Pumping Irony

I mentioned in my previous post how excited I was that my lore-master Arwellyn had reached level 40 in Lord of the Rings Online. It is exciting, but at the same time, nerve-wracking.

I felt much the same back in World of Warcraft. I took forever to get a character to 60 because I’d never reached level cap before in any MMO and in my infinite noobness was afraid of the unknown. Would I feel the game was “over” once the xp bar disappeared? Would I feel I’d “beaten” the game? I was aware of dungeons and so forth, and certainly had gone through Deadmines, Scarlet Monestary, and others during the leveling process but I was completely unsure of what exactly there was to do with no xp bar, or why anyone would do it. I did everything I could think of to slow down the leveling, gaining as little xp as I possibly could, but finally the day came when I experienced the dreaded, yet wonderful, Final Ding. It didn’t take long for the lightbulb to go off in my head and realize how wrong I’d been: rather than coming to any “end” reaching 60 opened so many possibilities it was staggering!

With LOTRO, I’m not walking around with blinders on. I know what there is to do at 50, and I want to do it. The catch is, I’m a bit of a completionist, and in the next few months prior to the release of Mines of Moria, we can look forward to Book 13 (this month) and Book 14 which brings the Shadows of Angmar epic story line to a close in preparation for an all-new epic story arc with Mines of Moria. On the one hand, I want to experience the final two Books during the leveling process and feel like I’m earning my way through them rather than already being 50. On the other hand, if I delay leveling until Book 14 has been pushed, will I even have time to do the current raids, etc. that I’ve been looking forward to before the expansion ships?

Regardless, I had Arwellyn nearly parked this week, only doing some solo quests in Evendim and helping a few kin-mates with some quests. Otherwise I’ve been leveling my new hunter, Sethryndil, who is already level 22! The hunter is an amazingly fun class to play, downright addictively fun. I’ve only managed to get into a group twice though, and I’m finding learning aggro management more difficult than with the lore-master since, other than healing, the lore-master isn’t exactly going to top the dps charts. The hunter, on the other hand… It almost took me back to those WoW days with my hunter, back in the pre-raiding days where I had no use for dps or aggro addons, I had to learn and manage my aggro on my own. Once I got into raiding, so many addons were in use that everything was being told to me anyway, I could pretty much turn off the brain cells, veg out and spam a couple DoT’s or special attacks. LOTRO’s lack of addon scripting support is a nice change of pace in that regard, although given how RP-friendly the game is, I really miss the old RPHelper addon that I was in charge of before I retired from WoW and turned development over to a user who’d been contributing to the project. I’d love to write a LOTRO version if Turbine adds scripting support someday.

In FPS news, the Battlefield team has announced that a 1.50 patch will be going into beta soon for Battlefield 2142! Looking forward to that; it’s almost unbelievable that any game published by EA is getting an inkling of support nearly a year after launch!

Curiosity finally got the better of me and I purchased Frontlines: Fuel of War on Steam. I had to turn off a few of the eye candy options to get a playable frame rate, and I still need to do some tweaking to smooth out the experience but it seems pretty cool so far, though I only have a few minutes with it. I’ve completed the first single player mission and played one match online. My initial gut reaction was that it’s way better than the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demo 2.0 from Steam but I’m unsure yet — despite 64 player support — if it will have the large maps with multiple battlefronts, varied objectives, and the overall feeling of being in a large-scale war that the Battlefield series has always excelled at. That’s what I’m looking for in this type of FPS these days. The small-scale skirmishes ala COD4, Insurgency, Counter-Strike, whatever is so 20th century for me. I bought Frontlines the same day dedicated server support was patched in, but there weren’t any dedicated servers up at the time. I’m looking forward to checking out more Frontlines when I get home next week; hopefully some dedicated servers will be operational by then. Also looking forward to getting some 2142 action since I totally slacked off getting my frag on the past few weeks. Mainly because I’ve been so into LOTRO and having fun with my kinship…

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 11:13 pm and is filed under FPS, LOTRO, MMO Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.