Watching Margie play LotRO last night during the stress test reminded me of everything I loved and didn’t love about the game. (The comment above was hers, by the way, playing her “hot elf ranger chick with a bow” Frellian as I headed upstairs for bed.)
Big plus: the setting is still stunning, a beautiful and thoughtful rendering of Middle Earth. If you were going to make a LotRO MMO, it would be hard to craft it better than this.
Biggest minus: a lot of running around; still a lot of mining (harvesting, pruning, digging, skinning) resources; a lot of wild animals killed to get “a scrap of dirty hide,” “a tongue,” “a claw,” etc. Grand and epic, not so much.
Margie did show me some of the new mapping functions that make it a lot easier to find where your quest is located. I’m sure there are other QoL improvements, from what Doyce has written. But as I watched Margie, after hours of playing, still stopping by each bush, struggled to make sure she had her axe active vs. her hoe, and harvest off some wood for this and that, it still felt more like Starcraft than LotRO.
Not feeling any great compulsion to re-up. I dinged Molly Morningstar up to 24 on CoH and had a blast with it (literally, as I grabbed a pretty nasty Mental cone power to go with all of her Fire AoE attacks). We had a very good team, led by an excellent tank, which is just what Molly needs (keep the aggro off of me and gather all the baddies in one spot).
The LotRO stress test, btw, appears to have been pretty stressful, as both Margie and Avocet complained of major lag, especially earlier in the evening. That’s what they were trying to test for, of course, so I guess it was successful. No fabulous prize awarded to Margie, alas.
Margie and I (both working from home today) chatted a bit more about this.
She noted that we’ve both been canalized in our expectations and preferred play style by starting off with CoX (vs., say, WoW). Which may be true, which is why I try to not make blanket judgments and frame things as my preference. Not always successfully, of course.
One big distinction remains that LotRO has (at least at the low levels) very little instancing. As a result, you run into the annoyance of having to stand around glancing at your watch waiting for the Boss who the guy running to the zone ahead of you just ganked to respawn. Etc.
There’s also much more hunting in LotRO than in CoX (which was not what the original designers of CoX thought would be the case, which is why all the cities are overrun with mobs). Personally, I really dislike hunt missions, and will only take them when we’re trying to get our mission assignments from a contact in sync with each other.
That gets back to a point I snarked about above, is that LotRO has a lot more mundane activities (collect 15 bear pelts, slay 12 reep-a-cheepers, etc.) than CoX. While I’m sure Legolas was occasionally assigned as a young elf to collecting spider’s legs, it’s not the epic-heroic activity that I associate with him or with the LotR world. Even the hunt mishes … hunting bears just doesn’t seem as heroic as hunting Skullz (poor bears) (Yes, crass sentimentality, as bear hunting was both valuable and necessary at times in history — but, again, I look on LotRO not as a similation of Medieval Europe, but of the Lord of the Rings saga.)
Margie noted a few areas where the LotRO folks have tried to improve the QoL for folks jogging all over the place. One case she gave was where before out in the mountains near where all the wights hang out there was this abandoned gazebo and some mournful elf hanging out there. Now there’s an abandoned gazebo with the elf, another contact from town, and a grocer. Now, that makes for less jogging hither and thither, but it sort of upsets the whole “Lone Gazebo in the Mountains” image.
(Another way that the LotRO Devs could reduce the amount of running about would be, when a quest is done, allow an option to avoid running back to that contact (when what you really want to do is continue to the next area from where you are) by having some sort of picture-in-picture or cutscene describing how, yes, you traveled far to go back to Farmer Fred, and here’s what he said and did and the coins he gave you, then returning you to where you are presently standing. Perfectly good literary mechanism to avoid a bit of drudgery.
To be fair, Margie also noted one huge advantage LotRO has over CoX — being able to swap toons without freaking logging in again!
Okay, end of ranting.
Yeah, I forget that you missed out on Ultima Online which laid down the foundation on which MMO’s have been built ever since (Everquest built the first floor, garage, a wing and gazebo on to that Foundation and WoW made it so that it would all run on your grandmothers computer).
The things that you have issues with are pretty much the SOP of most MMO’s (Farming, crafting, economies) which CoX didn’t have to deal with for most of it’s existence because it had no economy. Once Wentworth’s was introduced, they now had an Economy and Farming (which I think I saw you write about lower down in regards to the MA). And yeah, most every MMO has the Quest Giver that tells you to go and collect x # of Rat Pelts or whatever.
Having played UO I was use to the concept and it is just part of the game for me, and I build alts to cover all the crafts so that I can share the resources around where needed, and then use whatever I make without having to buy it on the open market (Yes, I am my own cooperative! =P )
Some games do crafting really well (EQ2’s is the best I have seen in being able to build things that rival rewards and drops), some do not (AoC, which has the most useless crafting system I have seen other than the Alchemist…though it will hopefully be all fixed in the 1.5 update).
From what I have read, EVE Online has taken “Farming/Crafting” to the extreme.
So, to have an economy you need to have some level of Farming and Crafting, and you need to be able to build items that almost as good as the best items in the game.
You won’t know if Margie has won a prize for several weeks. They need to sift through the data and find out who was logged in and playing, then have a drawing to dispense the prizes. Winners will be notified by email.
Well, they had an economy (with farming) before that. It was just purely influence-based for buying of SOs and DOs. Crafting + Wentworths added another thick layer in that …
Except, really, you don’t need it. Pick stuff up, sell it off, buy DOs and SOs (or even IOs at auction), live happy, if you want. And even if you don’t, the “crafting” part is generally the only time sink — I rarely if ever spend any time having to “harvest” things. (There are ways to do that, but they really are for the hardcore.)
Now, that all said, I even find the economy in CoX annoying at times. The trick is, how do you add variation to activity (and character ability) without it?
But I will say, in CoX’s defense here, (a) You can pretty much avoid every single mission of that sort. Well, sometimes they show up in arc. But it’s for the most part (mercifully) avoiable. And (b) I still feel better being told to hunt down X number of miscreants (for some in-game reason) rather than hunting down X critters. My own goofiness, certainly, but for all that it’s annoying, it feels more in keeping with being a super-hero than in being an adventurer in Middle Earth.
Hmmm. Are there games where one of the “combats” is social vs martial? IOW, one of the big CoX hunt tropes is, “Interrogate 25 Skulls and find out what Bonebreaker has in mind.” Which is effectively no different from “Put at least 25 Skulls in jail,” based on what you actually end up doing. What if instead there were paths to “intimidate” or “schmooze” etc. up to 25 Skulls? Would there be an interest in that, do you suppose?
Oh, you can do that in any MMO, you just need to learn the game so that you can avoid those Quests. Or, better yet, Both EQ2 and AoC got really good about having quests grouped in an area of a zone, so that if you know you are going to be near where some fluffy bunnies are and you need some fluffy bunny pelts, just kill a few while you are moving around doing the other quests. Both with EQ2 and AoC (and CoX)I used the first character to the upper levels to learn the game, learn which quest lines or quest givers to avoid (usually the quests that do not give you much for the time expended, or are not on an arc with valuable gifts and prizes).
I don’t know if there are any out there like that (you may have to poke your nose into Free Realms to see what they have), but I am sure that it could be done, kind of like a mini game like how EQ2 does crafting. You would fight X, and a cut scene to where you use your skills to interrogate the baddy(s) you caught….I am sure it could be done, but since that kind of game would appeal to a part of the market that the game companies do not want to market too (i.e. would that be something that a 12-20 year old boy want to play?) I am not sure that kind of stuff would make it past Beta with all the Ganker kiddies whining and crying.
I don’t know if there’s any crafting system in any MMO that rivals SWG’s Droid Engineering. It was a complex, fun system.
So I have been told, but I assume that it and EQ2’s were simular since they were from the same company.
Free LotRO for a week from July 9th through July 15th. The beginner areas have been revamped, so this is a good time to create some new characters and see what’s changed.
Margie played around in the beginner areas during the last free weekend. She seemed pleased by the improvement, but not enought to keep jogging across Middle Earth.
LotRO goes free! http://www.lotro.com/news/709
You and Margie will have Premium status if you return. http://www.lotro.com/betasignup/vipchart.html