MMORPG Archives - Page 233 of 399 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Media Consumption – Blizzcon 2015 Edition

November 7, 2015 by Belghast

Interesting Day

Last week I had this grand plan of hanging out at home and watching BlizzCon 2015, so I took the day off work. Then as we got closer to the day, it suddenly filled up with other things I needed to do. Our house looked like madness yesterday with three vehicles of the contractors working on the siding and minor renovations, and another truck for the heating and air company. All of this while my wife and I were being forced to park in the next door neighbors driveway. Thankfully they were not here the last few days, otherwise I have no clue what we would be doing for parking. I am sure the neighbors are wondering what manner of insanity we are up to… as at one point yesterday we had a guy stop and gawk for a few minutes without asking anything. I guess that is the benefit of not actually knowing half of your neighbors is that you don’t have to make the same small talk over and over when something like this happens. This morning in honor of BlizzCon however I am going to talk about the things that interested me.

Diablo 3

I am leading off what was I originally thought going to be the big disappointment of the day. Blizzard did what they always do and rolled out everything that was new and shiny in their opening ceremony. The problem being… they said absolutely nothing about Diablo 3 which has turned out to be probably the game in their lineup that I care the most about. I had hoped they would announce another expansion this year, but alas that didn’t happen. However I am completely fine with this because the Diablo 3 panel later in the evening pretty much showed me that the team is quietly doing awesome stuff, in spite of apparently being ignored by Blizzard as a whole. The presentation was essentially a rapid fire series of announcements of new features. The one nearest and dearest to my heart surrounds the season play functionality. They have essentially sorted out that they are going to make seasons three months long, meaning at the end of that three months there will be new content leading into the next season. They said this gives players enough time to really deeply experience it… and also fits players like myself that swoop in… play enough to get the easy rewards and stop playing for a bit.

The biggest announcement as far as I am concerned is the “Rebirth” feature, which will allow you to essentially reboot a previous character and turn it into a new seasonal character. All of the gear that was on the character gets mailed to the account, and that character gets dialed back to level 1… but keeps achievements, hours played etc. It sounded like maybe there would be a special set of achievements for reboots, but essentially it solves the problem I always have of feeling like I have to create something brand new to be able to play along in the season again. They are also adding additional stash space… and the ability to earn slots by completing the seasonal journey on a character, up to 10 slots total. This all honestly would have been enough for me, but they are revising the buff system, changing the way damage is shown… adding a whole item set dungeon functionality where specific dungeons will require you have an item set equipped and then have challenges based on the strength of that set. On top of all of this… new zone and some expanded areas which makes 2.4 pretty damned awesome and it apparently goes up on the PTR next week.

Heroes of the Storm

The highlight of the Heroes discussion is the fact that we are getting Genn Greymane as a playable champion. This is absolutely hands down my favorite Alliance leader… that isn’t given the respect of having his own damned town to govern. I am still a little sore that Gilneas never became someplace we could actually use as a capitol city. I would seriously bank in that town all of the damned time if they allowed me to. All the same however it is awesome to have him as a champion and it looks like the gameplay is going to be based around changing in and out of Worgen form. The other interesting tidbit is that it seems like they are introducing ARAM for Heroes of the Storm. The details were pretty scant and I have not watched any of the panels for Heroes yet… but from the sounds of it, the mode seemed to put a random group of champions against another random group of champions just like “All Random All Middle” mode in League of Legends.

I am honestly all about that because ARAM is probably my favorite mode to play in League. Mostly because it takes all of the pressure off in that if you are getting randomly assigned a champion… no one can complain too much about you not being able to play it terribly well. I’ve found it a great way to get my feet wet and get used to how a champion performs under actual combat situations. The other interesting thing from the show was the introduction of Cho’Gall the two headed ogre. This is a champion that is literally played by two different players. I am assuming that one controls the movement and the other controls the combat at least to some extent. Everyone with a BlizzCon virtual ticket will be getting it added to their account… and then they can play matches with other players to pass the character on. After two matches a player will earn their own copy of Cho’gall and after I think they said four matches the original player gets a sack of gold for spreading the madness. It sounds cool and it is awesome to see this game thriving.

Hearthstone

The highlight of this announcement was awesome new Brann Bronzebeard artwork. Hearthstone is one of those games that I like, but rarely actually boot up to play. I am not sure what it is about the game, but essentially I keep playing the same deck over and over without changing it up much. It is like this game requires too much of me to actually get in and sort out the decks I might want to build. I am happy that it seems to be doing well, and I am happy that it has a meta that is very much alive. That said I felt generally meh when listening to them talk about the gameplay. I feel like maybe if it ran for shit on my iPad I would play it more, but I struggle with this game in the same way that I struggle with so many mobile games. It requires too much of me to pop into it while waiting on something… but it just isn’t sticky enough to make me choose to play it over literally any other game I have installed on my computer or consoles. There just is rarely ever a situation where I am going to pick this over an MMO or a single player game experience. I have so many other games to play… and honestly most of the time too damned many. The hearthstone fans seemed to be really happy, so I am never going to rain on their parade with my own “meh”.

Overwatch

I won’t lie the highlight of the Overwatch presentation for me was seeing just how awesome the Mercy Wings are in Diablo 3. Other than that I loved the Mei reveal, because she was freaking adorable… and also looked like a really fun zone control champion to play. Similarly I thought D.Va was a pretty cool concept, but I doubt I could ever see myself playing her. The boot up sequence of her HUD was awesome, in that it showed a cute bunny icon while it was loading. I really don’t care for the design of her Mech, which is my main problem with her as a champion. There is just something wrong looking about it… I get they were going for a jet with legs after the reboot that allows her to fly… but a Guardian Mode Veritech is a better version of what they were trying to accomplish. Though I think the design they came up with was largely a compromise to save space on the screen.

I have to admit I was largely tempted when they announced this would be coming to PS4. The problem there is that the Xbox and PS4 Blizard games are disconnected from Battle.net. That is my biggest problem with playing Diablo 3 on the PS4 is that I am stuck with only having access to my PSN friends… which are in no way as long of a list of Blizzard fans as the Battle.net account. So even though I am going through a bit of a renaissance of console gaming… I am ultimately going to go with the mouse and keyboard of the PC and essentially have to reacquaint myself with that sort of game play. I agree with Kodra in his belief that playing with a controller on a PC is a trap when it comes to a competitive FPS. There are times I have even considered picking up a XIM4 for my PS4 so I have the option of playing with a keyboard and mouse there as well. The PS4 natively supports USB and Bluetooth keyboards and mice… but very few games actually support that. Mostly right now I just want to get into the Overwatch beta… and I am hoping that will be a thing that happens soon.

Warcraft Movie

I have to admit on this one that before this trailer I had not really given much of a shit about the Warcraft movie. But man… those feels while I watched this. I have just been burned in the past when a franchise that I love was turned into a movie… at least from the gaming side of things. Does anyone remember how horrible the Dungeons and Dragons movie was? or Doom? This however…. looks like it is going to be a really good movie and revitalize the Warcraft franchise for a whole new generation. Maybe it is just the hype I am feeling about Star Wars spilling over into Warcraft… but I am feeling like now is the time to set aside old grudges and just embrace any fandom wholeheartedly. Both Durotar and Lothar were awesome in the trailer, and I think they were probably right to make this a Warcraft movie… and not a World of Warcraft movie. My hope is that along with this we maybe see a rebooted version of the original Warcraft RTS franchise. In any case regardless I know what I will be doing next June… sitting in the theater and watching this movie.

Legion Expansion

Now we finally get to the low point of Blizzcon… which I guess tells you how far my tastes have changed. I was completely amped about most of the above announcements other than maybe Hearthstone. I wholeheartedly love Blizzard games… but I have just reached the point where World of Warcraft is my least favorite of them. The cinematic trailer was nice… but I honestly had hoped that maybe we would have seen Varian die during it… or at least I thought that was what we were going to see for a bit. For years Varian was supposed to be “our thrall” but he has always been this paper thin super one dimensional character. His son on the other hand… Anduin has gone through some actually interesting changes especially during Pandaria. So my hope was that we would see Varian dying during this siege and passing the banner to his son who is more than likely far more capable a leader. The trailer also gave me hope that maybe just maybe they would finally be retiring the tired old shtick of Alliance versus Horde and giving us the ability to play with friends from both factions. Look… it is a dream that I am not going to let go of ever… I hate faction bullshit.

For the most part there is a lot of interesting things at work here… but I lack the faith that they are going to be carried out in a fashion I am going to like. It is my honest hope that I get into the beta testing process so I can see if I like it or not. I big nail in the coffin for Warlords was how badly they made the Deathknights feel… so I guess there are a lot of things that sound good on paper but never quite work right when you put them into practice. I am absolutely willing to give this game a shot, but I want to know that I will actually like it before I plunk down that pre-order. The new zones do look absoultely amazing however. They are pushing this aging engine for every ounce of oomph that it can muster, and I love that. The way WoW looks right now, reminds me of the way late in a generation console games look… when they have really figured out how to make the most of the resources they have to work with. This expansion is a bunch of really good ideas, that just don’t seem to be connected by enough tissue to hold them together. My disappointment largely was that the game didn’t really give me that moment of “fuck yeah!” that I have had in previous expansions. It did however give me a lot of moments of “that sounds cool”, especially when it comes to the non-linear leveling process for the new content. Unfortunately that same level scaling won’t apply to the rest of the world… so we are again creating this walled garden of “good” content and everything older will feel like crap as a result.

MMOs Worth Playing – World of Warcraft

November 6, 2015 by Belghast

Changing Course

When I started this segment of my blog the original intent was to highlight games that are not getting a lot of press and talk about all of the things I like about them. That said since the column is called “MMOs Worth Playing” I knew eventually I would have to get around to talking about some of the bigger names. So as a result I am going to have a momentary lapse of purpose here… and go with serendipity. Today’s is coming on the morning that BlizzCon 2015 starts, and as a result it just felt natural to talk about World of Warcraft. There was never a point where I would not ultimately end up covering the game, given that in many of the discussions I end up talking about it. So here we go… my attempt to create an overly positive discussion about the benefits of World of Warcraft.

The Standard

In every industry there is a leader that for the most part everyone gets compared to. In the MMO world this leader is World of Warcraft. Even though this has become the stuff of internet memes… it is by no means the first MMO, or in truth did it invent many of the things that folks attribute to it. That said it did manage to take the model that was burgeoning at the time of its release… knock off the rough spots and sand it to a mirror shine. Blizzard is really good at making games that appeal to the masses, and World of Warcraft is no exception. The problem is… the “appealing to the masses” has been a moving target causing the game to shift and dodge numerous times along the path. Each time it has changed course it has created a set of fans nostalgic for their imagined version of “the way things used to be”. So here we are today, with a legion of fan… some joyous, some in denial, and some begrudgingly along for the ride. Everyone has a World of Warcraft story, and if they don’t… they should. Every so often a questionnaire circulates through the community asking what game you would suggest a person with zero experience in MMOs should play… and the only actual answer you can give is in fact World of Warcraft.

This is the game that takes the complex concepts of an MMO and feeds it to players in bite sized chunks at just the right times to convert them from a MMO gaming neophyte to a seasoned veteran. The problem is that we have seen is that Warcraft is really good at creating Warcraft players, because many of these gamers never really venture out into other games. This is in many ways a failing of the other companies to embrace the same sort of low level educational campaign that Warcraft has. Sure to us long time players we see the Cataclysm revamp of the newbie zones as a travesty, but in each case they just work better… when you view them through the eyes of someone who has zero ancestral knowledge into the way that these games work. Each blatant breadcrumb, or cheese quest designed only to deliver you to the next quest hub… is honestly not for us, but instead for the players that NEED those clear indicators of what they should be doing next. We recently saw the subscription numbers for Warcraft and in part that number is due to the fact that a decade later they can still manage to induct brand new players into the tribe of WoW.

The Paradox

I am naming this section the Paradox because it highlights something odd in the game. When people leave Warcraft it is generally stated that they are leaving because they have “run out of things to do”. The problem that a game like WoW creates is that in order to keep the front edge of players happy, they have to keep cranking out content… something that Blizzard has proven to find difficult in the massive lags between end of expansion patches and the new expansion. The paradox comes in that one of the big reasons why I would suggest this game is that there is so damned much content to experience. Sure it might not be anything a veteran player wants to do… but for a brand new player this is a smorgasbord of brand new experiences and over a decade worth of sights and vistas to experience. World of Warcraft is by no means a gorgeous game at this point, because it feels a decade old at times… but there are still moments that are breath taking, like the first time you roll into Booty Bay and see the giant Goblin statue, or the first time you look down from the top of Thunderbluff onto the valleys below. These are important experiences that I feel like no one should rob themselves of.

So many of my good memories of this game however come from the interaction with the people. Part of my nostalgic chagrin however is realizing that so many of those players are no longer playing the game. Many of my best memories are tied to specific moments in the games history that will never come back. That however is not to say that each and every night new memories are not being made. People are still loving this game with all of their heart, and I have stated this before that I am more than a little jealous of them. I miss the types of experiences I used to have in World of Warcraft, but since many of those were tied to my “first time” doing this or that… I realize those are experiences I will never be able to have again. This is a game I was utterly devoted to for over half of that decade, and still have pangs of remorse when I think about those things I have lost. This game is powerful, and the experiences you have through it are equally powerful. Which is why I feel like everyone should step foot in the game and find their own version of those “first times”.

The Model

As I said many of those moments were because of the other players, but one of the benefits about starting World of Warcraft at this point… is that essentially everything is available to you as a solo player. That is not to say that I do not suggest that you find your way into a really good guild, because guilds make the entire experience better regardless of the game. However there really should be nothing locked from you because you did not bring a legion of friends into it. The game itself is subscription based, but you can get a free trial account to start and dip your toes into the water. If you end up liking it, the base game is $19.99 and will carry you through level 90, with the latest expansion Warlords of Draenor costing $49.99 on top of that. The later comes with a free boost to 90… which I highly suggest you don’t use at least not for your first character. There is a bunch of really awesome content to experience, and part of my frustration in the past is that it feels like these boosts cheapen the older content. Some of the best content in the game, is well below the level cap… so to skip over a Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, or Dire Maul would be a travesty. Then to maintain your account it is an older monthly subscription model of $14.99.

Over the years I have said a lot of hurtful things on this blog about Blizzard and World of Warcraft, and in many case those were about specific problems I had… that most players would never even care about. If I were creating a Facebook profile about my relationship with Warcraft… the only thing I could possibly pick is “complicated”. Similar to my feelings about Star Wars, with all of the hype and disappointment… I also hold in my heart a lot of frustration and disappointment with all of the possibility that was squandered. I’ve also come to realize that I wholeheartedly love Blizzard as a company, it is just one of there franchises that I have some issue with. Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm are both amazing… and what I have played of Starcraft 2 was really fun… even though I am not really an RTS player. I anxiously look forward to Overwatch and seeing how it does… and occasionally I break out a Hearthstone game even though that is not a regular occurrence. With World of Warcraft… I know that eventually I will go back and resubscribe because I always do. This game has a hold on my heart that even though I have tried to purge it so many times… it stays there clinging tightly. No matter what my current feelings are for the game, that power cannot be denied. So regardless of what the current hype cycle thinks… this is a great game and has so many excellent experiences that you would be robbing yourself of it you did not experience them. That is not to say that I don’t also think there are so many other amazing games out there… but when creating a column called “MMOs Worth Playing”… Warcraft had to be included among that number.

Week In Gaming 10/25/2015

October 25, 2015 by Belghast

The Sickly Bel

This week was an odd one in that I managed to catch some flu-like chest crud. I felt pretty awful most of last weekend, and then struggled to exist Monday and ended up coming home halfway through Tuesday. I chained Wednesday as well, and found myself in that place where I wanted to play something… but anything seemed to require too much concentration. This was after all the week I had early access to Star Wars Fallen Empire, and I did exactly none of the content. I poked my head in a few times to attempt to play my Sith Sorcerer and failed miserably at it. I have a few comments to make about my experiences, but the majority of my gaming time was spent playing Destiny. Apparently that game is largely muscle memory, and I can play it without having to think too much about it.

SWTOR: Fallen Empire

As I said in the intro, this week was the early launch of Fallen Empire the massively game changing expansion for Star Wars the Old Republic… and I barely touched it. I did pop in enough to get sorted out how some of the new systems work. Namely the way companions now exist as being independent of the abilities they use. This means if you no longer have to deal with companions you cannot stand just because they fill the role you want. As a result I swapped to using Andronikos Revel on my Sorcerer, because he loves it when I shock the shit out of NPCs that are not giving me my way. Similarly I would probably never run with a companion that is not Vette on my Sith Warrior, or always run with Kira Carsen on my Jedi Guardian. There is seriously nothing cooler than running around with Kira and feeling like a Jedi strike force, and having her also be a healer… just icing on the cake. As you can tell this is a super important change for me, and I am damned happy to see it go in.

Other than that the other big change for me is the fact that the NPCs are actually labelled as to what type of quest they give you. For example in the above image you can clearly see that this NPC is going to give you the Belsavis planetary quest. This makes it easy to ignore things like the non-soloable heroic quests or flashpoint quests you are not quite ready for… to keep them from cluttering your logs. The other big thing that I noticed was the way that the level scaling works. It seems like when you land on a planet you are scaled to the maximum level for that area, somewhat like Final Fantasy XIV scales dungeons. This means you can overlevel content… but just barely making it a bit easier if you wait for awhile to do a quest rather than doing it when it is on level. However there is never a point where content ever becomes useless to you, which means you can easily go back and farm early content if you are struggling a bit to progress forward. The loss of 12x class experience however means that pretty much to stay current you are always going to have to do your class quests as well as the main planetary story arc. In any case I think the expansion content is going to be enjoyable… if I ever actually play it.

All-Saints Wake

I don’t have a lot to talk about when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV this week, but I did poke my head back in for a few hours. This week was the release of the All-Saints Wake event that serves as Halloween for the game. As we talked about last night, holidays in Final Fantasy XIV are largely the tale of incompetent villains and in this case it is a repeat appearance of the Impresario the mastermind behind the Continental Circus. Over the years we have learned that this is really a group of voidsent that are trying to cause mayhem each year, and we the player finds new ways to thwart them. As cute as the story line is… the reason why you do holidays in games is to get stuff. This year we get the purple outfit that my character is showing off above, a new Pumpkin Butler minion, and for the first time this year an actual mount. We get to ride around Eorzea on a flying broom… that actually does fly if you have unlocked flight in a given zone. The thing I love about Final Fantasy XIV holiday events is that they are adorable, provide awesome rewards… and end up taking only a few minutes to complete rather than being a grindy mess that brings out the worst in players. If you are subbed you should definitely check it out, because while the quest is more enjoyable if you have done the previous years… it is still fairly easy to follow without that ancestral knowledge.

Devilian

I have some issues with this game, but since I am now in alpha/beta/whatever phase it is and the NDA has dropped I thought I would talk a bit about it this morning. My number one issue is the gender locked classes and the fact that they have very specific styles to them. The Berserker is a guts clone, the Shadow Hunter is a bare chested Bishi-elven alucard like character, the Evoker is spilling out of her dress, and the Cannoneer is a Loli. Out of those options… there is exactly one I can stomach playing as, which is the Berserker. The thing is…. all of these design decisions unfortunately have nothing to do with Trion Worlds which is the company bringing the game to non-Korean markets. As fraught as the classes are… the game is actually rather enjoyable once you get past its slightly odd control scheme. By all looks it is a Diablo clone, but it controls vastly different… and honestly reminds me a bit more of the way skill shots in League of Legends feel. You use your mouse for character facing and then use your number keys to fire off abilities. You can bind an attack to your left mouse button, and I am probably going to do that with my basic attack to make it feel more Diablo-like. What I have seen of the combat is kinda interesting, and the dungeons are really enjoyable. I am just struggling to get past the art direction decisions, because honestly… they make me really sad. This could be a really great game, if it didn’t have gender locked classes and the art design did not seem to be from a thirteen year olds “tee hee hee boobs” mindset. It will be interesting to see if I am still piddling with it by the time the next beta comes around or if I have decided that the game is simply “not for me”.

Destiny

Magical glow of an Exotic Engram… only to be dashed moments later when you find out its a damned helmet.

This week has been almost entirely devoted to Destiny. As I said before this was the game that I could play without having to apply much thought to it. A good chunk of the week was spent working on my Hunter who is now I believe 270ish light level, and all of the way through the TKK content. I cheated a bit and jump started the character to level 25 using the item I got from purchasing the Taken King. I have to say if they want to sell something on the cash shop… I would absolutely buy a second one of these. Going from 25 to 40 was not that bad, but I am just not looking forward to taking my Warlock from 1-25 to get there. This week has also been the resurgence of my appreciation of Auto Rifles. I completely the third Gunsmith faction quest and it ended up giving me an exotic rifle called the Fabian Strategy. This thing is just a blast to use and I love the way it sounds and feels as I rip through mobs. This has also caused me to dust off the auto rifles I had in my vault and I found a few others that I really like, one of which my hunter is currently using.

The other key activity for this week has been running level 36 strikes in an effort to get exotic engrams with three of coins. I found out today that I could be just doing level 20s, but honestly I kinda enjoy the slight effort the 36s provide. They go so much quicker than the heroics, but don’t feel like I am simply steamrolling them in quite the way that the level 20s do. Essentially my pattern has been to run strikes using coins until I get an exotic, then take a break for a bit and do something else. I am also attempting to keep both characters up to date on bounties each day, and my regular farming runs on the dreadnought manage to pay off big time… as I had more than enough Hadium Flakes to get my Hunter his sword almost immediately. The big chore is still trying to increase my light levels, and the most 290 grind is extremely slow. That said it still feels enjoyable because I am seeing a ton of drops in the process. Even though half of the things are going to turn out to be something I cannot use… it still feels good to see drops. Its like the game is giving me hope… even though moments later it is just going to dash them once again when I find out the exotic is another damned helmet.

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.