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

© Posted by JoBildo for Im Talkin Games with 2 comments on 11/19/2009.
Posted in: Commentary, Opinion Tags: Lord of the Rings Online, LotRO, RPG, Turbine

Last night, thanks to a welcome back weekend promotion and my own lack of ability to keep money in my wallet, I resubscribed to LotRO.  The good news is that I was given the wrong options when I bought Mines of Moria recently, and was unable to take advantage of the $9.99 monthly pricing that the accounts page said I should have been able to.  I sent this complaint to Turbine’s account support, and this week I got a reply e-mail saying I’d been credited a 3-month subscription and will receive Siege of Mirkwood as a free bonus.  So while I might not have received my work bonus this year (long story…) I at least got some little gaming stimulus from the folks at Turbine.

I got to start my adventure last night, and while my own experience wasn’t as disorienting as Keen’s, I must admit… I feel a little lost.  So many changes have happened to the game in the time I’ve been away that it took me a while to figure out what all the new doo-dads were for.  You can now track quests with map-markers that pop up showing you the general direction of your objective, you have two different slots for appearance armor and clothing, you can buy a house, work on oodles reputation rewards, get a hobby like fishing, and several zones have been completely reworked to provide a better questing experience.

My level 37 Champion had been logged out for so long, and I’m not sure how the rest experience works, but when I killed just one bear I went from level 37 to 39 and I have no idea where a trainer is to get any new skills that might entitle me to.  Playing the Champion is a little easier than getting acquainted with all the new features I’d been missing though.  My hotbar setup came back to me in no time, and I was killing bears, bandits, orcs, and wargs like a pro soon enough.

I remember quitting LotRO because I felt the solo content stretching thin in my upper 30s, but when I logged in yesterday I found my quest log filled to the brim with solo quests appropriate for my level.  Maybe I was delusional back in the end of 2007?  All I know is now I’m having a blast.  Maybe I just needed an extended break.  I’m nearing the appropriate level to start Angmar and work my way to 50 and the Mines of Moria too.

But I’m finding myself very tempted to start a Warden now that I have the Mines of Moria expansion, and level him up.  Champions are a lot of fun, but quite squishy and not exactly easy to solo with in some cases.  The Warden’s mix of DPS and tanking might be more up my alley.  I think I’ll split my time between the two.  I hear the starter zones have been reworked completely, and so have places like the Lone-Lands, so I’m anxious to see how some of the old world has been changed.  Plus on top of all that, Skirmishes come to the game in just a couple weeks, which will add yet another way to play.

I guess what I’m saying with this long and meandering post is that it feels like the perfect time to resubscribe to LotRO if you’re at all curious as to what’s changed in the game since you last played like I was.  My article at MMORPG.com should be going up today, which talks about a great deal of the changes coming to the game in December.

One of the most important ones?  The combat system has been reworked so that the auto-attack no longer keeps your special skills from triggering.  It will run in the background as it does in WoW or WAR, making the action far more fluid and reliable.  That little facet alone would have been enough to get me playing again, but all the other new things like Skirmishes, mounts, and the like are just icing on the cake.

Look for me as Begud on Silverlode.  I’ll be around.

- JoBildo

© Posted by JoBildo for Im Talkin Games with No comments on 11/17/2009.
Posted in: Opinion Tags: Lord of the Rings Online, LotRO, RPG, Turbine

I’ve tried to get back into the game in the past, but starting new characters always left me kind of feeling “meh”, as I missed my 38 Champion.  I was playing on my ex-father in law’s lifetime account and just couldn’t get into it.  But there are some base changes coming to the game’s combat system, namely that the auto-attack now runs in the background to the skills/spells much like WoW so that when you trigger a skill on your hotbar said skill goes off immediatel instead of delayed and waiting for the next auto-attack.  It makes combat much more tactile and gives it much more feedback, giving it that smooth feeling that few games really capture in the traditional combat model.  This alone is enough to make me eager for the new expansion… but I’m missing something crucial first. 

I never did get into The Mines of Moria expansion, and now seems the perfect time to buy it.  Not only is it just $10 to through Turbine, but I believe it comes with the $9.99 a month subscription plan too.  After seeing LotRO last night, $9.99 is easily the biggest steal in terms of subscription pricing on the market.  This might be the very best MMOG in terms of value and features, and I’ve been letting it slip by my view for some time now.  I feel sheepish.

I remember getting a little bored with LotRO around the time of the Evendim content patch, because content was a little thin for a solo-oriented player.  But Aaron Campbell, the live producer of the game, assures me that Mirkwood not only adds a bunch of new content to the end-game, but the staff as walked through the majority of the game’s early content and added new quests, streamlined the experience, and really plugged up any holes there might have been in the leveling process.  It’s his job to say things like that I know, but from what I can tell on various forums across the web, this much is true even without the Mirkwood expansion.  I was miffed that I never got my Champion to level 50, and that alone is a big part of the reason I skipped Moria. That’s going to change tonight I think. 

With the Siege of Mirkwood you have a real change in tone of the game.  Where Shadows of Angmar was about the early stages of the fellowship’s quest and the real thematic ties to the books kept the developers from exploring too much in the ways of the strife and battles between armies (and also kept the game focused primarily on boars and bears out in the wilds), Mines of Moria delved closer to the more dangerous things in Middle-earth, and the Siege of Mirkwood goes even further east and marks the first time players will really start to see the struggle between the free peoples and the forces of Sauron.  In short… things are about to get real hairy in Middle-earth and it’s no longer all about delivering pies in the Shire.  If my short session with Aaron last night is any indication, Mirkwood will be just the beginning of a new and darker LotRO as the story really starts to heat up. 

And one final note if anyone reading this is now intrigued about Turbine’s undersung beauty of a game?  If you’re a current subscriber and buy either a multi-month subscription or the Adventurer’s Pack (a sort of upgrade to your account that gives you more character slots, a shared stash for loot, a special cloak and a special mount) you’ll get the Mirkwood expansion for no additional cost.  Additionally, if you’re a lifetime subscriber and you order the Adventurer’s Pack, you’ll also get the Mirkwood expansion for free… basically saving you $10 and getting you some killer bonuses on top of it. 

Consider me convinced.  I’ll be upgrading my account tonight, and posting more thoughts from a returning player as I go along.  Look for my full walkthrough/preview article on MMORPG.com in the next week or so as well, in which I’ll cover all the new hotness that the expansion is bringing to LotRO.

© Posted by JoBildo for Im Talkin Games with 3 comments on 11/04/2009.
Posted in: Analysis Tags: Lord of the Rings Online, LotRO, Turbine