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Curious about LoTRO's Player Base
shae
Member Posts: 2,509
First, I want to clearly state that I am in no way demeaning LoTRO or the people that will play it, I realize that many of you have been (and still are) waiting for this game for a good while now so please take this as a true question and not a negative statement blanketed in prose.
My questions and curiosity arise from reading through the various FAQ's on the official site, which can be found HERE and HERE, and finding some features (or lack of sometimes) pretty interesting. Not wanting to get to in depth over it all, as it may start to seem more like critisizing but here's just a few things that caught my attention.
- There will be no playable evil races (which seems a little odd to me in a strory line with such diverse and fun bad guys.)
- There will be no player housing. (This seemed particularly odd to me considering these players, good guys, are supposed to be fighting for their homes and land, yet apparently everyone willl be homeless from the start, thankfully they have stated this is an important feature they wish to add. But still...)
- 10 to 20 % of the game will be instanced. (Now I realize instancing can be very important, especially when it comes to game performance, but 10 to 20 % to me is alot of un-open group oriented type game play)
- No crafting, at all, nothing, nada. (I know it's hard comming up with a really good crafting system and often it adds more confusion then needed, but I mean... DWARVES !!! This is basically where crafting lore came from for every single fantasy mmo that's been released. How you leave this out, completely, I'm at a loss, truly.)
- No Mounts (Again, I realize that having mounts in game can be a tricky technology and not always easy to impliment, but isn't this a huge part of LoTR lore ? I remember reading the books and trying to picture Sam's packed and beat up horse they picked up in Bree or Gandolf's magical white king of the horses. Anyways, I don't get it. )
- No PvP (Now I'm actually thankfull for them going this direction as I'm no huge fan of pvp in the first place, but is this the right direction to take ? I mean LoTR is about many things, friendship, devotion, love, spirituality and I personally think that Epic Battles is one of those points. But mind you, I guess this goes well with not having Evil Races as we would not want to see two Hobbits duking it out.
- Timeline (The timeline is set to be during the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, in a recent interview the Turbine developers stated that the story will not be dynamic, as it in it will not move foward along with time deeper into the story but rather ramain stationary in that time line consistently over the years. This to me is quite possibly the biggest mistake, would it not make more sense to try to involve players in such a known story rather then keep everything stagnent ?)
So those were just some of the choices I found odd with what information I could find on LORTO, which begged the question. Exactly who will be playing this ?
Will it be filled with LoTR fans that want anything and everything to do with Middle Earth ? Will it be of interest to casual players and hardcore roleplayers ?
And so this is what I ask from the community, if you plan on playing LoTRO, why are you doing so and if let me know what features above and beyond these you find interesting and what will carry this game through out the years. I'm very curious to see what the mind set is at stands now, of course all the while realizing that there is still much developement to be had on this game.
Thanks for any future comments.
Comments
Always do the right thing
The license will attract all sorts, from trueborn Tolkienistas to those who think Quenya iz dat ho wut sang "May It Be".
<Mea culpa>.
Before I answer your questions, allow me to clarify a couple of your points.
Player Housing: The Dev's have not stated definitively that there will be no player housing. The current outlook is that there will be no housing at launch. Being the positive person I am, I believe we may see housing in a future update, or even in the first expansion which will include.....
Mounts: The Dev's have almost completely stated that the first expansion will focus on Rohan and will include Mounts, as well as moving the.....
Timeline forward. The Story of LOTR takes place over period of just more than a Year, ME time. I'm almost certain that the expansions we see will move the timeline forward, as the Fellowship makes it's way East. It's the logical thing to do, from a Marketing standpoint. Plus, in the Launch version, we've been told that we may see Aragorn in the Pony during our early game time, then again later in Rivendell perhaps, to illustrate the Fellowship's movements. The intent, I believe is to give a sense of time passing, of us being IN the story and not just caught in a fragment of it.
Crafting: The Dev's have not said one iota about crafting. Negative or Positive. I believe that's because crafting is a big part of the game, and they see how important it is for so many people. To have a half-assed crafting system is an insulot really to those that rely so much on it. The Dev's have stated time and again that they only tell us things that are very very unlikely to change. They recognize the folly of telling us something, and then have it change in 2 months. So for me, no news about the crafting system tells me that it is still under heavy development. Whether it's ready for launch or not, is another story.
I can't say anything about why other people will be playing LOTRO, only for myself. With that said, I will be playing LOTRO because I have been a fan of Tolkien, his works and Middle Earth since I was first exposed to it almost 30 years ago with The Hobbit. I've also been, from time to time, an RPer. For me, there is no richer world to engage in RP than Middle Earth. There is no larger fight of good vs evil than the one in the War of the Ring. There is no more restful of a spot than in a cozy Hobbit hole, sitting under an open window that looks on your garden in the spring sunshine. It's visions like that that Tolkien brought to life for us, and to see it graphically displayed, and wonderfully interpreted, and to be able to engage in combat for the soul of Middle Earth, or even sit quietly in the Pony watching Butterbur waddle around, is the reason that I will be playing LOTRO.
"First you wanna kill me, now you wanna kiss me...Blow."--Ash, "Army of Darkness"
I will just reply to one point here...
There are no playable evil races in LOTRO for one simple (for me) reason. The game is based on the books. In the books, the evil races had no free-will. They were all under the control of a, basically, Sauron or Saruman.
OP let me say that you nailed exactly some of the reasons I will want to try LOTRO. But the biggest one that you didnt mention that the other posters have is that it is LOTRO. I waited most of my 30 years for the movies, I owned two revisions of the pen and paper RPG for Middle Earth and now I get a chance to play in a MMORPG based on these works. Its a no brainer.
Now to get back to some of your points and see why I think they only add to my excitement for the game.
1. No crafting. I think that is a great idea. It makes no sense for an adventurer to be a crafter. You can be one or the other but not both. And lets be honest roleplaying a swordsmith who never sees anything other than a forge would get real boreing. How would someone become famous as a smith if they were too busy running around killiing monsters to get good at their craft. So I like the fact that it is omitted. Why waste development time on a system that is usually not of much use in any game I've seen it impimented.
2. Instanceing. 10-20% sounds about right for me. I wouldnt want all instanced, like GW, but some level is needed to keep others from camping your dungeon, like would happen in AC.
3. Mounts, who cares. It has no effect on the actual game play. Besides a horse walks at the same speed as a person anyway so you shouldnt be able to travel any faster on one. Sure you could make the horse gallup the whole time, but then you would just quickly end up with one dead horse.
4.NO PVP, I agree with you there. From my experience in MMORPGs PvP unbalences the game and is a source of insane grief no matter how it is implemented. So once again why waste development time on it.
5. The fixed timline fits in with LOTR world. We will not be playing any of the epic characters that actually shape the world events. We will be the little guys that fill in all the gaps the bigs leave behind.
So I will be playing from day one. Will casual gamers play? Not sure but I think since the market is probably going to get flooded with WoW clones, Turbine going a different way may be a smart move in that they will offer something different than the main stream.
I think Turbine is setting this game up to be a PvE world unlike any seen before. No one else does this, most of the other games add PvP to keep the real hard core gamers happy. This game may get a chance to make role players happy. Something I have never seen in MMORPGs is a real ROLE PLAYING GAME
I'm one of the leaders of a 60 man guild in WoW. When we're not raiding BWL we're PvPing. Its already decided this is our next game. WoW is the best thing going right now but we're all sick of farming epics in the same place every week and the poor PvP system. We don't know if lotr will have endgame raiding or any endgame at all for that matter and the PvP system is even more of a question mark. Its in but not in the traditional sense...None of us even care. As long as they don't instance the Shire with a 7 day timer and fill it with trash mobs we'll be playing this game.