October 2015 - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

MMOS Worth Playing: Lord of the Rings Online

October 23, 2015 by Belghast

The Underdogs

This is the third week of my MMOs Worth Playing series, and at some point I am probably going to stop doing this introduction. My focus on the games I pick is to try and choose some of the awesome titles out there that may or may not be getting as much love as I think they deserve. No one needs to do a post on the reasons why you should be playing World of Warcraft, because there are tons of sites currently covering WoW. However there are a bunch of games that slip under the radar for one reason or another, and my goal is to pick some of those and talk about the things that interest me about the game. So far I have covered The Secret World and Rift, and this week I am digging up a title that I have not spent nearly as much time as I would have liked playing. I feel like I missed the boat with this title, and at this point there is just too much content for me to ever hope to catch up. I am talking about Lord of the Rings Online, which honestly is a quiet juggernaut of available content and things to do.

The Hook

Shortly after posting my last write-up, someone asked me what the hook for Lord of the Rings Online was… and honestly if that title does not inspire magical tingly feelings down your spine then more than likely this is not a game for you. The hook of this game is and will always be that you get to wander around in the Middle Earth Setting from the Tolkien novels. That is perhaps the first distinction I should make. While this game draws some on the visual styling of the movies… it is very much a product of the literary source. As a result you are going to see more of the world than you ever saw in the movies. For example the movies cut out the entire Tom Bombadil/Barrow Downs section of the books… and here you get to experience them in all their glory. The Barrow Downs area was seriously one of my favorite parts of the early game, and exploring the tombs felt just like reading about the Barrow Wights for the first time. Rolling up on Weather Top, or Rivendell is just amazing… because here is this thing that you already know so much about… that you are seeing fleshed out and made far more real.

The biggest take away from the setting that I can give you is that it is huge, and feels more like a real world than most MMOs do. There are all sorts of little things that draw you into the world. When you ride past this or that stand of trees… it might scare a flock of birds to take to the air.. making it feel like this living breathing world that you get to explore. Travel is one of the frustrations most people have with this game, in that the it requires you to memorize a series of routes that remind me quite a bit of the way travel in Dark Age of Camelot felt. That said this also makes the world feel like something that actual people are living in… because people are messy and chaotic and pretty much buck order. Think of your own surroundings… is it actually laid out in a manner that is consistent from town to town? The amount of distance that you have to cross ends up slowing your gameplay down, and putting you in a mode where you are really enjoying the setting as much as you are the game. There are so many little nuggets of detail scattered through the land that you can only see if you are not passing over them at irrational speeds.

Completionists Dream

In many ways this game was doomed at launch by being thrown in a bucket of “WoW Clones” because honestly… the interface does feel extremely similar to the World of Warcraft standard. However the game has always felt like a bit of a throwback to an earlier time, and a much less arcade gameplay experience. The game has one of the more intricate and rewarding crafting systems, and I found wandering the countryside looking for nodes to harvest a pretty enjoyable use of an afternoon. Where the game gets really intricate however is the “Deed” system, which I realize is a proper use of the word… but for some reason I always think of housing. Essentially every action that you can take in the game more than likely has some sort of a deed associated with it. These deeds however are largely invisible to the user until they go to a specific area or do a specific thing. From there it starts a completion bar explaining what you need to do to complete the deed which then appears in your log.

What makes this system interesting is that they are for all sorts of tasks. They might involve you exploring an area and finding specific landmarks on the map and clicking on each of them, or they might involve you doing specific combat attacks a number of times. Some of them involve you taking down a fixed number of mobs of a specific type. Equally varied are the rewards. This game is huge on handing out titles for damned near everything, which makes it really interesting as you roam the country side. There are far fewer “Hand of Adal” type titles, and more intimate and custom ones. I for example tend to rock the “Enemy of the Dead” title gained from slaying members of “The Dead” type… namely undead, wights and the sort which are one of the ancestral enemies of “man”. The important bit from deeds is the ones that unlock your Class Traits.

This game is full of systems within systems, and the Traits are a talent point type system that falls into three categories: Class, Racial and Virtues. Class traits tend to increase the effectiveness of your class abilities. Virtues are pure stat increases, and the type of stats increased vary based on the virtue you are choosing. Finally the Racial traits are this odd mix of abilities and stat boosts that are designed to take the place of “racial bonuses” in most other games. The end result makes them feel far more fleshed out, and gives every race in the game a specific flavor other than their visual characteristics. The gotcha here is that in order to progress you really need to be paying attention to your deeds, because these traits end up giving you a huge boost to your effectiveness. In theory you could probably level through the game without doing any… but it would be highly unlikely that you could actually complete any of the end game or likely even dungeon content without some focusing through these abilities.

The Pricing Model

Turbine with Lord of the Rings was one of the very first successful and even viable free to play pricing models. It is a mixture of stick and carrot that no other game seems to have completely replicated. Completely free to play characters are extremely limited in what they can do. They are limited in their chat functionality, and the amount of money they can earn… and most importantly for me the number of bag slots they have access to. All of the rich systems in the game are essentially on an adhoc basis forcing you to purchase wardrobe access, auction slots, and individual trait slots. One of the interesting things about this system is that you transition from free to play status to “premium” the moment you purchase anything from the turbine store. This unlocks a bunch of things including increasing your bag slots to five, and this essentially stays unlocked for the life of your account. This means that once you have actually bought any of the unlocks it greatly upgrades your account making it pretty damned playable. Granted when I have played this game actively I usually subscribe, but over the last few weeks I have been poking my head in to take screenshots and found the game play pretty viable in freemium mode.

The downside however is that I consider the Turbine store to be one of the more expensive to actually purchase anything on. Horses are essentially $20 regardless of how you chop it by the time you factor in the mount and the actual riding skill. Compare this to Rift where you can pick up a basic mount for only a few dollars worth of in store currency. This was one of the first, but unfortunately it has not really taken into account the fact that other models are out there and are more equitable to the player. They do however run a lot of store sales, and unlike most games you can actually earn turbine points by completing content in game. Granted you are awarded them five to ten at a time.. and you need 2000 or so to unlock most of the things people would be interested in like new classes. It does however give players the option to grind out content to earn cash shop currency to purchase things like trait unlocks and extra inventory and vault storage. I file this system in the realm of not optimal but not nearly as “anti player” as the SWTOR free to play model.

The Community

The game is extremely rich and interesting… but in truth you are not going to be playing Lord of the Rings Online for the game itself. You are going to be playing this game for the amazing story that allows you to play a character in the background of this world as you mirror the events of the Fellowship. It is like playing Star Wars but playing Wedge Antilles instead of Luke Skywalker. You are doing super important things, but you aren’t ever going to get the kind of broad credit and fame that the stars of the show are getting. This ends up making the quests feel all the more rich because you know a bit of back story already, and they are filling in details of the setting and giving you insider information on the world. Even more importantly than this however… is that you will be playing Lord of the Rings online for the community. Now I am a huge fan of communities that are active and vibrant and I tend to be drawn towards role-playing environments… even though I am not myself much of a role-player. I currently play on the Landroval server and I have to say it is pretty amazing.

This game has spent so much time on providing settings for the players to interact and mingle, and has quite possibly one of the coolest sub systems I have seen in any system. There are instruments in game that can actually be played by the characters, or you can read in midi sequences from text files that then get interpreted with the in game instruments. This allows the players to do really interesting things… like hold concerts and places like the Prancing Pony Inn in Bree are a hotbed of folks showing off. I rolled in last night and saw the band from the first image above performing in a corner of the Inn. Outside there is a full concert stage, and normally there is another group set up there playing songs for the passers by. There is never a moment in any of the hubs where there is not some role-playing going on, and people have always been super open to answering questions from new comers. In terms of friendliness I would put Landroval up there with Antonia Bayle in EQ2 and Entity in Wildstar, and that is saying a lot. I have also heard that the Windfola server was pretty amazing… but unfortunately I believe it was a casualty of the server merges. It seems like about half of the people I knew from Windfola are now on Landroval… and another batch ended up moving to Arkenstone. I have a feeling that honestly whatever server you end up on, is going to be a great place to land. The game is well worth a download and giving it some time to explore. The biggest word of advice I will give you however is to take it slow. This game is a much more gradual game than players are used to these days, and if given the proper amount of time to allow yourself to wander and inhabit the world… I have a feeling you will greatly enjoy your experience.

Loving Fabian Strategy

October 22, 2015 by Belghast

Nightstalker or Not

Over the last few days I have been irrationally sick. The part of this that sucks is the fact that Knights of the Fallen Empire has been released… and I have honestly barely spent any time in SWTOR. I keep going in there and attempting to play, but the whole standard questing construct is just something I cannot handle right now. If it involves reading or honestly paying attention too closely to anything… it is pretty much ruled out in my current state. The funny thing is that playing Destiny works just fine. I guess that is because most of that game I have committed to muscle memory, and while I may not be able to aim as straight or move as fast… I can still function pretty well on auto pilot. As a result I have been working on my second character, the Hunter. By working I mean… I consumed my “free level 25 token” and pushed it from 25 to 40. I still have yet to beat the actual quest content, but I have been having a blast doing patrol missions and completing bounties. Right now I am mostly focused on Nightstalker but there are some quirks about the class I really do not like. As awesome as Shadowshot is… it just isn’t in the same class of abilities as Hammer of Sol or Fist of Havoc. It requires you to follow up with something else to take down the target rather than simply evaporating them.

Additionally my biggest problem with the class is that it seems to have shitty grenades. I am so used to throwing grenades constantly as a Titan… especially as a Sunbreaker with their amazing sticky grenades… and the options I have so far for Nightstalker just seem rather crappy. I need to branch out and try some of the other classes, because honestly I was enjoying Bladedancer quite a bit before I completed the quest that unlocked Nightstalker and decided to go that direction. Both the the Shadowshot and Arc Blade supers though are far more fiddly than I am used to as a Titan which is all about smashing or exploding things. At some point I plan on leveling my Warlock as well so I can see what that side of the house looks like also. So far though I just can’t get into the Warlock as much as I can the Hunter and Titan. I guess it is my whole allergy to magic getting in the way again. While technically it is just as strong as the Titan… it FEELS weaker since it isn’t nearly as armor bound. Then there is the melee attack… the Titan Punch and the Hunter Stab… both feel amazing and visceral whereas the Warlock Palm Explosion thing just feels wrong. I realize the whole battle caster thing is a fantasy fulfillment for some people…. but it just isn’t for me.

A “Lousy” Gun

Another accomplishment is that I finally hit rank three with the Gunsmith which started my next “back in the saddle” quest, this time involving Auto Rifles. It was kinda cool since I am on a bit of an auto rifle kick lately. That is the strange thing about Destiny… is that I will get a new weapon… that causes me to re-evaluate my feelings about an entire sub class of weapons. I spent a lot of time on the Hunter using an Auto Rifle largely because that is what I happened to have laying around in my vault. Then when I got to 40 I handed the hunter a bunch of past armsday orders… which included a pretty nice Hakke Auto Rifle that I never really gave much attention to. The faction three Gunsmith quest involves killing 100 mobs with an Auto Rifle while you have a telemetry device active… aka a class item with the auto rifle leveling boost. After that you dismantle four blue auto rifles or two purple ones, and bam you complete the quest and are handed apparently a Titan exclusive Auto Rifle called the Fabian Strategy. Honestly the gun has some strange things about it… and the fact that it is locked into iron sights mode at first seemed like a massive detriment.

Then I actually used it… I took it to the dreadnought and into a few strikes and I have to say I fell in love with the gun. Now every guide maker is going to tell you just how bad this gun is. In fact Briar Rabbit devoted an episode of Shard It or Keep It to the weapon… and the only real positives he was able to come up with was that it felt cool and looked unique. I guess for me that is enough, because the way this gun handles as compared to most auto rifles just is… “different” and I am having trouble quantifying that. It feels like you can just chew through damned near anything, and it does just enough impact to push back anything yellow or lower. Granted it sometimes takes all forty eight rounds in the magazine… but I have shredded those crazy buffed imperial centurions on during the skyburners event with this thing like it was nothing. The big thing for me… and why I am now using it is strikes is the the combination of Crowd Control and Life Support. There were several times where I went into a pack of mobs at low health and exited moments later with full health just from the kill triggered regeneration. This weapon makes me FEEL like the unstoppable Titan I am supposed to be. Folks are going to tell you that this weapon is not worth an exotic slot… and I get that… because the special perk of the gun doesn’t seem to do all that much. That said I love the look and the feel and am probably going to start gearing for auto rifle perks just because of this gun.

Future Disappointment

October 21, 2015 by Belghast

Future Is Disappointing

I am home sick today fighting some sort of flu like chest crud, and as a result I am taking a bit longer than normal to knock out a blog post. It will soon be evident that today you will be unable to escape the fact that this is “back to the future day”, or at least the day that Marty McFly supposedly went forward in time to. While I have a heaping helping of nostalgia about Back to the Future in general, I have to say the future is always a bit of a disappointment. If you asked my thirteen year old self, what the future would be like… he probably would have bought into the fantasy of Back to the Future 2. At the very least I expected to have flying cars, and to have colonized the moon… but what happened instead was potentially stranger and more interesting. Futurism is almost always inherently wrong. We envision the future as delivered by the things we can dream about today. As new technologies evolve they shape that vision, and we are historically bad at guessing what trends will look like in five years… let alone ten… or in the case of this vision of the future twenty six years. Something odd happens when you place a goal on the horizon… people tend to start working towards that. So in a swell of nostalgia… we have actually seen hoverboards, self lacing shoes, and even the goofy pepsi bottle… because this movie TOLD us to make it.

This happens all the time and more often than not we don’t even notice. The bright colorful ubiquitous Verbatim 3.5″ floppy disks I am sure look like they do, because almost the exact same thing existed on Star Trek as a means of reading and writing data. Similarly the iPad looks an awful lot like the handheld LCARS tablet device carried on Star Trek the Next Generation. The internet as we know it… seems to have patterned itself off of the futurism of William Gibson. The reason why this happens is that technologists are generally geeks… and geeks love geek culture. Even if you don’t mean to… we are all subconsciously influenced by the things we love. The problem is… in the case of Back to the Future… none of the technologies that have showed up are really “true”. They are media stunts that have been created to prove that it “could” be done, but not necessarily something that is a widely accepted and adopted technology. The flying car for example, for the majority of my life has always been ten years away. The problem is that ten year mark never actually arrives… and my big concern is that we just are not investing enough in the future as a whole. Our space program is in shambles, and the corporate sector is constantly focusing on what brings them profits six months down the road instead of six years. It feels like we have stagnated, and most of what we are getting as far as innovations go are just constant iterations on the same ideas. This makes me concerned that the future will never actually arrive… or at least when it gets here it will be Shadowrun instead of Star Trek.

The Height Poll

If you follow me on twitter… or any other network that my twitter re-syndicates to… you may have noticed a poll that I sent out yesterday. Some people called it the strangest gaming poll they have seen… and I feel like maybe I need to supply some explanation. I am tall in real life… sitting around six foot four inches. This is tall enough that you realize that the world was not built for someone of your height. I am constantly banging my head on ceiling fans, the occasional low door frame, and have to be super careful when getting in and out of cars. As a result when I play games… especially MMORPGs I tend to play significantly shorter races. My first character in Everquest was a Dwarf, and I have had an affinity for little races including my current Lalafell in Final Fantasy XIV. In a conversation with another friend I found out that she was short… and had a similar experience… preferring to play taller races. So that got me thinking… which lead to the poll wondering if this is common place or if we are outliers. I thank everyone that voted in the poll, because it produced the image you see above. If anyone else wants to join in the question you can either click the link above or the image to launch into the strawpoll.

One thing I left off the poll is the folks who are medium height and prefer to also play medium height characters. I am assuming that a lot of those people voted “no real preference”, but in truth I was mostly interested in the relation between the extremes. It turns out that I am apparently not the normal, at least in terms of this question. Based on the poll it seems like the majority of players either have no real preference or prefer to stick with their same height regardless of the games they are playing. Only a few of each type preferred to play the opposite of whatever they are in real life. I guess that says a lot of things, and mostly that people tend to be happy with themselves. For me at least when I play a character in a game I tend to create a revised version of myself, where I fix the things that I dislike about myself… creating a “Ultimate Belghast”. I guess if I were being completely honest with myself… were I to “fix” my height I would not actually go “short” but instead trend towards medium. For a man it seems like six feet tall is about the sweet spot… the point at which the entire world seems to be built around that height. I’d never have to worry about leaning down in hotel showers so that the shower head can hit me… never have to worry about banging my head on things… and wouldn’t have to constantly search for “tall” sizes. Four inches doesn’t seem like much of a difference but in terms of functioning in the world it really is. Nonetheless I thought it was an interesting poll question and it was awesome that folks were willing to take it.

Gaming Muggles

October 20, 2015 by Belghast

Non-Gaming Spouse

@ModeratePeril I'd actually be interested in hearing about this and how you balance gaming with a non-gaming spouse.

— Jumpscare Jessica (@heyitsliore) October 19, 2015

Last night I kinda barged into an interesting conversation on twitter between some of my fellow TGENerates. This morning I thought I would write a bit about it, in a very non-standard blog post for me. While I don’t refer to her as a Gaming Muggle… I guess that would probably be a potential term for my own spouse. She doesn’t identify with the term gamer, even though she owned an Atari, a Nintendo, and currently plays more mobile games than I will likely ever play in my life. However because she tends to play spider solitaire or sudoku… she doesn’t consider it gaming. The truth is gaming left her when it went three dimensional, and what I mean by that is… she is capable of dealing with two dimensional planes and moving objects across them. However since her eyes never fused completely, she struggles with depth perception type tasks… especially in the virtual world where there are far less visual queues so to where an object is in relation to other objects. So I can remember her happily playing Tetris Attack in my college apartment, but once we moved to the Nintendo 64… that era was pretty much dead to her. My wife however is absolutely a geek, and we actually met due to our at the time shared IRC addiction. We were introduced by a man in Belgium, even though we grew up thirty minutes apart.

I will admit I have always been more than a little jealous of “gamer couples”, and seeing them in the various games I have played exploring these virtual worlds together. That said I know in the case of my wife and I we would probably just drive each other insane. We are both extremely good at the things we do… we just get to the same conclusion in vastly different ways. For example when we clean the house we tend to divide and conquer, each taking specific rooms. The reason being if we are trying to clean the same room at the same time we just end up getting in each others way. My fear is that in gaming the same would be true, with her taking one path, and me taking another… but ultimately ending up in the same location at the end. She has this inborn sense of direction that I have always coveted, because I have to navigate based on landmarks… and get completely lost when those landmarks are missing or have changed. I can enter a subdivision and within minutes have no clue which direction I am going anymore… and somehow she can magically tell me exactly what our heading is at any point during the trip. So I think she would honestly probably be far better at navigation than I would even in the virtual space.

Keeping Grounded

Over the years I have come to realize that having a non-gaming spouse is actually a big benefit for me personally. Everquest was essentially my first MMO, and it bit hold of me hard. Essentially the ability to explore a fantasy world was the sort of thing I had always craved, and giving me an always on persistent world to do it in… was absolute crack. The truth is that for most people that got really hooked on that game… it was in fact like a drug. There were more than a few people that I know that changed almost everything about their lives to adjust to doing things in Everquest. The ones who had it worse in a way were the ones with spouses also addicted to that game. I watched my friends alienate other friends, blow off jobs, and ultimately destroy relationships because of it. While playing I watched more than one marriage disintegrate, as some folks simply forgot to keep checking into the world. Bills may or may not have gotten paid, kids and animals may or may not have gotten fed. There was a bit of a dark underbelly to that game, and as a result it made me realize how lucky I am to have someone to forcibly pull me out of some of those mires.

To answer Liore’s question… how does one balance? Well having that person that isn’t doing the thing that you are doing… helps me at least realize that there is a world other than the games I happen to be playing. It isn’t exactly easy sometimes, especially considering that the reason why I game as much as I do is because my spouse is often busy with her own work. My wife is a rockstar teacher and because of that ends up spending upwards of eighty hours a week working on this or that item for her classroom. She takes it all super seriously, and because of that they have piled on so many extra duties. So there are a lot of times where I am busy with a game, and she is busy with lesson plans… and we are in completely different rooms conversing over instant messenger. It works… because we know we are in this together. The relationship is in the little things, and the fact that for the most part we “get” each other. I made the comment last night that “marriage is a strange thing… you never really know what is going to work… until it does” and that really is the case. I don’t know how or why it works… but it does and we have been together nineteen years… and married seventeen.

Complimentary Differences

I think the reason why we work is because on some levels we are completely and utterly different people. There are times it feels like the only thing we share in common, is our love for each other. I love Horror and Science Fiction movies… and she loves Home Improvement Television and Crime Dramas. She is very religious… and I am pretty deeply anti-religion in general. But the strange thing is… or differences make us stronger as a whole. We are unlike most couples in that from the moment we go together we were pretty much a team. Hell in college we pooled all of our resources into a joint bank account and pretty much supported each other, and I know married couples that have never had a joint bank account in their lives. This common sense of struggle together means that pretty much everything is tackled as a team. So if I don’t know how to do something, and she does… and then sometimes she doesn’t know how to do something, I do… we have a wider range of skills that make it easier to tackle things. I think the fundamental truth is that we have faith in each other, to do the things that we know we can’t ourselves.

What also makes it work is that for the most part we “get” and respect the things we choose to do. While I may not understand the concepts my wife is teaching… because Math has always been my weakest area… I get why she needs resources that her school cannot provide her, and never begrudge getting those items regardless of cost. Similarly my wife doesn’t necessarily understand why I love Star Wars or Lego.. or the countless game franchises I do… but she is constantly on the look out for things she knows I will like. The other day she found me an awesome R2-D2 skull cap that I plan on rocking this winter when it gets cold. She has also come home with Legos that she happens to find on sale somewhere, thinking I would like them. Similarly I am constantly searching for whatever things she is into, and have gone to silly lengths to track down whatever it is that she is hunting for. So while I might have a “muggle” wife… she certainly knows the important bits, and at the same time reminds me that there is a world just outside our door as well.