[...]
You're kinda cool but I know better than to break the rules
Of messin' with a lesson that I'll never learn
I'll go from bad to worse and later back to better
But I'll never mend the bridges that I meant to burn"
Anna Nalick - Consider This
It's been two years since my last Lord of the Rings Online posts. Time flies when you're having more fun with other companies' products. But, in fact, I never uninstalled or quite entirely gave up on LotRO.
When I last wrote about it in any detail, the game's production team had split off from its parent company and been bought up, along with other aging MMO titles, by Russians sniffing around for old account data to exploit. Which is fine. If geopolitic upheaval is the price we pay for keeping Middle-Earth online, then I'm all for it. Fuck the real world. Give me hobbits. At the time my response vis-a-vis LotRO's continued expansion was "wait and see" because it's creators were likely to find themselves more motivated. As part of Turbine or Warner Bros., LotRO had been only one of many products, valued after its initial stumbles for nothing more than its cross-promotional value with WB's disgusting Hobbit maladaptations. For the unknown "Standing Stone Games" on the other hand it would be their only product, their breaded and buttered lifeline, and thus likely to be treated more seriously, Easterling overlordship aside.
Since then I've been dropping in now and then, sitting in a dead guild (or a guild full of brain-dead zombies who never organize a single instance run, which is the same thing) and spinning my wheels through Northern Ithilien, Dagorlad and Mordor's various zones while never quite catching up to the latest content. (I was five levels from the level cap this November when they raised it another ten levels.) As far as I can tell I'm about four zones behind everyone else and feel little impetus to catch up, due to reasons I'll discuss later. But! I've now finally reached some content unambiguously developed independently after the transition period, aaaand (drumroll please)... it's moderately improved! Huzzah!
Welcome to the Dale-Lands, shortly post-Sauron. Aesthetically, pretty much everything's better. New music tracks are nothing outstanding individually but pleasing in their variety and apt to their context. The content itself is more appropriate to a derivative product, less prone to gratuitously interposing the player into the original LotR narrative, less infested by D&D-ish devils and spiky fire-orcs. Pointless cinematics are eschewed in favor of fine-tuning mission intros to hit that sweet spot between "go kill big uglies" and tedious walls of text. It seems that after a decade and a half the game is finally getting back on track to being "middle-earth online" and paying more attention to developing its world rather than merely feeding its customers' self-importance. Even floating quest markers have been improved: now when you're searching for an NPC, the glowing ring will sometimes only show up when you get near, forcing you to be slightly more aware of your surroundings. It may not sound like much, but for an activity as idiot-friendly as a WoW-clone MMO, it's significant progress.
But if there's one feature in which LotRO has always outshone the rest of the industry, it's in providing scenic locations, and with the Dale-Lands they've certainly played their strength. Though the individual models and textures are shamelessly recycled from earlier zones, they've been arranged to give every corner of the map its own personality. Mirkwood looks appropriately mirky, with its one lonely path fading in and out of the groundcover. The Dale-Lands transition from marshes at the lake's southern end, to grass and scrubland, to the bare slopes of the Lonely Mountain. Each town feels unique, from the dendritic cathedral halls of Felegoth, the relaxed trade town of Loeglond, Lake-Town and its multi-tiered carved wooden construction, the sturdy but convoluted trading town of Dale with its marketplaces and the Dwarves' monolithic halls. And, as in the screenshot above, most locations were positioned within sight of at least one other, carefully suggesting visual contrast and mental recapitulation. Where Rohan and Gondor were mostly pointless repetition, I now find myself actually turning around to take stock of each new location again, as I did in Eriador.
Unfortunately, it appears I was right about one thing. Dumbed-down WoW-clone gameplay attracts dumb customers, and once you've cemented that subscriber base you've got little to no chance of re-assembling a core of curious, creative individuals willing to band together to take on serious challenges. Standing Stone has been putting some effort into avoiding the "kill ten rats" routine, but they themselves obliquely admit this has so far only amounted to a lot of redundant running back and forth as timesinks, and "click ten boxes":
Cute.
Well, the first step is admitting you have a problem... but that phrase in itself presumes further steps in addressing that problem. What are you actually doing about LotRO's main downfall of oversimplified gameplay? Because no matter how breathtaking its level design and how apt its music score, a game still fundamentally needs to qualify as a game. As a holiday in Middle-Earth, LotRO has benefited from staggering amounts of leeway in this respect from people like me willing to show up just for sightseeing, but for one my continued support has implied a demand (albeit little expectation) to return, sometime in the future, to the cooperative PvE mechanics which made this so intriguing a class-based game at its launch. Leaving aside soft and hard crowd control, genus-specific monster debuffs, class-specific status cures, single-target tanking and offtanking, semipermanent point-buy skill builds instead of perfunctory trees, meaningful damage types and immunities, resource management including depletable mana, a crafting-based player economy and everything else you slashed from your product to make it appeal more to degenerate retarded filth... let me ask you one question:
Have you brought back conjunctions yet?
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