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When does LotRO....
Shiymmas
Member UncommonPosts: 587
...actually draw people in? I actually managed to get into the closed beta of this game a long time ago, and at the time it was utter garbage. A year or so after release I tried it again. I didn't really remember why I didn't like it, so this week I decided to give it another go.
So, I hop on my freshly downloaded trial, get into character creation, make myself a nice looking dwarf rune-keeper, and hop into it. The initial quest was fine - nothing special - as was the following cutscene. I'll stop here a moment to point out that I was always a big fan of the LoTR movies, so this game always interested me. That said, I didn't really get any feeling of that from the initial sequence of the game (whoopy-doo, they named the char in the cutscene Gimli). Afterwards, I hop down some stairs and start questing. Initially, the quests were extremely short, and through reading them, you realize they're very little more than glorified tutorials. By level 5 or so, you actually start doing some quests, but frankly nearly none of it really caught my attention.
For starters, combat sucked. I know that NO game really shines in the beginner levels. Everything's always easy, but here it seemed extremely so. As a rune-keeper, I ran around spamming the pair of instant-cast skills I had by then, killing everything in less than 10 seconds, and if I cast my cast-time spell, no mob ever even hit me. I'm not looking for 10 minute fights at level 1, but offer SOME degree of challenge to show me what I can expect. After all, I'm a light armor class, with a minor slow and a heal (read: heal over time, oh and some stone that does the same) that I can cast even if I'm attuned for damage. There's some real potential, even at such a low level, to toss some challenge in there to SOME degree.
Second, the quests I got into were little more than the generic "we need supplies so, uh, go get them" or "these mobs bother us, so, you know, go 'get rid' of them *wink wink*" sort. Worse still was one particular quest that had me visit a dwarf on one side of the little village I was in where opening the door meant actually having to load a single-bedroom dinky house. I'm not one to freak out over instancing (having *some* load screens) but I found it a bit absurd having to zone and load such a tiny, tiny room to speak with a sick dwarf on his death-bed.
The point of this thread, then? I really, really want a quality MMO to move to and get involved with (just got done with a 5-month stint in Atlantica Online and my God, I want a proper P2P MMO after cash shop hell). I thought I'd convinced myself that LotRO was a quality choice, but quite honestly I can't even force myself to hit 10 right now after even such a brief experience in the game. Some of you may well be yelling at the screen already that I didn't even give the game a chance, but that's precisely my point here - give me a reason to do so. Does combat get more in-depth than killing everything before it touches you? Do the quests actually convince you to read them at some point? Furthermore, I've tried finding some decent vids at YouTube for examples of some raiding later in the game, but the few I've found show little more than tank holding a mob, DPS burning the mob, and healers keeping folks alive. Are there fights that actually require thought in this game as you move forward?
Thanks for some well-constructed answers.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
George Bernard Shaw
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Comments
it sounds like your having the same problem i had when i played that class. the begining is just so damn boring for that class but it picks up a bit more later on. try to lvl up a bit more but maybe that class isnt for you, i know it wasn't for me
I loved the game. I played a captian. It was always fun and the quests in the start are a bit boreing but in later lvls it gets more entertaining to read them and they also have pull into a larger story. i would say get to 30 befor you give it up. hell on my 10 daytrial befor i payed for it i got to lvl 20. An i played runekeeper for a bit my self. It was a boreing class at least to me.
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I probably should've added that I chose rune-keeper after some reading because, while it isn't exactly a typical "hybrid", it does get to choose either ranged damage, or healer as you get into the game. A bit of versatility is very attractive, particularly since I generally enjoy healing in most games (big bonus that you can deal good damage while leveling).
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
George Bernard Shaw
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Heh, I basically left LOTRO after 6 months for Atlantica Online. Funny to see someone going the other way.
Part of the problem is that LOTRO really just isn't that interesting. Combat is really dull (just push the same buttons over and over). Most quests are either fed-ex or killing X. (They get a bit more inventive where I am now in the 40s, but 20-40 is a snooze)
On the other hand, the worst starting areas are for the Dwarfs and Elves. (They recently re-did the Elf one). The Shire and the human ones are much more interesting (and the shire probably has the most interesting quests in the game, I've thought).
It's not really a raiding game, but apparently there is one really hard raid right now (which people are complaining they can't do).
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
Honestly I get the feeling that LotrO is not for you but I may be wrong.
If WoW = The Beatles
and WAR = Led Zeppelin
Then LotrO = Pink Floyd
The epic quests are really the quests of quality. Also, there is challenge in the game such as the northern Angmar dungeons or the radiance runs (especially since book 7) and of course the watcher raid (which is actually very hard).
One plays this game for the lore and the small stories. Sometimes the small stories, even in the go kill x quests, are interesting or hint at something in the book.
The game picks up in my opinion around 20. I did not find 20-40 a snooze. And of course, the higher you get the more options for grouping you will have as that is where most of the game is, higher level areas.
Still, and I will continually say this, this game has more than a touch of the sublime and is not for everyone. one has to really like the Lord of the Rings and the small details in order to get into this game.
Going through Goblin Town is always a blast for me, or making my way through Moria "just becuase".
Riding through the countryside, doing kin raids, all very fun.
Sounds to me that the game really isn't your style though. My thought is that if one did not like it at beta (I was in the closed and open betas) then one will not like it now as in many ways it's more of the same type of gameplay. Oh sure there are 2 more classes and a few more raid type things but the game is the same in philosophy.
As far as challenge, I would agree that in some of the starter areas there is no challenge but this game is more of an oops game for challenge. You will be fighting one mob and suddenly get two adds. I know for a fact that the runekeeper has a bit of problem with more than one mob at the start.
Also, making your own challenges. I like to pull many mobs in goblin town and see if I can survive. I also do that in some of the moria solo instances like the slaves the mithral slaves and the Guard one... can't remember it's name. I can only pull a few in Library of steel and still stay on top of the fire spirits.
In the end this game is what you make of it.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Short answer: Probably never.
Long answer: What you ask for is a challenging LOTRO. The makers of LOTRO decided that challenge means less accessable for the "normal user" and less accessable means fewer customers, less money.
Very Long answer:
In the old games the market was limited - it was a comparably small market of "freaks" that had the patience to solve all the riddles - not only the quests but also the "not so perfect" UI's of the old games, work around bugs and all. These people where happy that games like EQ or DAoC where out and they lived with what was there, because there was no alternative and they belonged to a group of people who knew more than where to switch the computer on and off. These people where much more forgiving when it came to bugs, bad graphics and other glitches.
Today the market and the competition is much bigger. PLUS the players are alot less forgiving because they always pull other games out of the hat that do this particularly annoying thing better.
So as a manager of a dev team you need to make decisions. The LOTRO management probably asked who will be appealed by our game? and YES correct it will be people who will try LOTRO for the story and not because they like MMO's. The majority of these people will not be very experienced with computers, computer games or MMO's many of them will most likely be CASUAL gamers too. Adding to this pool of brand new players was the pool of burned out hardcore gamers from the lifesuckers like EQ or DAoC. Players who wanted to relax from their hardcore MMO carreers.
Now you know who your market is and you make the perfect, most easy, most "accessable" and most casual friendly game possible in the given story setting.
This is exactly the product you have in front of you when looking at LOTRO. With the disadvantage that you can not expect very much from the game from a challenging / time consuming point of view.
This all said you can still ask if thats what LOTR deserves... My personal opinion is no, LOTR should have deserved a much harder game that trains your imagination and demands you to be creative solving its riddles. But if you read the official forums after release and 6 months later you would find many cry-threads asking to make the game even simpler because it was so hard. The next generation MMO-player is a cheater type who does not like hard riddles because he has to read them up in the internet.
If you are looking for a challenging hobby, join a sports team and their ladder. LOTRO and most new MMO's are colorful 3D chat systems with painfully boring gameplay.
regards
Snorf
To the OP;
I feel you didnt give the game a chance. Many MMO vets think that starter zones are designed for them, but what they should keep in mind, when trying any new MMO, is that a starter zones is designed for a newbie. And thats how it should be.
It is always funny to see, how supposedly grownup people can still be 100% sure on what is generally considered "boring", "entertaining", good or bad etc.
Too bad they can't see over their own petty barriers.
Wisdom comes when one realizes how little he/she knows about the world. Especially about how differently other people see it.
DB
Denial makes one look a lot dumber than he/she actually is.
I have to agree with this.
So often we see threads where people are looking for gameplay that they experienced at the start of the mmo genre.
But they never really point the microscopes at themselves and realize that they were very different people from people who did not want to spend time in an esoteric, online game where you had to spend hours looking for groups, waiting for spawns and then in some cases grinding away.
Even now when I show my friends the games that I play, they roll their eyes and in a good natured way indicate that they think it's an absolute waste of time. Then I tell them how games used to be and they have harsher words for that type of gameplay.
So when devs, as you indicated, try to think about who their target audience will be, they are not going to, in the end, cater to more hardcore gamers. They are going to cater to people who are at least willing to play these games, if not spend hours solving problems and riddles.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I recommend that as soon as possible, you catch a mount to Michel Delving. It's only 1 silver. Then start doing those quests there.
The Shire has a lot of the same old, same old sorts of quests. But it also has a lot of original quest mechanics as well, such as a whole series of trying to deliver mail around the Shire while keeping from being spotted by nosey hobbits. There are even a couple puzzle quests at the chicken farm, that then even lead to you being able to play AS a chicken and complete a whole quest line that way. Very, very different stuff.
One thing that I have to ask: Are you someone who reads the quests? Or do you just click through and only focus on the objectives? If the latter, then all quests are ultimately going to be pretty boring for you simply because there are only so many possible quest mechanics. But LotRO has some of the best quest writing of any MMO I've ever seen. Possibly THE best.
As you progress deeper into the game you'll also encounter a lot of additional depth. A great example is the Deed system, which ties into the Traits system. This system rewards you for the things that you do, and many of the rewards stack. Killing wolves in Ered Luin for example will give you a deed to kill 30 of them for a title. If you complete it, you'll get another deed to kill 60 more for a trait. Ered Luin has kill deeds like this for goblins, dwarves, spiders and I think one or two other mob types. The traits that you can unlock add more versatility in speccing your character to fit your play style. Using your abilities also starts unlocking deeds, as does exploration. On my newest character, I set a personal goal for myself to finish every deed I could find in Ered Luin. I'm playing this character with a friend who's new to the game, and it gives me something to do when he's not online. But that right there shows how there's more to the game than just questing.
Crafting is a pretty good system. It's deep enough to be interesting, without getting to the point of being overwhelming. It also introduces other challenges over time, such as gaining reputation with a crafting guild so that you can get access to amazing recipes. Or farming, where there's a whole pipeweed cross-breeding system built in that some people really get deep into. (Seeds are only available for purchase for about 1/4 of the possible types. Another 1/4 are found as quest rewards or loot. The remaining half of the pipeweed varieties are only gotten by cross-breeding.)
Then there's the Legendary Item system. Amazing. It's so diverse that no two items will probably ever be exactly the same. You really can fine tune an item to suit your play style perfectly. But there's enough randomness in the system to prevent "flavor of the month" items, and always keep you looking for something that might just be even better than what you have now.
What I discovered was that the more I played LotRO, the more I discovered. There's a lot of depth and diversity there. But for obvious reasons, the game doesn't throw everything at you all at once. It would be overwhelming. Plus there are a number of things that most people NEVER discover about the game. That is its own reward for those few who do.
That being said, it took me a few tries to really get into the game. I had a bad habit of getting into my 20's and losing interest. This I think is due to the fact that Lone Lands and western North Downs are just plain bleak compared to the zones that come before them. But once I did finally push past those areas and got into the 30's -- wow. The game just keeps getting better and better from that point forward. And thankfully, the developers have dramatically reduced the XP requirements for those levels, so you can get over the "20's Hump" pretty painlessly now.
So after having unsubbed a few different times, I'm definitely back in the game for good. I've actually bought a lifetime subscription -- the only game I've ever even considered doing that for. I don't think LotRO is for everyone. But I do think that giving up after just a few levels is never giving the game a chance.