LotRO: Skirmishes = Awesome

So, in case you’ve missed it… JoBildo’s back in Middle-earth.  I’ve really been enjoying my stay there so far and I’ve even started a Warden to go along with my trusty ol’ Champion.  But right now, aside from getting familiar with just how much the game’s changed in the past couple of years, I’m spending most of my time drooling about the main major feature of Turbine’s upcoming expansion: Skirmishes.

Ravious of Kill Ten Rats has even gone as far to call this feature the potential future of the MMO landscape, and while that may be a bit of hyperbole, he’s on the right track.  Repeatable, variable, scalable encounters with lots of rewards and story-driven content tied in aren’t new in and of themselves.  The old missions of City of Heroes were something akin to this.  But once one plays a Skirmish in LotRO, they’ll see the difference between the two is stark.

Skirmishes are closer to the dungeon content in Turbine’s DDO than anything else on the market.  Each one is heavily story-driven and ties into the overall narrative of the game.  They can be played solo or by a full raid group of 12.  The enemies, objectives, and content changes each time you play them.  There are daily quests tied to each Skirmish.  Rewards gleaned from the system are some of the best rewards obtainable in the game outside of the raid encounters.

In short, what it looks like Turbine’s done is create truly meaningful and dynamic content for everyone and anyone that’s not gated by party size, hardcore or casual play-style, or any of the normal divisive factors that split people of the community into small sects.

I recently had the pleasure of being walked through one of the Skirmishes by Aaron Campbell, and I left wanting to reload the very same encounter to see how it would change.  I wanted to play it solo, with a small fellowship, with a full fellowship, and in a raid to see how it evolved depending.  I wanted to change its difficulty setting, its level range, and go in and play.

It’s a remarkable system, and one that I foresee will be used in the future for the game’s Epic Quest series.  Right now there’s a fairly big problem of old Epic Quests being skipped because they require groups, and Orion (designer for Turbine) is currently going through the old books and making them more solo-friendly to help alleviate this.  If in the future the Epic Quests were handled via the Skirmish system, there would be no need to worry about such issues.  If the Skirmish system isn’t the future of MMOs in general, it’s certainly the future of LotRO.

- JoBildo