Lord of the Rings Online, Thoughts of a level 40 Elven Hunter

Like many Fantasy fans I used to play World of Warcraft. I didn't really get into it right away. It was a gift from a friend one year for Christmas. I played it off and on and enjoyed what I played, but at the time my computer wasn't really up to snuff and so I frequently got knocked off the game. As a result my friend got way beyond me level wise and I never really caught up. That seriously impacted my enjoyment of the game. True to real life, I had no better luck making new friends online than off. So I spent a lot of time playing by myself. When I got to top level, and because I didn't play a "Useful" spec I spent a lot of time bumming around capital cities trying to get into groups. After a while, I simply got tired of paying for this privilege, and quit. I dutifully came back each time an expansion was released, I'd play through the new content and then as usual, the same actions would repeat and I'd get left standing around in Ogrimar or Ironforge twiddling my virtual thumbs.

I realize that the following statement may sound odd for an mmo player to make, but I don't really like the "Multiplayer" aspect of the games. I'd be just as happy going back to the Neverwinter/Elder Scrolls model for Fantasy RPG's... I play too erratically to be relied upon, or to really find a group to play with.


World of Warcraft isn't really built to accommodate players that don't fall into either the dedicated camp or the casual camp. It's high end content is heinously difficult sometimes, frequently requiring guilds to maintain high numbers of alternate players, mid raid swap outs, and tremendous amounts of time and energy to complete. On the other end, some of their base level stuff is extremely simple, especially now after their various updates. It's fully possible to play through the entirety of levels 1-60 in a week's time without spending more than a few hours a day playing. It wasn't always that simple, but it was always accommodating to people who would maybe play an hour a day a few times a week. The Zones were small, the quests generally pretty easy. But for the middle ground it lacked some what, especially if you were mainly playing for the storyline.

In order to truly grasp the big picture, you had to play nearly every race/class combination for both factions. It had no "Story specific" quest lines. The closest you really got to that was the Missing Diplomat quest chain. This is where I feel Lord of the Rings Online really wins out.

It features some really difficult quests, and some enormously huge zones. I've been in the Lake Evendim zone for 8 levels now. The only wow zone that even approaches that is Stranglethorn Vale. It's not perfect though, some of the zones and quests have not been retooled for an individual player to complete yet. I've still got a couple of level 33 "Story Quests" kicking around because they are heinously difficult. But that was true of the level 30 and up zones on wow as well. It's the games way of telling you it's time to make friends.

Where as you can get to just about any place on wow in a few minutes, it can turn into a 45 minute long slog to get from Evendim to Rivendell, this is of course partly because there are certain transit stations you have to pay for separately every time you use in Lord of the Rings online. Which exemplifies exactly what makes it so different from wow. Your level of commitment to the game is proportional to how much you are willing to pay to play it.

For 0$ you can play a virtually limitless number of level 1-21 characters. You can experience the Shire, and Bree, just shy of making it to Weathertop. The important aspect is, almost from your first quest you are interacting with characters who are important. You are told that you as an individual player is valuable to the coming war effort. You are tasked with distracting black riders, trailing the fellowship, finding potent artifacts to be turned over to the big fish like Gandalf and Aragorn and Elrond. All of that for free. If you want to keep playing, you pay a fee and unlock a new zone and keep playing. The Lone Lands, The North Downs, The Tollshaws. Get bored? Don't buy any more. I've probably spent about 60$ already on the game, and haven't quite unlocked everything I would have had I bought the game when it first came out.

That Lifetime membership they sold for 200$, is still a fantastic deal, considering I've probably got another 100$ at least to spend before I've unlocked everything up to Mirkwood.. and a new Rohan/Isengard expansion is slated to come out later this year, I'd like to see it, but I've been playing this character for about 6 months now and still have another 20 levels before I will even make it to the first expansion. I'm sure I'll keep playing, but I've begun to feel what differentiated LOTRO from WOW is beginning to break down. It's beginning to feel that the things that made it different are dragging it over towards sameness. Difficulty meeting groups. WOW has addressed this marvelously with the cross server looking for group mechanic. You simply get in queue and the game will automatically assign you to a group.

So if anyone reading this has a character on Dwarrowdelf Server.. let me know if you want to group up.

Fallen off the wagon.

yup.. not proud of it.. but I've gone back to playing world of warcraft. I kept hearing all about all the changes that were being made to the game preparing for the launch of Cataclysm and I just had to check it out. The rumors of changes vastly shortchange the scope of the change. For all intents and purposes, this new game is WOW 2.

Even though I was never a very serious WOW player, I can already state unequivocally that it is a vastly different game, even while the mechanics are generally unchanged.

The general storyline has been advanced by about 5 years, which in my opinion vastly improves the general game. As some one who is generally concerned with the "big picture" rather than the small details, it always bugged me how despite all the enormous changes which were supposedly undertaken, the game never really altered because of them. Partly this was simply logistical, it costs money to change the game, and partly because the game designers didn't want to make new players feel as if there was no reason for them to stick around. This time however its not the case, the implementation of phasing has been brought into great effect on several zones, this is something I felt that Lord of the Rings online did very well. Now if Blizzard will implement the ability to move backwards through the phased zones in order for you to be able to help your lower level friends, they will have caught up to Turbine.

I decided that rather than using my old character, I'd simply start a new one, on a new server. I'm glad I did as its a vastly different experience this time. Dare I say it, being a low level character dosen't suck any more. The developers have redesigned nearly every zone in some way or another, they have re aligned quests so that they radiate around central hubs, making it much easier to do more than one quest at a time and cuts down on the backtracking which used to plague the game. Especially in the 30's to 40's which required tremendous amounts of travel and must have been some what similar to the "Doldrums" in the days of sailing ships.

They've clearly taken note of some of the most gregarious examples of these problems and fixed the majority of them. Some of the most obnoxious zones however, such as the dreaded Stranglethorn vale, still require a rather obscene amount of out-and-backing, but nothing to the extent to which it used to do. As a bonus they have also added a "Calling all heroes" bulletin to the capital cities, so that if you are at a loss as to where to go next, the board will provide you with a quest to seek out some one at the first quest hub in which ever zones you are currently at level to play in, this is a very nice touch.

I'm not sure yet how excited I am for Cataclysm itself to launch, the idea of having all those flying mounts circling me while I'm on a low level character is unnerving. And I'm still not entirely sure why, now that the events of the Burning crusade and war against Arthas are over, that we still have to go through the expansions in order to get to level 80. I could be mistaken, as I've not gotten far enough yet to find out, but I doubt seriously if there will be any attempt to explain these excursions via the story.

I doubt I will play for any considerable amount of time, but it is definitely enlightening to play it now, especially after having played several months of Lord of the Rings online, and previously over the year other MMO's such as Everquest 2 and Guild wars. It's nice to see what aspects of all these games are becoming standard for all MMO's.

MMORPGS, My Take.

Lord of the Rings Online is Turbine's answer to World of Warcraft. I have to admit, that when it launched, I was unimpressed with it. It was difficult to play, the graphics were not very good and it seemed to be very buggy. It didn't hold a candle to World of Warcraft. It was however, the second best MMORPG that I had played at that point. Easily outpacing the dreadful Final Fantasy 11 and lackluster Warhammer Online.

At the time I had not played Age of Conan, Guildwars or Everquest 2. I've played those three now as well. Guildwars is fun, but suffers from scale problems. It's not a very large game, and its updates are few and far between unless you want to shell out for the expansions, some of which are still going for full price despite the length of time they have been out. Age of Conan suffered from simply being excruciatingly difficult once you got into the "real" world.. huge grinds against enemies who easily outclassed your pitiful character, not to mention the ever present threat of randomly being killed by assassins. Everquest 2, I played at the behest of a friend. I'd grown up during the Evercrack fear mongering, and had never given it a second thought. Not to mention, I didn't have Internet during most of the time it was out. But EQ 2 was something of a surprise, it was generally pretty fun, it just had really poor graphics for a game they expected you to pay for.

I quit playing WOW a little over a year ago, I had completed all of the quests included in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. And one day it dawned on me how silly it was to keep shelling out money to loiter in Ironforge while waiting (usually in vain) to run the same dungeon I'd already run 50 times again. So I just stopped putting coins in the machine.

But recently, Turbine, who has Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online have converted them both over to a free to play via micro transaction scheme. I had played DDO this way, and didn't think much of it, but then DDO was apparently a pretty lackluster game to begin with. But when I saw they were fixing to have a Beta for LOTRO, I jumped at it. I can't say much, as I'm pretty sure I signed away my soul when I agreed to their EULA for the BETA.. But now that the actual game has launched. I have to say, I'm impressed.

They have clearly fixed some of the annoying problems the original had, toned down the monster and quest difficulty (sometimes to the point of being silly, but still) and the fact that you have to pay to unlock various things dosen't really negatively impact the game, at least not so far anyway. You have to unlock certain questing areas, but most of them unlock pretty cheap.. and certainly cheaper than paying a monthly subscription. And it is a style of pay for play that I feel vastly improves the over all experience. I don't feel as if I have to keep playing in order to get the most for my money. If I don't want to play at all, I've not lost anything. If I wanted to play a lot and run out of stuff to do, I can pay a bit (usually about 10$ for 100 - 200 new quests) and continue to play.

I'd not say the game is as much fun as WOW is, but WOW has a sort of homey cartoony feeling that is extremely inviting. And it is marked forever as absolutely being a Blizzard game. Lord of the Rings Online, dosen't really succeed in meshing with either the books, nor the live action films. But the people who assembled it clearly know their Tolkien lore, even if they have had to invent a tremendous amount of geography in order to fill in the blank spaces. In the North Downs, you can even do a quest for Trotter. If you don't follow that reference, you need to turn in your Tolkien fan card at the door on your way out.

And they give away the soundtrack for free. It's on Fileplanet.com, and if you ever need some good background music for a D&D game, or something along those lines.. its quite good.

I plan to play Final Fantasy 14 at some point, but currently all I've been able to find are the extremely expensive Collectors Editions. And since I have to pay for it every month, I don't really want to shell out two months subscription just to get an Onion Helmet. I'll give it a shot once I can play a demo.