Lord of the Rings Online

Originally posted by Bursche

So you've played some MMO's too? nice.

Then you surely know that once Nagafen was killed you couldnt come 10 seconds later with an alt and just kill him again - you had to bloody wait a week for the respawn. The guys who killed him had for a decent time changed the virtual world!

And that felt much more authentic than any instance timers and such.

So you are saying that if book quests could oinly be done once a week per server, instead of whenever you can get together a party of six, you would feel like you are having a reall effect on the world? 

I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. If the effects only last a week and then they are artificiallyt reset, the world has not really been altered in any meaningful way.  It's nothing more than a cleverely hidden long respawn timer on boss mobs, ala EQ (the original).  I'm sorry but I prefer not to go back to 1999.

Or when Hiberniens in DAoC controlled the castles for weeks due to their massive effort TOGETHER defending in bigger and smaller battles. Yes they changed the game for a while at least.

I agree DAoC had some astoundingly cool systems that have yet to be emulated by any other MMOs.  I'm really looking forward to WAR in fact.

Oddly, the only game I can really think of that minics any of the RvR mehcnics is .....LoTRO.  When freeps hold the correct keeps they have access to a new raid dungeon.  When creeps hold the keeps, they have access to it.  If u are inside it when it changes to enemy hands, you get to stay and can wreak havok on enemy raids...until you get butchered and are unable to re-enter .  It's an awfull lot like Darkness falls from DAoC.

Or if i recall correct in WoW once a certain boss was killed everyone got a buff for a while? right? and that boss was gone for a while right too?

I agree that the realm buff from a big boss kill was cool.  Kind of like the realm bonuses in DAoC.  As for the boss being gone for a while, just stupid stonage EQ mechanics cleverly disguised. 

I mean maybe to you a group that takes down some rare ass mob in EQ "really impacted the world" beacause no-one else could kill the guy for 48 hours to a week.  But to me they had no lasting impact at all.  It doesn't matter.  They had the same impact that somene killing some random dude I need in LoTRO for a quest had.  The only difference is in LoTRO I wait five minutes max, and in EQ I  might have to wait a week. 

Maybe you think farting a round for a week waiting for some dude to spawn and then competeing with six other groups that have been standing at his spawn point to tag him first is "fun."  I know I sure as hell do not.  And all guilds on the server being unable to do nag for a week is pretty much the same thing when you get right down to it.

Putting purfume on a turd does not change it's underlying smell.

And now look at lotro, you can fail the book quests as often as you wish, sauron doesnt get any stronger.  You can defeat the ballrog once, twice or 6 billion times - it changes nothing for the next in queue to consume this bit of the story.

You can fail at Nag as often as you wish.  He does not get stronger.  And notice how all the BC raids don't work at all like Nag.  Why do you imagine that is? Oh yeah, becuase the general consenus is that those mechanics suck. 

The most hardcore that BC raids get is lockouts for a certain amount of time after you do them.  Hmmmm, I can think of another game like that...oh yes, it's LoTRO.  But no wait, there are zones where if horde or allaince (one side or the other in a PvP conflict) hold objectivesw, it opens up quests and NPCs.  Hmm, I can think of two game like that.  Oh hell, what do you know, it's DAoC and....LoTRO.

I have given you 3 examples where games started to go into the dynamic world programming - and lotro is a setback, a disappointment because its 100% instanced, 100% linear 100% prepared story to consume. It tastes like prechewed food.

No, you have given us one good example that LoTRO emulates (in a very limited way, admitedly), and one totally shitty example that is the dumb ass rare spawn system from EQ 1 with skirt on.

It's 100% instanced?  Really?  I'll be damned I could have sworn I've been in some public areas.

100% linear, 100% prepared story.  Both of the MMOs that you talked about are the same with respect to story elements.  It's not as if quests change in WoW from one alt to the next.  And it's not as if all the PvE quests in DAoC change for every alt. Sure you can level differnet toons in different zones in WoW or DAoC, but that is true of LoTRO as well.  I levelled right past the trollshaws on my first toon, for example.  Never set foot in there save to farm up stuff for crafting.     The only thing trully nonlinear in DAoC is end game RvR.  And PvMP in the etinmoors is closer to RvR in DAoC than anything WoW has to offer.

I'm sorry man, but you just came off like a giant troll to me.  You didn't like LoTRO.  Fine.  But you felt the need to try and argue that it's "a step back" for MMOs, and that your individual opinion somehow reflects a universal truth that the game is inferior to other games out like WoW. 

Different strokes for different folks, and a folks that like your strokes are no better than folks that like other strokes.  If you can't see that, we can't have a discussion, and nothing you have posted makes me think you do.  Don't expect me to respond any further unless you surprise me on this last count.

umm you guys completely miss the point (probably deliberately but oh well...)

First of all, if you read my initial reply carefully again you will see that i didnt even critisise LOTRO. LOTRO is a good game ok? The difference is that its a different concept - its interactive story telling which seems very popular since so many enjoy consuming a story they have no influence on and already know the outcome.

I find this new concept quite intresting and entertaining in a certain way - and will of course look into lotro from time to time just out of curiosity how it developes.

The examples i gave where made for different intention in everquest yes - they where to avoid mass farming of the items dropping from nagafen and other bosses. But they had the intresting side effect that guilds had to communicate and check certain things in tne world, spy alts where placed all over the world to always have a good knowledge what is going on in norrath AT THE GIVEN TIME. LOTRO has no given time at all - all it has is story consuming carbon copies of core class templates. Enough people at the right step: Woot! lets unlock the next 20 seconds of the cartoon movie story.

What is amusing is that you guys keep defending lotro as a "next generation mmoRPG" which it is clearly not. Maybe i am picking beans here when i say - yes its a "next generation MMO" but thats just how i am. I respect everyone who has fun in LOTRO - i had fun too for a while because the atmosphere IS nice at start (only disturbed by stupid and ugly animations but else: perfect).

Yes live and let live, for me LOTRO is not to play, i will look once in a while but at the moment i have no motivation, because watching a cartoon movie is not why i play games. But now its easter holiday and i hope you all have fun in middle earth spring "event" thingy.

Hope that cleared some things up :)

Bursche

I haven't read through all the posts but could it be that we are all tired of the MMO genre? The market is getting saturated with all of them. I, for one, have played SWG, MxO, DAoC, Pirates, WOW and countless more that I cannot remember right now. Unfortunately, all MMO's are similar in design, they all have levels and/or skills to learn, quests to do to level up. Same idea, different engine ;P. Even the new ones coming, like Warhammer Online or even Age of Conan, although they sound exciting at first, wil eventually become boring after a while.

I feel that most of us play MMO's just to get to the final level. We want to reach the end game as quickly as we can. It's unfortunate. I think this site should be called MMOG; leave the RP out since a lot of players don't do it anyways ;P

However, maybe including roleplay in game would spice it up a bit? Once, I decided to craft good armor for low levels, spammed it in the low level area for someone that wanted it and decided to spend some time questing with that person. Although I did not gain experience, I had fun :) Another time, I launched a music contest in game. That was awesome. Around 20/30 people showed up. It was a blast.

I think we , as players of MMO's, need to create our own fun. It's unfair to expect the developers to do it all for us.

I agree with the poster above me :) MMORPG's have really became boring lately. For me, this happened when I hit the maximum level in WoW. After that I haven't played anything for one year. LOTRO is like a copy of WoW, it has nothing new and it was boring.

Any game can be good if you just have friends to play it with. Once I played one 2D 16bit oldschool mmorpg (Dransik) for three years because I had friends playing it too, and the community was awesome. There were couple of guilds, and they really had wars and alliances with each other. PK guilds sometimes cheated some newbies to follow them to some exciting place and then ambushed the poor player with the whole guild. It was really awesome, even though the game was only 1.5 megabytes in size. It also had only a few quests, but it's still the best mmorp g I've ever played.

The communities of these new games is so big, that people don't really know each other. That's why I prefer less-known games with a small but intense communities.

Originally posted by Beathawk

I agree with the poster above me :) MMORPG's have really became boring lately. For me, this happened when I hit the maximum level in WoW. After that I haven't played anything for one year. LOTRO is like a copy of WoW, it has nothing new and it was boring.

Any game can be good if you just have friends to play it with. Once I played one 2D 16bit oldschool mmorpg (Dransik) for three years because I had friends playing it too, and the community was awesome. There were couple of guilds, and they really had wars and alliances with each other. PK guilds sometimes cheated some newbies to follow them to some exciting place and then ambushed the poor player with the whole guild. It was really awesome, even though the game was only 1.5 megabytes in size. It also had only a few quests, but it's still the best mmorp g I've ever played.

The communities of these new games is so big, that people don't really know each other. That's why I prefer less-known games with a small but intense communities.

Lotro never hooked me either, it has almost no learning curve. Nothing to uncover or find out - its all so obvious in the Turbine middle earth for my taste You expressed that better: it is boring.

happy easter! 

LOTRO looks like a great game with beautifully rendered artwork, but I haven't tried it because I can't  see how it can be set in the middle of the book, it just doesn't make sense to me. I know I am probably being too fussy, but having read most of the posts, I think many of the issues other people have stem from the same basic paradox.

In the books, Middle-Earth is a fairly small closed world where people are easily recognised. There aren't many powerful warriors or mages & the central characters in the book are not that even that powerful in MMO terms. Even my 'Fae Wizard' in EQ2 is possibly more powerful than Gandalf, but I digress.

How can the fate of all Middle-Earth really be dependant on a small party of hobbits when there are scores of 'Uber Raiding Guilds' ? If players occasionally get a chance to meet the central characters from the book, how can Gandalf, Aragorn & Frodo fail to notice that more competent help is readily at hand?

Moving on to the other side of the coin, in most MMOs player rarely get to influence the world but in LOTRO it is ruled out from the start by definition. Players want to get a chance to have more meaningful quests & battles, but how can they when that would surely alter the course of events? If players can't do anything that disrupts the plot of the book, I assume that must be why there are so many random kill quests.

Personally I think it would be more interesting if LOTRO established itself as a parallel universe & branched off from the main plot of the book, but I assume the 'Tolkien Family' have already ruled that out. Maybe not though, since they allowed Peter Jackson to take quite a few liberties with the films when it came to 'Legolas Fan Service' & 'Action Sequences' like the 'Gandalf Mount Doom Molten Lava Rescue' .

I still think it looks like a great game, but at least for me that is why it doesn't appeal.

I agree completly with OP. I can't say what is wrong with LOTRO, because I can't find anything worng, really. It has everythig that is supposed to be there, it has a nice style, nice graphics, and a nice version of Middle earth. Really nothing to complain about... But I cant play it for more than a few weeks before being bored out of my skull and I don't know why. In some ways.... In some ways it feels like one big middle road, they have just enough of everything but stand out in nothing. There is no... hook. This last year, even Anarchy Online has gotten more time than LotRO.

I have wished several times to be able to pinpoint exactly what the problem is, to be able to convey that to the developers, but all I can say is: Really good work. I am impressed. I don't like it.

Sound like Andy

Originally posted by sweetpoison

 

Originally posted by Beathawk

I agree with the poster above me :) MMORPG's have really became boring lately. For me, this happened when I hit the maximum level in WoW. After that I haven't played anything for one year. LOTRO is like a copy of WoW, it has nothing new and it was boring.

Any game can be good if you just have friends to play it with. Once I played one 2D 16bit oldschool mmorpg (Dransik) for three years because I had friends playing it too, and the community was awesome. There were couple of guilds, and they really had wars and alliances with each other. PK guilds sometimes cheated some newbies to follow them to some exciting place and then ambushed the poor player with the whole guild. It was really awesome, even though the game was only 1.5 megabytes in size. It also had only a few quests, but it's still the best mmorp g I've ever played.

The communities of these new games is so big, that people don't really know each other. That's why I prefer less-known games with a small but intense communities.

/signed.

 

Lotro never hooked me either, it has almost no learning curve. Nothing to uncover or find out - its all so obvious in the Turbine middle earth for my taste You expressed that better: it is boring.

happy easter! 

Why is Sara Oakheart always showing up in the middle of trouble? 

What is she doing in Fornost?

What is the deal with the Nazgul "imposters" in the Shire?

What connection does the brigand forces around Bree have with the orcs and Saruman?

Why are some Earth-kin friendly and others attack you?

Why did the Giants break their alliance with the Dwarfs and Elves?

Why are some dwarfs evil?

Don't have much time today... so I'll have to stop there... but suffice to say.  I could post quite a list of "unknown" elements that unless you played through them... you'd not know the answer to.