The Legacy of Tolkien Strip
Try as you might, you will not actually find a deed in Lord of the Rings Online that will reward you for beating up children. In fact, I couldn’t find one child to beat up anywhere, which is a great failing amongst MMOs today. Though, this is one of the few failings LOTRO has, in my opinion.
So we have a strip again, I have purged most of my gaming from my system, and we of course see the game that sucked up most of my weekend. Generally, MMOs and I are a bad mix as they tend to eat up most of my time, but on the flip side of the coin, I needed something to do that wasn’t the strip. While gaming is often bad for productivity, doing strips 24/7 often led to burnout for me, which I felt coming on. I had nothing to do that wasn’t making comics for a few weeks there. The lure of Middle Earth grew strong, and these past few days were spent satisfying my lusts.
Now my character is established, and we can move on, a little more casual in both regards.
I like LOTRO. I will venture it is superior to World of Warcraft, the MMO measuring stick, in many ways. It will never be as popular, of course, because it is less user friendly and more hardware intensive, but all in all, I am enjoying my return. Yes, I say return because I did play LOTRO before, last winter, and am unsure why I stopped. The game has evolved a lot since then, for the better. My captain is still around, but until they fix her up a bit in the next patch, I am enjoying my new guardian.
LOTRO also has a very involved community, in both RP and other things. I’ve been treated to just fantastic live concerts in Bree thanks to the game’s ingenious player music system, and have even delved into some roleplaying myself. Granted, having an RP community does not necessarily mean that the RP is superior to what is found in other games. In fact, from what I can tell, most of the roleplaying seems to revolve around moody, bitter sweet romances between elves and grim hunters. This isn’t exactly blowing my socks off, and elven hookers don’t have a very Tolkien-esque feel to them.
I’m am by no means a hardcore RPer, as I mentioned, but with almost every character in any MMO I create, there is always a private background I make up for them along with their name, and a personality seems to evolve from that. My guardian, Findaerien Farzulgarukh (”Goldenshield” in Khuzdul), is an elf defender who exiled herself after the fall of Edhellion and came to live amongst the dwarves of the Blue Mountains, learning their ways. I tend to love to dwarves in all manner of RPGs, even though I can’t get into actually playing one. I just like to hang out with them.
So that’s Find, no sappy romance stuff there… because that would be weird, since she is a she and I am a he. She’s all business, and one of those “first in, last out” sorts, and that personality affects how I play her even when solo. Here she is, having a moment with a good friend.
Now my task is to balance my LOTRO time and my work. The basic idea is work in the morning, game at night, but we’ll see how it goes. Regardless, I am happy to be back, and happy also to have something recreational to do again.
We’re going to stick with our fantasy theme for Wednesday, but this time, it will involve dice.
See you then.
July 14th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Many MMO quests, particularly the low level ones, seem to make very little sense. I’ve been playing Everquest off and on (mostly on) since 2000 and still get annoyed by the lack of logic behind many of the quests. You have to wait until the upper tiers of the game before you really start getting into the quests that are imaginative and closely tied in to the game’s lore.
That said, it’s obvious that most of these “nonsense” quests exist solely because low-level characters can’t be expected to rush out and kill a Nazghul (or similar high level villain). The developers have to create the classic “collect 15 rat tails” type of quests just to give low level adventurers pretty much ANY introduction to questing. I’m sure there have to be some more imaginative ways to do it, but given how quickly most people tend to move through the lower levels (one of the things that help us to get addicted to the game and our character) I guess the devs do not choose to devote a lot of time to creating intricate and imaginative content for characters that will level past it in just a few hours.
July 14th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
You’re lucky that kid doesn’t punch you in the groin, lol.
July 14th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
I probably should have explained how deeds work, to non Lotro players.. they’re not quests, they’re accomplishments that are gained while doing quests, kind of like the achievements on Xbox Live. I find them all very fun, especially the exploration ones. As for starter quests, LOTRO has the old staples, but some interesting new ideas too. Newbie quests in the Shire are pretty interesting the first time around, and the epic storyline quests are a nice touch.
July 15th, 2008 at 12:46 am
I’ll just hold off on MMO’s till Champions Online comes out…archetype-less super heroes? ROCK.
July 15th, 2008 at 1:41 am
Yeah, stupid quests. One of those things I noticed in AO a few days ago (damn it! You got me hooked on that game!). There is still so much to explore. Exploration, seeing new things, finding hidden places, that’s what attracts me to those games. Maybe I should take a look at LOTR online, but right now, I have other priorities.
I like the idea of character backgrounds a lot. I used to pen & paper RPG as a boy and it sure helped me to evolve fantasy, creativity and a love for good stories and writing. I created a small story around my party in Icewind Dale.
I should emphasise that Fenris was one of the creative minds who inspired me to write a story of my own. The whole thing started as a short story I wrote at work (night shift security with too much idle time) and now is a 200+ pages - well - book with a nice film noir touch to it. I liked his creative work and character development in Pepperwood and the Aikida Fantasy storyline. I just thought “Hey, I should do something like this on my own someday.”. That’s basically what happened. So I was sitting there for days at night at work, having the building perimeters alarms armed and secured, writing, drinking coffee and being creative.
Roleplayers.
That special very creative breed.
:D
July 15th, 2008 at 3:06 am
Cool to hear. My creative side enjoys exploring, and enjoys world building, which is part of the reason I started the fantasy Aikida arc… mainly to have an outlet for this.
July 15th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Back…by popular demand.
July 15th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Holy shit, where did you even find that picture?
July 15th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Thank the lord for cached sites on the internet.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:32 am
That’s one hot elf on that screenshot btw. :D