18 Mar 2011
The last post focused on the world of Lord of the Rings Online, because that’s the first thing you’ll see and care about. This post delves into the details of what to do within that world, once again comparing to my various quotes from three years ago.
Advancement - Deeds, Traits, and Levels
It’s impressive how enticing the deed system is considering how minor the effect is on gameplay.
I was a fan of the deed system right away. But the more time I’ve spent with it, the more impressed I’ve become. It’s much better than an achievement system. It’s a sophisticated layered incentive system that will keep you coming back for the silliest little things.
I’ve never found myself playing a game like this and doing so many things that give me no experience. That’s a testament to how compelling completing these deeds can be. Sure, I could go do more quests and level-up… but it might be more fun to just poke around and find these ruins in order to get another rank on my Wisdom virtue. Oh and while I’m there maybe I can kill enough brigands to earn a title and maybe an upgrade in my Justice rank.
Having variety in this sort of game is a really good thing. I’m not exactly sure why it is that choose we spend our leisure time being overwhelmed with too many things to do. Maybe it’s because these are things we can actually accomplish and check off our list? Regardless, it’s a good thing to feel like there are lots of valid ways to spend your time. There are deeds for finding landmarks, killing specific types of baddies, completing quests in an area, using specific abilities a lot… you complete deeds constantly. Sometimes you get a title, sometimes you get a virtue rank (which can be slotted for a little stat boost), and always you get a couple Turbine Points (the real money currency of the game). It’s just fundamentally more exciting than your average completionist-focused achievement.
And as that the monsters in each region go up in level with me, it’s not like I ever get the satisfaction of feeling more powerful. So what are the levels buying me?
I kind of went off on a mini rant about whether levels are really helping anything (perhaps derived from this article from Raph Koster). It’s not that I think levels are bad, it’s more that I think perhaps they represent too strict of a divide. I joined a group of fellow adventurers to run some content five levels above me, and I was useless to them. At least half of my attacks missed. I should be less powerful than them, sure; but what seemed like a small numerical spread apparently represented total incompatibility. Is that fun?
This complaint isn’t leveled at LotRO but the MMO genre as a whole. I think the only game I’ve played where this wasn’t a problem was City of Heroes, where effective player level could be bumped up or down while in a group. This meant that the pool of people to play with was actually everyone online. Extremely liberating. I wish more games thought harder about how to unite players instead of separate them. Oh well.
Quests
Pretty standard MMO fare
Yep, the quest design in LotRO is status quo. Kill X Angry Baddies; gather X McGuffins; escort helpless Mr. X. The flow of quests has seen a definite improvement over the past couple years (less back-and-forth than I remember), but there isn’t a terrible amount of variety in what it is you do. And this would be more of a problem if there weren’t lots of other things to do that aren’t strictly quests. There are deeds and tasks and skirmishes to fill up your time. It’s easy to truck along and forget about your quest log for awhile, so it doesn’t really bother me that the quests are vanilla.
There’s a primary story quest line that adheres to a higher quality bar, letting you follow the path of the ring without contradicting the fiction.
The game has always had this quest line that connects you with the big names in the Lord of the Rings fiction. You meet Strider in Bree, you’ll track down Black Riders, you’ll rendezvous with the Fellowship in Rivendell and go hunting with Gimli and Legolas. It’s great stuff. But the problem was that it required an extremely varied mix of solo, small fellowship, and instance quests in order to progress through the books. It was very hard to find the help you needed to work through the whole epic quest line. But since I last played the developers have gone through and tightened up the experience so that the whole storyline can be played solo. This makes it so that everyone can enjoy their best content, a smart move.
Tasks
I’m not positive, but I think Tasks exist because someone realized that there needed to be something for non-subscription players to do if they weren’t willing to pay for quest packs. Tasks are repeatable quests that use the junk you’d normally sell to vendors. So instead of trashing that “Orcish Tea Cozy” you could instead turn it in for a small amount of experience and reputation. It’s not glamorous, but I think the effect on the game is quite positive. It turns an uninteresting part of the game into a decision: do I prioritize experience growth or economic growth? The repeatable quests are gated to five per day, so if you’re going to turn this crap into experience it’ll take some storage space and patience. If you’d rather just have the cash now you can sell them all as before. It’s a simple clever system that basically has no downsides for the player.
Crafting
I don’t think anyone would consider the crafting system a critical feature for MMO. It’s exclusion probably wouldn’t cause anyone to pass on a game, but every MMO still seems to have one. LotRO has a perfectly passable crafting system that even has a fair share of innovative ideas. Like others it probably economically makes more sense to sell everything you find and buy crafted goods from others, but the system is there for those who enjoy this sort of thing. I think I’m one of them, but I’m always wondering if I really do or if I just feel compelled to participate.
Unfortunately finding recipes on the auction house is laughably difficult due to poor UI.
The auction system categories are constantly getting refined, which does make the experience better. It’s easier to drill into the right recipe section, for example. However it feels to me like they’re going about it wrong. Maybe it’s just the fact that they put Usable as a sort instead of a checkbox. This makes it fussy to do something perfectly reasonable like find cheap upgrades for your current gear. Ah, but this is a complaint with the interface. The mechanics of recipes are perfectly fine. I like the one-use recipes, I like how you can sometimes choose different output flavors, and I of course like the nice surprise of the crafting critical that gives you an awesomer version.
the game lacks a friendly way to craft in bulk (I should never have to click a plus button 60 times just to smelt all my ore).
Fixed! I’m not sure why it took so long to add a “Make All” button. Oh, again this was an interface complaint. It’s almost like there’s a trend here… More on that later.
In my experience the stuff you can make is generally not of value by the time you can make it (given either the time to gather ingredients or the prohibitive cost of those ingredients on the auction house).
Aha! A real comment on crafting. Well, it’s worth saying that I’m having a little better luck with my second character’s crafting experience. Knowing the basics of the system helps you plan ahead. I’ve definitely been able to create good upgrades for myself without having to spend too much time rounding up the ingredients. Part of this was knowing to stop screwing around on the auction house and just vendor trash certain professions’ components. I’m sorry scholars and cooks, but you’re not willing to pay enough to make it worth the trouble.
Another thing that’s contributed to a smoother experience is the introduction of Bounty quests. These are three times repeatable quests that reward you with a big pile of crafting ingredients and patterns. This helps take a bit of the pressure off of rounding up some of the more obscure components.
Overall I think I like LotRO’s crafting system. It gives me something else to do besides obsessively leveling, and that’s probably for the best.
Next up, stuff to do with other people. Yes, the ‘M’ of MMO. Um, more specifically the second ‘M’.
16 Mar 2011
Now that I’ve put up my complete words from 2008, it’s time to re-evaluate the Lord of the Rings Online of today.
… there’s no doubt in my mind that WoW is a superior game. But when you’ve exhausted all of WoW’s content, and you haven’t written off the genre as a whole, you can do worse than to slum it out to LotRO.
Well, that’s an unflattering quote to start off with. It’s also not untrue. Basically the only times I’ve played LotRO have been when I’ve been bored with WoW. There’s never been a time when WoW was satisfying me that I thought about maybe playing some LotRO instead.
But this free to play thing changes the comparison. It’s no longer just about which game is a “better” game; it’s about which game gives you the most enjoyment for your time and money. I’m cheap enough to think about what $15 a month means to me. Okay, $15 doesn’t sound like much, but over a year that’s $180, and I don’t know if WoW is that much better than LotRO. Probably the hardest part for me is the knowledge that if I’m not playing the game then I’m wasting $15 a month. The flexibility LotRO now offers of being able to play as frequently or infrequently as I want is extremely compelling. And for my infrequent play style, LotRO may just be the better choice.
I’ll get more into the free to play details later, but for now I need to close the gap between 2008 and 2011.
World and Travel
Comparing to the fiction, [the game] basically only allows access to locations where events started to get interesting. There’s no Lonely Mountain, no Moria, no Isengard, and certainly no Mordor. Spending hours of your time grinding through a field that the Fellowship breezed through doesn’t exactly leave a heroic taste in your mouth.
Well, since I wrote these words there have been two large area expansions: Moria, and Mirkwood.
Moria is a huge labyrinth of underground halls and caverns. When you see the Bridge of Khazad-dûm you will find it cracked in half, as that you arrive after Gandalf’s passing. It’s an epic space that hits a wide spread of underground themes. It’s nice for awhile, but it wasn’t long before I felt the need for some fresh air and open sky. Thankfully when you’ve leveled your way through the content you emerge in the elven city of Lórien, providing a much appreciated change in scenery.
If you look on a map Mirkwood is huge, but the Mirkwood expansion only lets you poke around a small section of it. It’s an appropriately spooky forest, if a bit monotone. Sadly I can’t think of a single landmark that burned itself into my memory. So I rode around for awhile until I found a cool scary tree for a photo.
From a palette perspective you could just consider Moria to be the “mine” expansion and Mirkwood to be the “forest” expansion - with not a lot of variety within either. This is an ongoing struggle for LotRO. The fiction isn’t host to fantastical scenery. Pretty, absolutely; imaginative, no. What it lacks in inspiration it makes up for in quantity of historical locales, but here the slow drip of releases prevents me from achieving satisfaction.
For what it’s worth the next large expansion is scheduled to release this fall and will add Rohan. This should add key landmarks like Isengard, Helm’s Deep, Edoras, and Fangorn Forest - definitely many things to look forward to.
And this is where I think the license is working against the game: In trying to own up to the epic size of the world the developers have created an epic amount of work for themselves. If it’s taken this long to get us to the Misty Mountains, how long will it be until we’re at the steps of Mount Doom?
Apparently a long time. What’s released right now basically brings us to the end of Fellowship. It’s been four years (2007 to 2011), and that doesn’t count the development time prior to launch. The next expansion will officially start progress into the Two Towers. Insert some fuzzy math and at that rate it’ll be around 2019 before the core landmass from the trilogy is completed and we can /dance in Barad-dûr. By that point I expect to be able to play the game on retinal implants as I jetpack to work in the coastal Cascades.
What I can say is that what’s available is lovingly crafted, and I expect that trend to continue. But the rate of expansion remains maddeningly slow.
Next time I’ll talk about all the sorts of quests and various activities to do in this finely crafted Middle Earth.
14 Mar 2011
Played on PC
Recently Lord of the Rings Online went free to play, which is to say you can play the game without a subscription or even a credit card. Of course there are all sorts of potential microtransactions available so that Turbine can actually make money on their game, but these are all completely optional. Since there’s no cost to me I decided to log in and check out the game (the last time I played was alongside the Mirkwood expansion about a year ago). And as I evaluated the game in its current state against adjusted criteria I thought it’d be interesting to revistwhat I’d written about the game in the past here. It was at that point that I realized that there was a lot of content that I wrote about the game that somehow never got posted. So, I present to you what was intended to be an immediate follow-up to this post, further thoughts about Lord of the Rings Online, three years ago (circa early 2008).
Huge disclaimer: there are things I talk about below that have changed over the past three years. I’ll be following this post with my thoughts on how far the game has come. But I’m intentionally posting this as is, even though some of the statements are now inaccurate.
World and Travel
This is the only part of what I wrote that made it to the blog already. You can read about it here.
Advancement - Deeds, Traits, and Levels
One of the great innovations the developers have brought to LotRO is the deed system. Deeds can be given for traditional stuff like killing 200 orcs, or they can come from something more interesting like scouting out every ruin in the region. Completing deeds can reward you with titles, which don’t have any effect on gameplay but are fun to get nonetheless. Unfortunately, titles are usually the result of easier deeds, so the coolness factor of being called “Spider-Foe” is lessened when you know everyone else has that title as well. I wish they had more challenging titles to earn for those of us who want to set ourselves apart.
Deeds can also produce traits, which equip into slots to specialize your character. Some of these grant you new abilities (like the capacity to wear heavier armor), while others just grant you an attribute buff. Many of these are stackable, so if you unlock the Zeal trait multiple times the effect of the Zeal buff will be stronger. Number-wise, the carrot on the end of the stick is small, but it’s enough to encourage you to do something a little off the beaten path.
It’s impressive how enticing the deed system is considering how minor the effect is on gameplay. I’ve often found myself re-treading some old content just to get some interesting deed. It makes me wonder if all the extreme level banding is really necessary. I seem to be willing to go out of my way for very small gameplay rewards. The worry of all MMO developers is that without gating the content I will blaze through it too fast and cancel my subscription when I’m done. But in my modern MMO experience I usually level past the quest content before I’m able to get through all of it. And as that the monsters in each region go up in level with me, it’s not like I ever get the satisfaction of feeling more powerful. So what are the levels buying me? All they’re really doing is designating which regions I’m supposed to be playing at what times.
Wouldn’t the experience be just as rich if I everyone was the same level? Maybe getting rid of levels is too extreme, but at the very least can we make the gaps less extreme? There are 50 levels in LotRO, and taking on something more than 4 or 5 levels higher than you is a death wish. What if you could reasonably engage something within 10 levels? Would that break the game?
Combat
The combat in LotRO has always left me feeling a little unsatisfied. It’s standard WoW fare: various timed abilities mapped to a numbered quick bar. You stand there, whacking at your opponent, firing off some pattern of special attacks, waiting for them to keel over so you can loot their stuff. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t demand your full attention. The main difference in this game is that they seem to have thrown too many options at you in an attempt to make it interesting. But instead most of the abilities end up blurring together and leaving you bogged down with your overcrowded quick bar.
The average fight lasts around 30 seconds, which doesn’t sound like much, but is forever when you’re just trying to kill a freaking boar. The result is you never feel very powerful. It doesn’t help that you will be fighting an unending swarm of sameness. The respawn times seem shorter and the variety in foes fewer. Expect to fight a lot of boars, bears, wolves, spiders, brigands, and orcs. It’s all true to the fiction, but once the initial warm fuzzies wear off you’ll be wishing there was some more diversity.
User Interface
LotRO’s UI is approachable, largely due to its similarity with WoW, but it lacks the same polish. Icons are too small and lack strong enough silhouettes to be quickly identified. There are odd inconsistencies in the click-ability of items, requiring that you overfill your quick bar. And the bag view is frustrating because you can’t do key tasks from there like sell. There are a ton of small issues with the interface - I could really go on and on.
WoW provided an open platform that enabled the community to patch up the rough spots. Blizzard would watch popular trends and integrate those features into the core. The end result is that the default WoW UI has become better and better over the years at an impressive pace. Here in LotRO there’s no ability to make up for the UI’s shortcomings, and the momentum from the development team is too slow. I know user interface is my field so I’m a bit biased, but I strongly believe that WoW’s choice of UI platform is one of the largest contributers to its continued success.
Quests
The introduction to the game is quite strong with solo instances and nice epic feeling quests. But outside of that there’s an excessive amount of fetch quests and back-and-forth travel. There’s a primary story quest line that adheres to a higher quality bar, letting you follow the path of the ring without contradicting the fiction. But in general the creative uses of instances in the early regions seems to thin out and be replaced by less inspired content as you move forward. Pretty standard MMO fare.
PvP
Given the Lord of the Rings fiction, LotRO doesn’t let you turn on your fellows for standard PvP. That would let the terrorists Sauron win. Instead the game offers a special mode where some players play monsters and others play their heroes. I only tried it once, and was unfortunately bogged down by the excessive travelling involved. There was far too much downtime moving around to then die so quickly. But playing as the bad guys did spice up the sometimes bland morality of the primary quest lines. And it was certainly enjoyable to play varied looking characters (spiders and orcs and such). But the time to reward ratio was too high so I only gave it that one try.
Crafting
The crafting system seems pretty standard at first glance, but it has a lot more complexity to it than what you see in WoW. For example there’s a chance of crafting criticals that can add some surprises to a usually boring task (in the form of either a better version of the item or more components). There are patterns for more powerful items that are balanced by being one-use only, avoiding flooding the market and making the common stuff irrelevant. Unfortunately finding recipes on the auction house is laughably difficult due to poor UI. And for the other stuff the game lacks a friendly way to craft in bulk (I should never have to click a plus button 60 times just to smelt all my ore). In my experience the stuff you can make is generally not of value by the time you can make it (given either the time to gather ingredients or the prohibitive cost of those ingredients on the auction house). Overall crafting seems to be more interesting that what you can do in WoW but lacks polish, especially around the UI.
It is worth calling out that the ability to dye your armor is awesome. It prevents your character from looking stupid, which is good because you’re going to be staring at them for hours on end. I know support for this involves investment in some core tech, but really every MMO should have this feature.
There you have it - my unposted words from three years ago. Next up I’ll talk about how far the game has come since then.
16 Sep 2010
It’s common to have a video game release alongside a film release as some sort of companion marketing synergy something-something. It’s rare that I actually experience those products in tandem as intended. But that has been the case with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. So I have two pieces of media to process here, both of which have increased my curiosity about the original source material.
I actually technically started with the game, but I’ll begin with the movie. If you are not in an extremely specific demographic, then this movie isn’t for you. If you’re old enough to have predated the video game generation, then the whole thing is going to feel like a whirlwind of predictable, repetitive, superficial bubblegum. If instead you’re too young and had your video game cherry popped by Halo or Grand Theft Auto, then you won’t connect with the references or the 8-bit stylings. In short, your ability to enjoy this movie may be limited by whether you know what a bob-omb is.
I guess I should have known I would have liked the film, as that the director’s filmography includes Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead. Both of those movies understood their genre well, and Scott Pilgrim is no different here. The film feels like some delicious blend of video game and comic book. That’s either going to come off as cheesy or awesome, depending on your perspective. I did hear a groan from the audience when the movie took a left turn about twenty minutes in with its first boss battle. It reminded me of the time I saw Crouching Tiger in the theater and there was a similar confused “what?” that came from the crowd when a character in the film started to fly. Please, get over yourself, suspend your disbelief, and enjoy this alternate slice of reality. Physics be damned.
In short the plot is that Scott Pilgrim falls in love with Ramona Flowers (and with her vibrant hair, goggles, mystery, and deep brown eyes who can blame him?), and must progress through a series of seven boss battles to win her. The progression of the film is entirely predictable. You will know after a scene without looking at your watch about how much movie is left. But it’s really no different than knowing that the solution that House comes up with 20 minutes in is wrong and the one he comes up with 5 minutes from the end is right. It’s just narrative structure. But, you know, with boss battles.
The movie was paired with a coordinating game release for XBLA and PSN. The game is a classic beat-em-up, in the style of River City Ransom or Double Dragon. Unlike Castle Crashers, this modern beat-em-up makes no effort to modernize the visual style. The Scott Pilgrim game is blissfully low tech, with pixelated sprites and chiptune music. Oh my god, the music. So catchy, so good. Or at least it is to my nostalgic ear. There was one tune that started to grate on me, but that’s because the loop was too short and the level was too hard. But overall the audio experience is delightfully old school.
Generally the point of tying two media releases is to motivate you to get into one if you’re initially only into the other. The expectation I’m guessing is that if you’re excited about the movie you’ll get the game, not as much the other way around given that movie license games are usually terrible. In this case I guess I did it backwards - as that I picked up the game because I heard it was good. I didn’t form plans to see the movie until I heard that it was also good, although I guess the game did get me a bit more excited for it. Not that I helped - the movie had already been declared a box office failure in the short weeks before I got out to see it. It’s sad how immediately things are judged. It’s the same logic that gets an amazing show like Firefly canceled. Oh well, I still heartily recommend both Scott Pilgrim the game and Scott Pilgrim the movie to anyone who fits in that demographic (and if you’re in it, you probably already know).
11 Aug 2010
Played on Xbox360
Before playing Darksiders, I had already heard a lot of press about how the game is just one big Zelda rip off. It is accused of unabashedly stealing mechanics from that franchise and others. And you know what, that’s no lie. But I fail to see how it’s a problem. The Zelda games are almost uniformly excellent. And there really aren’t many other games that attempt that gameplay style. So really, there’s low supply and high demand for Zelda-style games, and something like Darksiders should be perfectly welcome. I mean, were people really upset when Shadow Complex blatantly cribbed from Metroid? I’m glad the gaming industry isn’t as crazy about patents as the rest of the software world - it prevents the culture from stagnating.
When the cell shaded art style for Wind Waker got unveiled apparently a ton of fans were mortified. They wanted some more realistically rendered adult Link. Personally I loved the light hearted cartoon style of Wind Waker. But if some people were still holding out for a grittier, more “adult” Link, then they have it in Darksiders… and then some. Darksiders takes place in a world where angels and demons are battling it out over a post-apocalyptic Earth. You play as War, one of the four horsemen, standing in the middle trying to keep both sides in line through extreme violence. It’s like if Link started rampaging around making demonic pacts and cutting people’s head’s off. Instead of, you know, occasionally harassing chickens.
That theme may not align to your typical Zelda game, but the mechanics are all familiar. You get a boomerang and a hookshot; you’ll romp through dungeons with chests, puzzles, and keys; and at the end there will be an epic boss battle with some pattern you need to learn that involves the fancy tool you just found. It’s undeniably the same design. But it’s all executed very well.
Truth be told, I think I preferred it to Twilight Princess. The visuals are obviously of a higher fidelity, but there are also a lot of surprisingly inspired environments. The controls are tight and responsive (at least compared to my regrettable experience of playing Twilight Princess on the Wii instead of the Gamecube). And overall the game is just that much more streamlined, with a manageable length (which for me is a positive characteristic these days). Overall Darksiders was a nice little game that took a beloved pattern and repeated it. It totally scratched the right itch, so if you’ve been feeling the need for a classic Zelda romp, then give Darksiders a spin.
