Siege of Mirkwood Dev Diaries

I’ve been digging around some of the Dev Diaries for LotRO and found a bunch of neat info about the Siege of Mirkwood (SoM) expansion.  Just thought I’d post some of them here.

I’m liking what I’ve seen thus far.  There seem to be a lot of innovative ideas in SoM and some improvements for a couple of long-standing gripes I’ve had (like the mount changes).

Note: the links probably contain a ton of spoilers, etc.  If you’re one of those folks that likes being surprised by content, etc., you may want to pass on clicking below.

~ Siege of Mirkwood Features

~ Mirkwood Regions

~ The Skirmish System (also contains some neat info about how Development happens in a studio)

~ Mount System changes

~ Shared Storage

 

Various

It’s been a while since I’ve posted.  I’m still kicking around LotRO at the moment.  I was subscribed to SWG but my old PC bit the dust and I had to get a new one.  SWG is a moderately fun game but, with the new machine, I don’t feel like reinstalling a game I’ll hardly play across the Internet.

I’m interested to see what will come up in the Siege of Mirkwood expansion for LotRO.  There’s a dev diary about the skirmish system – sounds neat.  I’ll have to wait and see how the whole thing turns out.  I know MoM was devastating for my kinship.

 

Turbine Announces Book 9

Happy Labor Day!

Turbine has announced it’s upcoming Book 9 expansion: The Siege of Mirkwood.

For those, such as myself, that don’t care much for the Legendary Item system, it appears that there will be some improvements coming.  Other neat updates include henchmen, a level increase to 65 and more raids, normal group (6-player) and small (3-player) instances.

One thing I noticed is another 12-man raid.  Should be interesting to see whether or not they’re planning on enforcing gear gateing this time around and, if they are, how stringently.  Specifics are a bit light in the announcement, so I’ll be keeping an eye on their expansion site to see if they expand on any of their goals in coming weeks.

 

Levels, Worlds and Other Random Thoughts

I was on a “staycation” recently – that’s basically me taking my required time off but being too broke to go somewhere cool.  I did a couple of non-sitting-at-home things but at night I found myself back in my apartment.  I figured why not also make it a gaming break from the norm too?  The only MMO I’m currently playing is LotRO, so I put that on a back burner.  I rummaged through my old gaming CDs and there amidst the WoW expansions and old games I haven’t played in years (Heavy Gear 2, Quake 3 Arena) was my Elder Scrolls: Oblivion CD.  Oblivion is a game I remember fondly from a couple years back, so I checked my PC and I still had it installed.  I popped in the game disk and away I went; I created a new character and entered the tutorial.

The introduction tutorial features the player escorting the current emperor Urial Septim on his escape through the city jail area.  As players use different skills, the game is making calculations about what kind of class they should be.  Like using stealth and ranged attacks a lot?  Perhaps you’d like to be an Agent.  Want to charge in and bash heads with a heavy two-hander?  Maybe a warrior-type would be more to your liking.

Once you’ve made your selections about what kind of character you want to be, you’re off into the world of Morrowind.  And once you’re out, you don’t have to do anything!  That’s one of the things I really like about Oblivion – players can follow the main quest line immediately and do everything they’re “supposed” to – be the hero, rescue the embattled people of wherever – or ignore the main quest and do whatever you like.

 

The Road Goes Ever On

Still alive here.  Work has been crazy for a couple of months now.  Also, I’ve been trying my hand at writing some short stories – some fan fiction and some in my own world.  They all suck thus far, but if I get something worth posting, I just might stick it here. 

On the gaming front, I’m still in LotRO.  There were some nice three-man instances added in the last book which my kinship mates and I have been enjoying.  My kinship has been doing a lot of turtle raiding (thus getting me a teal jacket and pants – both radiance items, thereby sparing me some of the radiance item instances which I’m not a fan of).

A friend of mine has been keeping me up to date on the upcoming Champions Online title coming out soon (you can pre-order at this point).  I’m not that into superhero games (though I did enjoy CoH back when I was playing it) so for now, I’ll sit this one out.  I’m still keeping an eye out for Star Wars: The Old Republic which is still a ways off.  Looks like they’ve got some new info about the Smuggler class.

And that’s what’s happening.

Happy gaming!

 

LotRO Book 8

Turbine recently released Book 8, a free content expansion, and I actually found some time to log in and check some things out.

The radiance armor instances in Moria are a bit of a sticking point for me; they’re not that interesting to see the first time through let alone the six-to-ten times each needed to get a radiance piece from them.  Furthermore, the radiance pieces are pretty much the only reason anyone goes into those instances – once someone has their piece, it’s not like they’ll be anxious to go back again.  The radiance six-mans got me to thinking maybe all the fun my friends and I had with Carn Dum, Urugath and the Rift was a fluke.  Maybe Turbine forgot, or never really knew, how to make a dungeon crawl fun.

I’m happy to report that Turbine seems to have gotten its groove back with the new instances with Book 8.  I have only been in one of the six-mans (there may be more than the one I was in) and one of the three-mans of which there are two.

The six-man instance was fairly straightforward.  There are many trash mob pulls followed by boss fights which usually involve some sort of puzzle or trick.  In one fight, for example, the boss was standing in a room of colored squares.  Each square gives him an advantage for a certain type of fighting and gives him weaknesses for others.  Based on the group composition, players need to decide which square to keep him in.  It was a fun romp through a new dungeon.

 

Addiction

There’s an interesting article in RPG Vault recently about addictive gaming.

It’s a tricky thing to define, but I’ll take a crack at it. A design is addiction-based to the degree that it encourages players to experience the same content again and again (often referred to as grinding) in return to obtain a series of rewards. These can be simple labels with no tangible effect (like an in-game title or some achievements), or they can be character improvements that give the ability to move on to a new location with a slightly different sort of grinding. I call this the grind/reward cycle, and it can keep players coming back to one game for years.

One key aspect of this design is that it gives many small rewards instead of a few big ones, so that the player is receiving constant positive reinforcement. A classic example is the style of skill improvement in World of Warcraft and EverQuest. When you gain a level, your skills don’t go up five points. Instead, your maximum goes up that much, and then the skill itself increases with use, a point at a time. Splitting up the reward into many parts increased the number of reinforcements.

The majority of games classified as MMOs these days adhere to a greater or lesser extent to addition-based game play.  Do x until you get y, then move on to z.  Repeat.  Sadly, games don’t seem to deviate much from that pattern.  Star Wars: The Old Republic seems to be attempting to move to a more story-based model.  Whether or not it’s successful, only time will tell (the game isn’t even in alpha yet).

Like the author, I’d love to see more options in games.  One gripe I’ve had with LotRO is their new-found gear-centeredness.  Like WoW, LotRO seems to be heading towards making players loot-crazy to keep them playing.  LotRO’s problem is they can’t make the instances interesting.  Rather than becoming loot-crazy, players are taking extended breaks until the next content expansion or leaving for other games once they hit the cap (that seems to be the general pattern I’ve noticed, anyway).  Personally, I’d like to see more community-based activities in MMOs … I mean, we play MMOs to play with other players so encouraging players to work with each other doesn’t seem like a bad way to go.  I don’t mean that forced grouping should become the norm, but it would be neat to encourage players in other ways (clever game design pushing them into proximity, better and varied PvP activities, trading-card type games where players can interact, etc.).

New models of “addictive game play” may help the industry out of its current rut.

 

Lore

I was having a discussion on Ventrilo the other day with some folks in my LotRO kinship.  We were lamenting the roughness of the LotRO end-game and were talking about some of the hurdles different IP-based games are having.  (That is to say, games based on a third-party IP – technically, all games are based on someone’s IP.

Blizzard owns the IP related to WoW.  So if they want to add space-ships or player-controlled flying mounts, the lore folks just say it’s possible and then it’s up to the software folks to make it happen.  There’s almost nothing standing in the way of a gaming possibility, the lore creators just have to figure out the story behind it and then it’s ready to be built into the game.

Turbine does not own the IP behind its LotRO game, Tolkien Estates does.  Everything in the game Turbine build has to conform to the lore as Tolkien imagined it.  There are exceptions (like the number of adventuring hobbits running around) but the places, the overall feel of the game and many of the character names and abilities are limited by the IP.  As such, players cannot be wizards (there are only a handful in Tolkien’s world), players cannot ride eagles (riding eagles is a rare privilege); the lore curtails many of the possibilities in an online world in favor of sticking with a set, third-party IP.

 

Still alive

I’m still alive over here.  I haven’t posted in a bit as real life has reared its non-pixilated head and I’ve been working quite a bit.

On the game front, I’m still playing LotRO but have reduced the amount of time I’ve been playing.  Part of my play time reduction has been work-related but part has been due to game play.  The current crop of hard mode “end game” instances doesn’t appeal to me at all.  I also don’t care for the gated content of the Watcher raid.  In Shadows of Angmar, players could play with their friends.  Gear seemed less important than trait selections and a little skill so a raid that was short a minstrel could just grab another one without too much concern.  Nowadays, I see things like “LF minstrel, must have 50 radiance or better.”  50 radiance can only be gotten by equipping 5 items (+10 radiance each), which in turn means 5 hard mode runs at a minimum.  Turbine often flits with a fine line between “epic” and “tedious” and for the MoM end game instances, I’ve found very little epic about them.  Some of them I like (Fil Gashan or the Grand Stairs) but most I could do without.

The sad thing is that I can see the strains forming in my kinship.  Those who went all-out to get through the six-man instances are chomping at the bit to down the Watcher.  Those of us that are taking our time or don’t particularly care about the six-mans are getting left further and further behind.  Friends can’t group up with friends anymore without also asking how much radiance gear they have.  I’ve seen this before in WoW’s Burning Crusade and have no desire to repeat that kind of loot-centric game play in LotRO.  There’s a lot of chatter on the blog-u-sphere lately about community building.  While there are a lot of things games can do to foster community, I’m pretty sure one of them isn’t wedging gear requirements in-between friends.

My burglar is level 60, has well-enough armor and weapons and has his talents maxed out.  So, other than the occasional rep grind, there’s little else for me to do in LotRO until book 8.  I have some alts which I play occasionally but without other people my level to play with, alts don’t interest me that much.

In other news, some friends of mine who left LotRO resurfaced in WoW on a new server so I re-upped my WoW account to play with them there.  Together, we rolled a small group (warrior, priest, and hunter) and are having a blast with the small-group stuff WoW has to offer.  For giggles, we also all rolled gnome Death Knights.  Hilarity ensued.

Now is the time in the Ebon Hold when we dance.

In addition to my warrior and new death knight, I’ve also created a dwarf paladin.  My how things have changed!  I recall when seals only lasted seconds.  Now they’ll last thirty minutes unless you do a judgment on them.  They seem to have lengthened the amount of time the blessings last as well.

While I haven’t given up on LotRO and plan on heading back, my game vacation in Azeroth has been a lot of fun.

 

The Road Not Taken: Star Wars Galaxies

I’ve been enjoying the new content in the Lord of the Rings Online but I’ve also been poking around for something different.  I’ve spent a lot of time playing game in the fantasy genre (WoW, EQ2 and LotRO) and wanted to see what things were like in some of the Science Fiction games I hadn’t picked up.  I had an unused fourteen day trial of Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) sitting around so I thought I’d give it a go.

Once the software was all set up, I logged in; created a character on the first server recommended to me and away I went.  The first character I made was a smuggler.  Smuggler at first seemed like a really cool choice.  I could do a decent amount of damage (both ranged and melee).  The intro quests had me helping out Han Solo and Chewbacca.  I shot down TIE fighters, got parts for the Millennium Falcon and did a bunch of standard MMO-type quests (kill ten x, get parts by killing, click-the-glowy, etc.).

Once I made it to Tatooine, I decided I didn’t like my smuggler.  I rolled him as a squid-looking guy and didn’t really feel like looking at him the whole time.  While I was in town I also noticed that there was basically no one else there.  There were a couple of lowbies like me, but running into people was a rarity.

I made a bounty hunter on a different server.  Bounty hunters also seemed pretty cool.  They have lots of ranged damage and snares.  Their armor also looked cool and the fact that I chose a human this go-around also improved my disposition towards the character.  Away I went, blasting the snot out of stuff for Han and Chewie and also getting to interact with Boba Fett this time.  This time I also started running the space missions right in the tutorial.  Very cool!  One of the things that keep me from trying out Eve Online is the lack (as far as I know) of personal avatars.  You are your ship, it would seem.  SWG allows characters to play as a normal walking-around toon or to be in their spaceships.  I like it.

Once out of the tutorial as my bounty hunter, I was again greeted by a low population world.  As I did more quests without seeing another living soul, I decided that, while the bounty hunter was interesting, it wasn’t going to be my thing.  So I rerolled again.