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…
My Lore-master, Arwellyn, is now level 40! Very exciting, though I was disappointed that with such a milestone, her only new trainable skill was Warding Knowledge: Drakes. That’ll come in handy for sure, especially once she get into dungeons like Carn Dûm with drakes and dragons. She’s already been to the drakes in the very southern fringe of Angmar but the groups were so strong, she wouldn’t have had time to even cast the warding circle before the drakes would have been dead. Maybe it’s just me, but I consider each ten level mark to be a Big Deal™ therefore skills that are trainable at those ten level marks should also be a Big Deal™, as opposed to “whooptidoo, big deal…”
So, a year being pretty casual, and now I’ve arrived at the final ten levels… Well, until Mines of Moria later this year. There’s much to look forward to, starting with Fornost then into the end-game dungeons and the Ettenmoors for some PvMP action… should be an exciting time!
I’ve also been working my new hunter Sethryndil a bit, he’s up to level 17 now, nearly 18. Completed all the quests and deeds in Ered Luin and I took him straight to Bree-town, skipping the Shire altogether for now. Sethryndil spent the majority of yesterday morning grouped with Troy’s lore-master and a few other kin-mates doing the Epic Prologue and getting started on Book 1, then Troy switched to his main character, a hunter.
I also had a discussion with Troy, one that’s been on my mind for months. Several times in the Voyages of Vanguard podcast he’s stated his dislike for quests. Yet his two games now are EverQuest 2 and LOTRO! LOTRO in particular is extremely quest-centric, which means by skipping quests (and that’s exactly what he’s doing) he will also miss out on the best content. I’ve often wondered why people who want nothing more than to kill mobs solo just don’t do the F2P games where that’s often quite literally all there is to do. Troy has also said a few times in his shows that he dislikes MMO holidays, festivals, and so on. Pretty much anything that’s “fluff” or “RP-ish.” Yet the very second he gets accepted into the kinship, he’s talking in character, role-playing, and every time he logs on he’s in character for the most part. It’s just mind-boggling after so many months of listening to him on VoV then seeing him in action in LOTRO! He’s truly the Master Soloist too, though after doing Book 1 yesterday I did catch him saying “wow, groups rock!” in kin chat… perhaps he’s leaning towards the Dark Side finally!
So yeah, once again I’m sucked into LOTRO pretty hard. Exodus is like, the best.guild.evar! Kinship, yeah, yeah… Ironically, being the best.guild.evar is why I took my break from LOTRO to begin with — I vowed to not get so embedded in a game and start playing in that addictive hardcore style I did in WoW. Granted, if nothing else, my crappy laptop prevents that since it can’t run LOTRO at all. I did install it once just to see how bad it was, and it was almost humorously unplayable. There was a bit of drama as I was making my return, but it’s all over with now and in a moment of perfectly inspired timing, our original kinship leader is back from his break too and things are back to crazy, whacky, laughing-our-asses-off normal.
I only had two days off this week, and while I was working on crafting with all three characters (I now have a lowbie hunter…) when it came time to get things done, it was Arwellyn all the way. A couple of us still needed to finish up Book 3, even though it had turned grey for Arwellyn already. I’m a completionist; I despise deleting quests, especially this type. However… for the so-called “Epic Book III” I am sorely tempted to give a nod to Cameron that in this case, “epic” doesn’t quite apply. Book 3 was short, consisting of a mere 6 chapters, most of which were solo quests of the “run all the way here, run back, run here too” variety that made me wonder if Turbine had borrowed one of Blizzard’s Alliance quest designers for the day. The couple of group quests towards the end were short-ish but fun, especially fighting the over in Nan Wathren. But the final instanced battle saving the burning town of Trestlebridge from an orc raid was too short, and quite anti-climatic, hardly deserving of it’s “epic” title. Book 3 is the only series I’ve heard that complaint though, so I’ll cut Turbine some slack for now. I look forward to arriving in Rivendell to start Book 4 in the next week or so when I get back home.
After Book 3, several of us headed back over to Dol Dinen again, which is a sub-zone in the North Downs where a tribe of mostly elite orcs and trolls have set up camp. Some of the quests involve disabling their siege weapons and what-not; last night we were after the Siege-Master himself: Patonka, a master elite level armoured troll. Trolls are quite fun to fight, and groups of orcs with a troll in the midst makes for a hilariously fun, and tense, combat session. We fought our way up to Patonka and during the final fight with some of his guards, another kinship snuck in from the left side and tagged him first so we had to wait (an awful damn long time too!) for him to respawn, where we proceeded to whoop his armoured ass.
Getting back out of Dol Dinen was interesting when a full group of orcs and two trolls respawned on top of us while we were already fighting another group! Laughing our asses off! It’s a good think Arwellyn has that backup heal, she saved our poor overworked minstrel a few times, as well as keeping him charged up on power.
Arwellyn, my Lore-master, achieved level 35 this morning, and promptly rushed to Hengstacer Farm in Bree-land as fast as her Bree-horse would carry her! The stable boy gave her four quests to complete to earn the Riding skill. The first three are simple “deliver this steed to the stable master in [town]” then a final race around the farm itself on a track with twelve gates to ride through. I kept reading in OOC and Kinship chat that the final race was a bit difficult and took several attempts to find the “best” course but I had no difficulty at all and completed it on the first attempt. Each of the four quests uses a different color horse so players can see how their characters look on each type. Arwellyn chose the Bay Horse as it was the darkest to match her black hair. The PvMP reward horse is black, but it will be quite some time before she gets to that point, considering it’s taken me nearly a year to get her to level 35! How’s that for “casual,” eh?
Turbine confirmed months ago they would indeed go the boxed retail expansion route for Lord of the Rings Online, and raised speculation recently when they stated a “major announcement” would take place at Connect 08 this week. The speculation is over, Turbine has officially announced The Lord of the Rings: Volume II: Mines of Moria to be released Autumn 2008.
Turbine also released a promotional Flash site for the expansion at http://www.unlocktheminesofmoria.com/ where players can learn more information about Mines of Moria and play Flash mini-games which may unlock previews or even special deeds and in-game items.
The expansion promises a level cap increase, two new classes, and a new unique item advancement system as well as the obvious new zones and dungeons to adventure in.
The expansion sounds great to me except for the level cap increase. I’m no fan of levels, period, but I’d have been happy with keeping the cap at 50 but providing a more diverse range of content, more difficult adventures, and more sets of crafted, dropped and rewarded gear.
I mentioned recently I was taking a break from Vanguard until my friend Daniel gets to a level where we can duo and group. Vanguard was included in my Station Access, which I canceled recently, and SOE advised that I needed to allow the Station Access to expire before I could renew Vanguard on its own. Station Access expired a few days ago, but I’m going to hold off re-subscribing to Vanguard just to make sure I give Daniel time to get his cleric leveled up. Otherwise, I’ve got Dolndruth right in the middle of the CIS chain and it’s just damn fun so I’d be tempted to keep at it and perpetually out-level Dan’s cleric. Having an inactive account rather forces the issue.
So, that leaves me with only DDO and LOTRO as active accounts, though it’s debatable if I should count LOTRO since I’m a lifetime member.
Speaking of DDO, I did get to participate in the final event in the 2nd Anniversary last night. My guild set up a raid in the marketplace. That was the first time I’d ever been grouped with more than a single guild member in DDO, and I have to say even though I don’t know most of them very well yet, seeing all of us banded together did instill a sense of pride and of family. It was a nice feeling; a bit surprising yet very satisfying and welcome. I have screen shots of various times during the event but didn’t get time to resize and upload them to my gallery before I had to leave on this trip. When I get home I’ll either just upload them to the DDO gallery or perhaps edit this post with a few screen shots. Otherwise, I’ll defer to DDOcast where stories were posted, many with screen shots and videos, with each change that occurred during the past week of the Shavarath invasion!
Synopsis: Devils from the plane of Shavarath instigated an invasion of Stormreach. Random portals appeared in the marketplace and small bands of devils attacked every few hours. A few days later a huge swirling portal appeared over the Bazaar tent. Soon all the NPC vendors moved out of the Bazaar and into the Rusty Nail tavern near the bank. A floating citadel appeared between the bank and the Bazaar tent, with platforms to climb to the top and meet Veheer F’Nord who is leading the research team to discover the devils’ intentions and a way to defend Stormreach. The vortex over the Bazaar grew in power and the tent flailed helplessly in its wake. Devils took up residence and posted guard at each entrance to the Bazaar and a magical force field emanated from the portal, protecting the devils from further attack. Last night the Stormreach wizards set up a counter assault, firing magical beams into the portal from points along the tent’s perimeter. The beams coalesced into a single beacon of power which succeeded in destroying the portal to Shavarath! However the ensuing explosion also destroyed the Bazaar as well, leaving a debris-filled crater in the center of the city! A quest is now available to defend from four waves of increasingly difficult devils, minions, and bosses.
This is my first live event in an MMO and I must say, the whole counter-attack thing was really cool and immersive to watch and experience. Seeing the magical blasts go up in sequence, merge, then get out of the mages’ control, destroying both the portal and the tent was awesome to say the least. The “Devil Assault” quest… much less so. The whole thing consists of two rooms, the second of which the group gets locked into as waves of devils, hell-hounds, etc. appear from three portals. I expected much more out of that. Some of the NPC dialogue over the past week makes it sound like we’ll eventually take the battle to Shavarath itself, so I hope more is coming and that simple portal room wasn’t the extent of this event.
Aside from the DDO event, I’ve spent time in LOTRO as well. I mentioned some potential kinship drama recently. Still not totally sure what was behind it all, other than the bottom line was both Exodus and Swifty & Hammo wanted more members available for raids. Why not simply create an alliance? I’ve been told that it was Swifty & Hammo’s idea for the two kinships to merge, though in reality it seemed more like an acquisition where Swifty & Hammo remains with the name and leadership intact, and simply absorb Exodus members. Whatever. It seems most of Exodus stayed and I’m now hearing it was mainly the upper echelon of (former) Exodus “management” who wanted to be in S&H. Regardless, all of us are welcome in Swifty & Hammo, though I still have to ask why there’s no Exodus-S&H alliance?
Anyway, my original “rule” (and we know the rule about rules…) in LOTRO was that I would have two “mains” and each would get equal time. I did great with that up until the low twenties where I wound up taking the Lore-master out more. She is now level 33, and had a great time last night (stayed up way too late though) with a group in Garth Agarwen, an instanced outdoor dungeon in the Lone Lands. She’ll need to go in at least once more to get a few more quests complete, and she’ll also need to get a group to complete some quests that are outside the instance but still in that general area, where all mobs are elite. She also has her first quest from Radagast the Brown to get non-combat pets, so I am very much looking forward to getting those completed. I also spent some time with my Captain, Gared, who’s been stuck at level 24 for some time. I thought I’d get him through some quests and up to level 25 where he could ride the Bree-horse he was given as a holiday gift from Turbine. We did that, and got a few groups in the Lone Lands and Gared is already level 26! Thankfully, one or two of the quests also rewarded a piece of heavy armor. Gared is woefully outfitted with a smattering of both heavy and medium armor. He’s a prospector so I’ll need to take him out gathering rich iron and ask a kinsman armorsmith to hook him up with a full set of heavy armor. Gared fellowed with a kinswoman, Elibeth, who was also level 24 at the time, who had crafted her own set of heavy armor appropriate for that level and she graciously offered to make Gared a set as well if Gared provides the materials, so that will be his mission next week, provided Arwellyn doesn’t take all my LOTRO time.
Thankfully, I’m a Founder on LOTRO with a Lifetime membership, so that’s working out great. My super-awesome kinship has been very understanding that I didn’t want to get sucked into the “must.play.all.day.and.night” rut that I found myself in with WoW. I want to do the dungeons and raids with them badly, but I want to make sure I can keep things casual so I’ve been on break from LOTRO.
Turbine recently announced a special $9.99 per month plan for DDO which I jumped on. I’m also in a super-cool casual family-style guild in DDO and, while I love the adventures in the game, the problem with a totally group-focused game is that if I can’t find a group, I can’t play the game. I do look forward to playing the high-end content, and it sounds like some amazing and awesome content is coming this year. In the meantime, if I can save $5 per month to keep the subscription active and pop into Stormreach anytime I want, sounds great to me.
My final subscription was the SOE Station Access, where I have Everquest II, Vanguard, Star Wars Galaxies and Planetside active.
However…
I haven’t bothered to play Planetside in months because I never saw more than 10 players on a server and it has an atrocious UI along with horribly flaky mouse movement in the menus. I understand it was great in its day, but apparently that day has come and gone so even as a curiosity, Planetside was a failed venture for me.
SWG. Whoah. Not that I necessarily mind adding quests and all but SOE did such a poor job of it in their misguided NGE overhaul. I could even adapt to that but, much like Planetside, the game has serious population issues. To date, I’ve encountered a grand total of six players and have seen not a single line of chat from anyone. The graphics are badly dated and I truly resent being hard-locked at 30 fps when I could be having a much smoother experience. SWG was my first MMO and I have fond memories that nothing else will ever replace, but I guess it’s true: sometimes you just can’t go home again.
EQ2. I have created several characters of different races and classes and the farthest I’ve managed to advance any is level 9. Other than the random bit of music, I have struggled to find even a single enjoyable element to the game. EQ2 is quite popular and arguably has more content than any other MMORPG on the market. Originally, I decided I would put up the fight and work my way towards whatever quality content surely must be out there, but I finally had to be honest with myself. With other games out there willing to “show me the money” with quality content from Moment One, why should I have to punish myself wading through this muck? It’s a shame, and I wanted to like EQ2 but it just wasn’t in the cards.
Vanguard, surprisingly, I’m having a blast with and I’m in a friendly, fun and helpful guild. Even though Karen has abandoned us like red-headed step-children to go adventure in Norrath. Grouping has been incredibly fun as well as challenging, and I’m thoroughly enjoying being the “Rock Star Tank” again. Actually, I may be enjoying tanking more in Vanguard than I did in WoW, because the Dread Knight class simply oozes coolness and I enjoy the challenges it presents. I also have a real-life friend playing Vanguard now (also a new guild-mate, yay!) so that’s an additional compelling reason to play. Well-known population problems aside, I can honestly say I’ve seen quite an influx of brand-new players over the past few weeks since GU3 was released, and it’s been wonderful. I’m seeing players in nearly every town I visit, the chats are active, friendly, and Chuck Norris-free (well, mostly).
I wasn’t having any financial issues, but I finally had to come to terms that I was paying an extra $15 per month to play Vanguard, because as wistfully nostalgic as I may have been, I’m not going to return to SWG, nor can I tolerate being logged into EQ2 for more than a few minutes, so it’s wasted money.
So, as of a few minutes ago logging out of the Java chat with an SOE customer service rep (thanks for the help, by the way, Eric) I am now left with only a normal monthly subscription to Vanguard and the new 33% discounted subscription to DDO. Should another game roll down the pike, I can add it without batting an eyelash as the total cost would be close to what I’ve been paying anyway with the Station Access and full-price DDO, but right now there are no titles current or in the immediate future that are piquing my interest whatsoever.
I happened across the new link on VirginWorlds today mentioning an interview with Turbine’s CEO Jeff Anderson so of course I immediately clicked.The full interview is at WarCry and is apparently more of their AGDC content they’re continuing to get posted. The interview was dated last week, September 18.
An expansion pack is not far behind; Anderson hopes the team can launch their first retail upgrade in the next 12 months.
So, there we have it. I, for one, am disappointed at taking the retail expansion route. Yes, it’s more boxes sold which is a greater influx of cash but I was hoping — perhaps too idealistically — that Turbine would hold fast and true with their free content update model. For me, it’s not even an issue of the money involved with buying an expansion, I guess I just look at what EQ did back in the day, and even EQ2 to a degree and shake my head at all the boxes sold. I could easily have envisioned The Burning Crusade as being a content update for WoW. It only added roughly 20%-25% landmass and 2-3 months of content outside the additional raid/reputation grinds and brought nothing new to WoW’s table. I suppose I should remove the “additionally” since TBC completely invalidated all prior content anyway. But I digress.
Most of SOE’s stuff I felt was nickel and diming the customers, so I hope that if Turbine is going to the trouble of putting another box on the shelves that it contains a level of content equivalent to what LOTRO launched with and adds new dynamics to the game without rendering everything the players have done useless.
He’s truly the Master Soloist too, though after doing Book 1 yesterday I did catch him saying “wow, groups rock!” in kin chat… perhaps he’s leaning towards the Dark Side finally!
Grouping has been incredibly fun as well as challenging, and I’m thoroughly enjoying being the “Rock Star Tank” again. Actually, I may be enjoying tanking more in Vanguard than I did in WoW, because the Dread Knight class simply oozes coolness and I enjoy the challenges it presents. I also have a real-life friend playing Vanguard now (also a new guild-mate, yay!) so that’s an additional compelling reason to play. Well-known population problems aside, I can honestly say I’ve seen quite an influx of brand-new players over the past few weeks since GU3 was released, and it’s been wonderful. I’m seeing players in nearly every town I visit, the chats are active, friendly, and Chuck Norris-free (well, mostly).
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