into Moria. I’ve paid for several expansions that I’ve yet to see, and I’d like to remedy that situation.

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July 30, 2016

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Is It Possible To Balance Melee and Ranged Classes?

It’s a perennial problem for MMOs: either melee classes have the advantage or ranged ones do. In WildStar, the constant moving and dodging out of red means ranged classes have an advantage simply because they can keep attacking while they move. In older MMOs like Lord of the Rings Online, where most of the ranged classes are rooted casters and most of the melee classes have a lot of instant casts, melee classes have the edge. From what I’ve heard about SWTOR, it seems that they’ve recently swung the pendulum; melee classes have always had more DPS/tanking potential, but many of the recent dungeon and raid bosses have included mechanics that require melee classes to move back to avoid massive damage, thus limiting their output. Maybe it’s just me, but I find that I do better with melee classes in games with action combat like Elder Scrolls Online because I’m more likely to miss with ranged attacks. Sure, this isn’t really a balance issue so much as a “stop failing” issue, and probably less of an issue in dungeons where, if it’s anything like every other MMO I’ve played, most bosses are the size of a small house, but still, this is a genre where people create massive spreadsheets of damage output to determine the META, and I’ve seen people literally complaining that one race or faction has an “advantage” over the others because their casting animation is a little more subtle.

The best solution I’ve seen to this problem is in Guild Wars 2’s, where most classes can be either melee or ranged depending on what weapon you’re holding. This allows the developers a lot of freedom when designing fights because everyone should be able to step back and hit things from range at least sometimes. Unfortunately, it also means that you really have to have at least one ranged weapon set to be viable most of the time, which is annoying because there are many classes that have two melee sets that I like (for instance, Revenant’s Mace/Axe and Sword/Shield). Couldn’t I have a whole bunch of weapon sets like Guild Wars 1?

So what do you think? Is it possible to truly balance these two class styles? Have you played any MMOs with any clever ways of bringing these two class types into balance?

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February 24, 2016

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LotRO: Over Misty Mountains Cold… Without A Decent Map

Misty_Mountains_map
Last night in LotRO, I was questing along through the Misty Mountains. It’s a really pretty zone, I love how the intensity of the snow storms change from place to place, and you get to fight your first Nazgûl (not to mention there’s an undead dragon there, which I’ve always thought felt way more out of place in Middle Earth than the Rune Keeper, but what do I know). It was all going well until I got the breadcrumb quest to go to the Northern High Pass. That’s when I got completely, frustratingly lost. The Misty Mountains is one of those zones that I only vaguely remember because I’ve only completed it once, and mostly what I remember is not being able to get anywhere without running half way across the zone to get around a mountain peak. The fact that there will be a few zones that are just plain annoying to get around in is pretty much a given for any MMO, especially an older one, but the problem is severely aggravated by the fact that LotRO’s map, pictured above, is just about useless for navigating. They’re a nice idea–make the game map look like a hand drawn parchment map (complete with coffee mug stains; someone really should take better care of the zone maps) that seems at home in the Tolkien universe–but they really need an option for something with some more fine detail. Back in the day there used to be a Google Maps styled map in the lore book that would allow you to zoom in from the parchment map to the actual terrain map, but alas, the lore book is no more and if that map still exists I can’t find it. So I wandered around near the final E in Eastern Bruinen Source for a good fifteen minutes, running into several goblin villages and such, but not finding the way to the High Pass. Finally I gave up there and thought I’d try finding my way through the Giant Halls up through the South High Pass. The Giant Halls is a big chunk of the zone that’s designed for groups, but with the Beorning’s heal over time and generally good survivability (and a little luck), I’m usually able to solo my way through such areas as long as I don’t pick up more than one or two things at once (and as long as I’m not in a hurry). I slogged my way through this area, but all I ended up was finding in the area that appears on the map to connect to the high pass was some kind of town full of giants, which, as you can imagine, proved to be too much for my self healing abilities. Some day I’ll have to come back here with a friend and clear things out, but I then decided to turn my attention back to the north and see if I could find the pass I was looking for. After another half hour or so I finally found it, but by that point is was getting late and I decided to call it a night.

After a little research, I ended up finding this plugin which gives terrain maps (from the minimap), but no labels, and isn’t terribly user friendly. It’s better than nothing, but I still don’t understand why something like this isn’t built into the game itself. Crappy maps are one of the fastest way to frustrate your players, and frustrated players aren’t paying players. I often had the opposite problem with SWTOR’s schematic styled maps; they had so many details on them it was often hard to tell what was a door and what was just some bit of decoration or debris they decided to include on the map for some reason. Picking through the wreckage of Taris was the worst for this, especially since it came before speeders for Republic players. No map is going to accurately portray every bit of the zone, especially as zone designs seem to be trending toward more and more vertical space (Guild Wars 2, I’m looking at you), but it seems like certain developers were more interested in graphical style than functionality.

You know what, though? I actually still ended up having fun that night. Soloing areas designated for groups is one of the guilty pleasures that makes me love healing-tank classes. And as frustrated as I was with the map, at least most of the enemies are pretty spread out and easily avoided. I was also able to complete a few quests while searching everywhere for the path to another. Anyways, thanks for reading my rant. I’ll be tackling Goblin Town next, which I’ve heard means more frustration. I think I may have missed (skipped?) it entirely last time around, so we’ll see.

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February 18, 2016

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Licensed IP MMOs Aren’t A Bad Thing

Licensed MMOs
I saw a player proclaiming in Guild Wars 2 the other day that he or she would never play a game based on an unoriginal intellectual property. Their reasoning was the usual; since the creators do not “own” the story, they are limited in what they can do with the lore. It also opens the developers up to all sorts of criticism for “breaking lore” (don’t bring up the Rune-Keeper in LotRO global chat; it’s still a huge sore spot in the community over seven years later). As someone who just got back into Lord of the Rings Online for the umpteenth time, I actually disagree with this rather strongly. While ultimately gameplay is what makes a game good or bad, I think a licensed IP can actually be a really good thing for a game.

The License Sells The Game
Let be honest, MMOs are businesses, businesses need to market their products, and brand recognition is huge. I know it’s hard to imagine, but there are people out there–gamers even–who have never played an MMORPG and know absolutely nothing about Guild Wars, EverQuest, or possibly even (gasp) World of Warcraft. Those people, however, can probably identify several super heroes and have seen at least some of the Star Wars movies. Unless this hypothetical person has a friend who plays, there’s not much of a chance a game like Guild Wars 2 will catch their eye at Walmart, but if they recognize a franchise they like they’re significantly more likely to give it a try.

Many Players Already Know The Lore
I still feel fairly lost as to the lore of Guild Wars 2 after playing it for a couple of years, but as soon as I stepped into Lord of the Rings Online, I already knew the world because I had read the books and seen the movies (yes, in that order). The enjoyment in exploring Tyria is discovering new locations, whereas the enjoyment of exploring Middle-Earth is all of the moments that make you say “Oh! These are the trolls that Bilbo defeated!” or “Hey, this is the spot where Frodo got stabbed by a Nazgul!” or “Man, the Old Forest is a huge pain to find your way around in, just like Tolkien described it!” Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but I tend to prefer the latter a little, mainly because I don’t have to trawl dev posts and wikis to learn the lore. The game may have to fill me in on the current political climate of The Old Republic era or the fallout of the destruction of Romulus, but the game world at large is already familiar to me long before launch day.

Storytelling Limitations Aren’t Necessarily Bad
Licensed IPs are like the storytelling equivalent to Twitter; some people prefer it because of its limitations. And really, it’s not that limiting. There are still plenty of stories to be told in the Marvel universe or the Star Wars universe. If there weren’t, there wouldn’t be an ongoing franchise beyond the game. Furthermore, the vast majority of the individual writers, even in a game with an original IP, have a story pretty much handed to them. They may have the freedom to add a few minor characters or create events that change the world in small ways, but for the most part, by the time the game is a few years old the people who wrote the original story likely doesn’t even work there anymore, and if they do, you can be they don’t write every day-to-day quest added into the game. At that point the writers for a game based on an original IP is basically the same boat as someone who’s writing a story for a game whose IP is owned by a major movie studio. Yes, there may be more red tape and approval process for the licensed game, but either way they don’t have total freedom/

All of that said, I agree that there are downsides to licensed IPs. The biggest and most obvious downfall is the license itself. If Lord of the Rings Online was an original game it could go on indefinitely, maybe shifting into maintenance mode at some point, but still there for the loyalists to hang out in. I don’t mean to bring this up every time I post about LotRO, but its Tolkien license comes up for renewal next year, and I think there’s a real question as to whether or not all parties involved will feel like it’s worth their time and money to renew it. The other downside is that, for every player the IP attracts, there will be one more that it pushes away, like the player mentioned at the start of this post. I’ve played some pretty awful movie tie in shovelware games in my day, and I can see why players would associate those games with games like LotRO, SWTOR, or DCUO.

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February 9, 2016

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LotRO: Home, The Long Way Round

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Lord of the Rings Online is one of those games that I just keep coming back to, and, while I don’t usually stick around nearly as long with LotRO as I do with, say, Guild Wars 2 or SWTOR, there’s a certain quality to it that you don’t find in any other game that I really start to miss after a while. Toward the end of last year, I had several friends and fellow bloggers express a desire to return to a more traditional/WoW-like/tab target game after the recent glut of survival sandbox and action combat MMOs. At first, I didn’t feel the same pull–after all, I was thoroughly enjoying WildStar’s combat and overall experience–but then, be it because of peer pressure or just similar action combat burnout, a couple weeks ago the tab target bug bit me too.

LotRO wasn’t actually the first game I looked to. Proving the old adage that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” all of this negative press about Rift moving previously free stuff into its cash shop has reminded me that Rift is still a thing, and that I enjoyed what little I played of it. Once in the game, I found out that my friends who used to play Rift haven’t been on in months, and remembered that I hated the character creator, both of which are big turnoffs when I’m first starting out. Long story short, I ended up doing the exact same thing as last time, which is make a couple of characters, run them through the tutorial, then get distracted by other things. Maybe some day I’ll actually get into Rift, but it is not this day.

Once I settled on LotRO, I spent a lot of time deliberating about which character to pick up, probably far too much. The obvious choice was my highest level character, my level 52 Captain, but when I actually logged in and played her, I just didn’t feel the same connection to the class that I did the first time around. I don’t know if it’s the changes to the combat or just my own preferences, but either way, I had to put her back on the shelf for now. I also considered rolling a new character, as I often do when returning to a game, but, as much as I love Bree, I’ve done it so many times that it has effectively cured me of my altaholism in this game. So that left me to choose one of my existing alts. After collecting all of the characters I cared about all on one server (Gladden), I spent a good amount of time and stress simply staring at the character select screen trying to decide. I really loved my minstrel back in the day, I’ve always been intrigued by my low level Rune Keeper, and the Lore Master was a really unique mix of pet class and glass cannon mage. What I ultimately ended up with, however, really shouldn’t really come as a surprise: my Beorning. The Beorning is the most recently added class, and the one that I primarily played last time I played LotRO (which appears to have been about six weeks shy of a year ago). The Beorning is probably the most comfortable I’ve felt in a class in this particular game, largely because of its great survivability and sustained DPS. He is now only my second character to break the level 40 curse. My first character in the game, a Burglar, stalled out at level 39 because I decided I didn’t like the way he played, thus beginning a long tradition of abandoning characters after investing hours of time into them. Since then, I’ve only gotten my Captain past 39, and that was after a year or so of off-and-on playing during college. All of the others have been doomed to mediocrity either by other alts or shinier game releases. Of the seven characters I moved to Gladden, five of them were in the 30s (the other two are my Captain and a low level crafting character). I’m looking forward to finally delving into Moria with my Beorning. I know there’s a lot of hate for the zone (especially before the revamp), but I’ve always weirdly enjoyed underground/cave environments, so we’ll see.

So, while it’s been quite the ordeal settling back in, I’m happy to be back in LotRO. I’ve been a bit worried recently about how much time LotRO has, with Turbine losing Infinite Crisis, their first new game since LotRO’s launch in 2007, and LotRO’s looming Tolkien license renewal next year. I’ve decided that, be it next year or later, the game can only last for so long, and, I want to experience as much of Turbine’s version of Middle-Earth as I can while it’s still here.

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March 23, 2015

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BEAR-ly Playing LotRO Again

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I recently heard that Lord of the Rings Online’s Beorning (or Skin-Changer) class was on sale. I remembered that I had a pile of Turbine Points lying around from the last time I played, so I figured I’d give it a shot for old times’ sake. LotRO was one of my first MMOs, and the one that established my altaholic tendencies. It started with making some poor, uninformed choices for my first couple of characters. First was my hunter, whose overwhelming single-target ranged DPS made him boringly easy in solo play, and everyone told me they’re not that useful in the endgame, so I decided not to bother. Next was my Burglar, who was fun because of stealth, but had the opposite problem of being useful for groups but not that fun to level. Minstrel and Lore-Master were both really fun for a while, but, for whatever reason, fizzled out before I made it over the Misty Mountains. I stuck the longest with my Captain, but, being a tank/healer class, Caps can take on four or five mobs at once without going below half health… as long as you don’t have anywhere to be for the next few days (though I’m told their DPS has gotten better since I played last). Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed all of my characters, but, despite playing off and on for a few years, the farthest I ever got was the first few quests of Moria (despite owning the Mines of Moria, Siege of Mirkwood, and Rise of Isengard expansions).

Beorning TransformSo now I’m back, and trying out this new class. It’s been seven years since LoTRO added new classes (Warden and Rune-Keeper with the Moria expansion), so I feel like the Beorning class is a big deal. It’s an interesting idea; you can basically fulfill all three roles of the Trinity: DPSing and healing in man form, and tanking in bear form. It also takes full advantage of LotRO’s revamped talent tree system to make big changes in your playstyle based on your spec. It’s probably the closest thing to WoW’s Druid I’ve seen in any game I’ve played. I say that bear form is the tanking form, but either they’ve made the first few zones easier or the Beorning is a truck; even in man form I BEARly take any damage and can kill pretty fast. It occurred to me last night while I was doing a skirmish scaled to 5 levels higher than me that I’m basically Wolverine; I have a HoT that heals me faster than a swarm of mobs can damage me, while I crank out lots of damage (this weird analogy brought to you by my recent marathon of the entire X-Men movie franchise). This gives the Beorning a very Guild Wars 2 feel–i.e. very self sufficient and mobile–but still maintains the unique feel of LotRO. I’m nearly level 25 and I still haven’t died once. This might be the first time I’ve gotten the “Undying” title for hitting 20 without dying (I think the first time I died as my Lore-Master was in the starter zone). I haven’t really read much player opinion on the class, but I can’t help but wonder if the Beorning is just a tad overpowered. Granted, they don’t have much AoE to speak of, so maybe they’re just the melee counterpart to the Hunter with a tanky transformation gimmick thrown in, and maybe they suffer the same fate of a weak endgame; a jack of all trades is master of none. I’m not really sure I want to know, because I’m having a lot of fun with it.

After playing so much Guild Wars 2, the pace of LotRO combat is a little hard to BEAR at first. I guess that goes with being an older, more traditional MMO. That’s not to say that the game is painful to play. Turbine has made a lot of improvements since I left (open tapping, yay!), and it’s oddly refreshing to be back to a game where I can pick up five or ten quests in the quest hub, do them all in the same forest, then turn them all in at once for big piles of shinies. Also I’ve really missed skirmishes, instances that scale to your level and group size, even if that group is just you. I’m also interested in the War Steeds system, which I’ve heard from multiple sources is the best mounted combat of any MMO to date, but it’ll be a while before I get there.

Will LotRO be my main MMO again after all these years? I don’t think so–I couldn’t BEAR to leave Guild Wars 2–but it is certainly a nice distraction until GW2: Heart of Thorns arrives.