One Druid, Many Worlds

More low level quest clean up in the Shire over the last two nights. It’s like a sickness, I can’t leave quests uncompleted. And, in LotRO, the quests are as much about reward as story. Each step of the way gives you another mini-chapter. Plus, running around the Shire at night is…magical.

Michel Delving At Night

The oft-reviled escort quest are the ones I’m enjoying the most. You see, with many encounters, you can control when you engage an enemy, how many, etc. But on an escort quest, your charge will blindly rush forward, forcing you to fight on the fly. No downtime to regen power or wait for that uber skill to finish cooling down. No hanging back and observing pathing to pull the mob solo away from its allies. It takes me way out of my comfort zone. and gets my adrenaline pumping. In other words, good times!

And, since this is LotRO, there are some intersting stories attached to your escort quests. My favorite starts with a spider nest in the hills of Bindbole Woods. A subquest is required to break through the wall of webs that blocks your way. Once inside, you discover a sentient tree that has been trapped by the spiders. With your help, it wants to escape. So the tree uproots itself and starts walking out.

Walking. A Tree. By Itself.

This is what I love about this game. I tried for a screenshot of this event. I hope it conveys the crazy way it ambles on the tips of its roots.

Walking tree on the move.

My little hobbit minstrel wasn’t even as big as one of the root/feet. But together we cut through the malevolent spiders out into safety. The reward for the quest? I don’t even remember and I don’t really care. The adventure itself was worth the effort. And that’s what quests should be about.

Tonight, Clauso and I are going to jump into the Epic Quest line. I’ll try to grab screenshots, but flipping into 1st person and hiding the UI to take the screenies, makes it hard to survive the encounter. Then again, Clauso’s not happy if we’re not flying by the seat of our pants.

Elbee – L13 Minstrel

It was launch day for LotRO and I didn’t quite make it to the level cap in Open Beta of L15, but I’m not going to race through this MMO. I want to explore and enjoy it. Even the delivery quests.

I’m eager to start the epic storyline, but I’m waiting til Friday for my buddy Clauso to log on. We mostly go our own way in this game, but we’re going to do the epic quest line together.

Until then I’m trying to clear out my backlog of quests I’ve started to out level. I’m neurotic about doing every quest I stumble across. Even the pie and post delivery ones (which I’m actually enjoying — its like a mini game.)

Last night, I didn’t have much time to play, maybe 30 mins, but was able to knock out 4 quests around Tookland that were all about to go grey. Not only was I able to cross these off my list, but I also got a good chunk of experience and progressed on a couple of deed lines as well as hit a few resource nodes. I love getting multiple things done at once.

I first conceived of this blog as a way to express my view point of MMORPG’s after 8 years of nightly playing. And I still intend to do that. But I’m also going to use it as a personal log of my nightly adventures in various games.

First, an entry for Tuesday, April 24, 2007:

EQ2 L58 Fury – Silverfur: LFay Questing

Lord of the Rings Online ended Open Beta last night. There was a glitch with my pre-order code and I couldn’t log on. I headed over to World of Warcraft but didn’t feel motivated to quest grind with my feral druid or my new dps shaman alt. I decided knocking out a quest or two in Everquest 2 and going to bed early would be the best choice.

Playing an MMORPG for just a few mins. What was I thinking?

EQ2 has been on the back burner for a few months for me. Since WoW came out with the Burning Crusade Expansion in January, I had been playing nothing else. And just when I was burning out on WoW, the LotRO Open Beta came along and knocked me off my feet with its immersiveness. I had been logging on to EQ2 just a few mins a day to do a Tears Grifter instance to keep the experience rolling. Two more levels and I will hit L60. Then many new zones become available to me.

So I logged on with my Fury and headed over to Lesser Faydark to knock off what quests I could. I still had 4-5 group quests for that zone and figured I would have to write them off. But after spending an hour finishing the solo quests I had there, I joined a group and we were able to knock off 3 group quests I had in the Thexian camp.

It was a good night for experience (2 AAs gained and almost hit L59) and I was able to clear out a good chunk of the quests I had left for that zone.

I was going to wait til L60 to hit the new zones, but I could probably start at L59. Or I could clear out the rest of my Pillar of Flames quests as well. We’ll see if I feel like quest grinding or exploring next time I log on, but I think I already know the answer.

Open beta for Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar began last week.

Combat is borrowed from EQ2, quests and crafting are straight out of WoW, classes fall into the standard archetypes. Is it worth playing? More than any other game out there. For two reasons:

#1
The narrative based gameplay is not something I thought I would see in an MMOG. LotR uses instancing to move a story forward. For example, (spoiler alert!)

…you can start as a Human in a small town outside of Bree with all the other newbie players. You do the typical”kill this”/”fetch that” quests. A pie seller wants you to collect some ingredients for her and check in on her husband, the town Jailor. Running around the zone filled with farms, a spider infested ruin and a fortress of brigand introduces you to some other quest npcs that you can help out.

Then around L6 you get put into a private instance of the entire outdoor zone. The town is on fire! The sweet pie selling quest giver helplessly watches her husband get brutally beaten by the soldier that betrayed the town to agents of the Nazgul! Only you can defeat the traitors, rescue a fallen ranger and face down the leader of the bad guys.

And when you succeed, you zone out of the instance back to the “normal” zone, only to find that the town is mostly burned down and will remain so. You realize the zone you were in for the first 6 levels was actually a “shared instanced” version and this one is the real one from here on out.

Many of the surviving townspeople are there to rebuild and they have all new quests for you that will help them do it. One of those quests is to bury three dead quest npcs you got to know rather well before the town burned down. That quest had some emotional impact.

The game gets you to care about the NPCs and then inflicts irrevocable consequences on them. You will never see them alive in the game again. Can you remember the last MMOG that managed that?

#2
I don’t know about the rest of you, but ‘The Hobbit’ was the first fantasy book I read. My uncle gave it to me when I was 11 and it opened my eyes to the fantasy genre. Every night over the past 8 years that I logged into Norrath or Azeroth I was really trying to recapture that feeling reading Tolkien’s books. And now I can play in that world directly.

In a weekend of playing LotR I had fought along side Gandalf, explored the Shire, helped a Ranger thwart a Nazgul rider, watched as an elven outpost fell to invaders with Elrond by my side and smoked pipeweed. I can’t even begin to imagine the adventure that lies ahead of me in this world, but I now know I’ve been waiting 26 years to start it since I read the words "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…"

So if you read reviews about LotR that tell you its "nothing special" or "not innovative" because it borrows game mechanics from other popular MMOGs, ignore that. Every MMOG before it borrowed from its predecessor. The real value of this game is playing in the world that made you fall in love with the genre in the first place.