Pumping Irony

LOTRO, LOTRO and LOTRO! Well, mostly…

Doing the Rift a few times, completing the Annuminas set, and working on some reputation for my minstrel before Mines of Moria, I had an absolute blast once again this month.

Moria itself is very cool. The Eregion zone you start with (everyone gets this, not just players who bought the expansion) is basically a culmination of all the Eriador content. The background music is a rotation of the most memorable tracks from Evendim, North Downs, Trollshaws, Misty Mountains and other zones in Eriador. The zone’s fauna has lynxes, boars, wolves, wargs and within Redhorn Pass there are a handful of sabretooths, snowbeasts and grims from Forochel (snowbeasts were first in Misty Mountains though). A few new animals as well such as goats and holly lizards. Also packed into some of the many ruins are half-orc bandits. And I do mean packed; sometimes they’re numerous enough that it’s very easy to get several on you since they all patrol. Down near Echad Mirobell and Echad Dunann are Angmarim and Dunlendings as well. On the whole, Eregion wraps up the feel of Volume I – Shadows of Angmar one last time then bids it farewell.

Entering the Walls of Moria sub-zone we get the first new music and new monsters to fight, then we enter the Mines themselves. As is always the case, screenshots don’t do it justice but in this case it’s also because they’re unable to convey the sense of scale you get from actually being in there. This isn’t “just” a dungeon, this is an entire underground continent. Just like most of Eriador was a seamless world, so is Moria only here it’s three-dimensional as well. The mines wrap up, down and around and seem to go on and on. In Chamber of the Crossroads, which is one of the first few areas you’ll find in your explorations, there is a well in the center of the chamber. If you jump (or fall, if you’re not paying attention where you’re running) you’ll get some serious air-time as you fall all the way down to the Waterworks, which is one of the more higher-level zones. The very construction of the mines lends itself to teaching us to mind our steps because some of the paths get narrow and twist and turn; a misstep can get nasty.

I haven’t made it to Lothlorien yet; or indeed not to most of the mines yet either, but I’m in no hurry. I was going like gangbusters the past couple months preparing for Moria — getting characters geared or various reputations up or crafting levels up — but now that it’s here I can slow down again. In terms of mere levels, it’s the typical expansion that only gives ten more levels to advance. Once I realized the Eregion quests would actually come in useful (especially for the swift travel routes, which are tied into the zone’s quest completion Deed rather than the usual reputation) I mostly left the mines to work on quests there, and am already level 54 without even trying. I have a whole year before the next expansion to get to 60, play through all the Volume II Epic Books (Moria ships with 6, the rest will be in content updates as usual) and work on more reputations (the dwarven miners and guardians are the two I’ve encountered so far, the Lothlorien reputation won’t be included until the Book 7 update at the earliest), etc.

I’ll do it sooner, rather than later, though. I don’t want a situation like I’ve had the past few months where I intentionally dragged out the 1-50 leveling for 14+ months then was scrambling like a madman to “catch up” to see and learn the end-game content before Moria arrived. I’ll slow down and smell the roses again and just enjoy the process, but something in between painfully slow and powergaming fast.

In the meantime, I’ve rediscovered the 360 and have been working through some of the games I’ve had collecting dust for months. Mass Effect, in particular, I’m devoting some time to. I still don’t always “get” it but I’ve more or less taken the time to figure out what I would want to do with the skills, and so turned off the “auto level” option. Being my first time through, my Shepard is a Soldier class and I think he’s level 17 as of this morning? If the game has 60 levels, I’m wondering if at that point he will be maxed at every skill?

I’ve also been doing more shooters. With a few exceptions (especially third-person) I normally prefer the mouse and keyboard approach to FPS controls but I’m getting to the point where I’m tired of always having to upgrade my computer to get better framerate. At least on the 360 it’s consistent. I suck at the fast-paced shooters with the controllers but I’m plugging away anyway at Battlefield: Bad Company over Live. I die far more than anyone else on the servers — told ya I suck with controllers — but I’m enjoying it anyway and in one sense it’s nice to be able to witness that progression as my skill very slowly improves, just like it did back in the Duke3D and Quake days. I actually started my PC FPS gaming with controllers too, the mouse and keyboard system did not feel natural at all but I trained myself and became quite excellent if I may say so. One of my more triumphant memories was during Quake II where I was on 56k dialup playing a bunch of college guys with their T1+ lines and I fragged the hell out of them with the rail gun even! Years of MMORPG’s have atrophied my FPS skills back down to newbie territory but I can hold my own on the PC at least. On the 360, I pretty much have a fragbait sign on my back but it will get there in time.

I own Call of Duty 4 and Frontlines over Steam but even at lower settings the framerate isn’t where I prefer my FPS games to be, so I’m very tempted to eventually check them out on the 360 instead because on that platform they just work, period. As an added bonus, Frontlines kinda failed on the PC platform because it shipped without dedicated server support and a few other technical issues. Today I’m only seeing a total of 16 dedicated servers and of those, only 5 in the US with latency I would consider playing on. On the 360 I’ve seen tons of games going, and it’s still the only 50-player game on the 360 as well. All the scale, better performance… my controller skills are the only thing holding me back.

Openedge1 has been playing The Witcher this month too. I have the demo which I installed back when it first came out. Really well-done but the performance goes to crap during the cinematics for me. The actual game plays at 60fps or better but the cinematics are a slide show. This is most likely a performance problem with the demo not the full game (especially the Enhanced Edition) but it was just announced the game will be coming to the 360 sometime in 2009! I’ll happily await that day and hopefully they can re-work the camera system. I keep harping on this, but PC developers never seem able to nail the third-person view. CD Projekt Red are obviously PC developers and a mere “port” to a console (which this doesn’t seem to be at all) won’t fix things, so we’ll see what happens there.

I’m hoping Casualties of WAR does a little more on the Xbox Live front. There are a handful of them who have expressed interest, and I would love to finally have some cool and mature players (and bloggers!) to game with since WAR didn’t work out for me. I’m a member of Adult Gaming Enthusiasts but haven’t actually gamed with them in… I think it’s a year this month?! They’re a bit too “hardcore” in terms of jumping on every new game that comes out and throwing the old ones out. I just can’t keep up when my first priority would be an MMORPG, so a more laid-back group who doesn’t feel obligated to only play on the bleeding edge would be more up my alley.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 4:03 pm and is filed under MMO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.