DEVELOPER: Turbine
Played on: PC
Initial impression: For The Mark!
Liked:
- Story
- Visuals
- Mounted Combat
Disliked:
- The grind
- Length
On The Fence:
- "End Game" Rebuilding Hytbold
- Level Cap gear
Preface - I Come Back To You Now...
I've been a Lord of the Rings player since the week after it
launched. I'd have been a Founder (aka pre-order player) if I had just gone to
the store a week or so earlier. I used to be one of the dedicated players,
spending 5-6 hours a night, every week night, trudging through the areas of
Middle Earth that were available.
I joined and left many groups, each claiming to offer a
'true, pure' role-playing experience. Got so fed up with the crap I formed my
own group. That went well for a while, until I more or less had a mental
breakdown from the stress of real life. My group fell apart in a horrible
fashion (and I was partially to blame since I contributed to its demise). I
took about 2 years off from the MMO.
I decided to look into rejoining and discovered that Rohan,
an area I wanted to see since the beginning - an area that my main character
was from, was finally becoming available about two weeks later. Oddly
coincidental if you ask me. I was able to reconnect with an old in-game friend.
I joined the group he was part of, because I trust his opinion. They are a
decent bunch of players who'll do anything for anyone.
My kind of people.
 |
| Outside of a town in the north of Rohan. Note: Not me. |
The Turn Of The Tide
The main detail about LOTRO that you need to keep in mind is
that you are not part of the historic 'fellowship' and you are not taking the One
Ring to Mordor. No - you are usually part of the support team, either cleaning
up their mess or clearing areas so they can forge ahead. If you're not doing
stuff for them, you're fighting back the Great Evil that is creeping from
Angmar (where the leader of the Ringwraiths came from). You are your own
character, who interacts with the likes of Gandalf, Tom Bombadil, Radagast the
Brown, Glorfindel and Prince Theodred. You encounter Frodo and the crew at key
locations - Rivendell, for one - and have some conversations with them about
the quest that lies before them.
For Rohan's part, you are experiencing the degradation of
the kingdom due to the corruption of King Theoden (via Grima Wormtongue/Saruman
the White). At this point you've already witnessed first-hand the decimation of
Isengard and Saruman's influence over the hill-folk of Dunland. Though you've
worked to reverse the damage in lower Eriador, the thanes of the regions of
Rohan grow impatient waiting for word from their leader on how to proceed to
protect their lands from the onslaught of orcs and uruk-hai.
You work your way through eastern Rohan, comprised of such
places as The Wold (specific region I decided my character was from on day one,
years ago). As with all MMOs to date, you run a handful of errands, helping
people in each town, camp and outpost along the way, eventually gaining enough
trust for them to back your efforts on reuniting the region under one banner.
What Do Your Elven Eyes See?
Rohan looks more or less how I imagined it would - some
large, open fields with some rolling hills and a lot of odd rock outcroppings.
Remember in the film The Two Towers when Aragorn encounters Éomer and the
riders of Rohan, how that area looked? That's what LOTRO's Rohan looks like,
more or less. Some sights are just plain awesome - There's a cave system you can
go through that eventually exits on top of a cliff high above the plains. It's
quite a breath-taking visual (despite the fact that a huge dragon happens to be
there). Even Fangorn was pretty awesome, and I hate forests in LOTRO.
Mounted Horse Combat
At long last you can fight while sitting atop your horse. I
say HORSE because you can't have any other kind of mount in LOTRO and fight
while atop it. The system is a bit clunky at first. The new war horse is a pain
in the ass to move in any sort of reasonable capacity. Even when going through
the tutorial (which I aced on the first try, oddly enough) felt like a
struggle. Thankfully, not too much longer you're out on your own. On the open
plains, mounted combat made more sense. The more you do it, the easier it gets.
As your horse gains experience (level building a mount? Bizarre.) it gets
easier to handle. Foes fall faster. You greatly exceed the level gap for taking
down enemies.
There is gear associated with the warhorse, but so far it's
only a bridle. Like your weapons and armor, the bridle has stats and will
influence how your horse takes and deals damage, how fast it can run and how
well it can maneuver. Other items, like barding and tack, are purely cosmetic.
Grindy Grindy
Yeah - the one thing I really hate about MMOs is the
persistent grind. They tried to alleviate it a bit by making items that used to
be vendor trash into a collectibles system to gain reputation and horse XP, but
in the end the missions are painfully reminiscent of how they were in the
beginning - Fed-Ex quests and slayer quests are still as dreadfully dull as
they've ever been. The only thing that changed is the reward.
In running all around Rohan, you find that mounted combat
makes things easy. Hell - TOO easy at times. I was able to fight things 5
levels higher than what I was (and win) because of mounted combat. Because of
this, most quests were a breeze. I found myself nearing the end before I had
even hit the level cap. I had been concentrating on the main quest all along.
As such, I decided to go back and deal with every little side-quest and task
presented in all the places I had visited. The grind had returned, and
presented itself as more fetch or kill tasks, some of which were so incredibly
redundant that I couldn't bear to take more than an hour of them at a time. One
specific quest cluster had me invade an enemy camp to perform some menial task,
then return to the camp no less than THREE MORE TIMES for separate quests in
the same chain.
Obtain quest. Go to enemy camp. Perform task. Return to town
for reward.
Obtain NEW quest. Go back to enemy camp. Perform task.
Return to town for reward.
Obtain NEW quest. Go back to enemy camp. Perform task.
Return to town for reward.
Obtain NEW quest. Go back to enemy camp. Perform task. Return
to town for reward.
No, really. That's exactly how it happened. You couldn't get
all the quests at once and do all the tasks while you were there the first
time. You had to keep going back and forth. That's just ONE example that I can
recall quite clearly, but trust me when I say this happens all the time, in all
areas (but quite prominently in Rohan).
This brings me to the area's central town - Hytbold. It lies
in ruin, but you can help restore it to its former glory if you ... grind your
way through daily quests. You can only do 5 of the 20 available quests per day,
and 15 of them have three variants (meaning you have to go on 50 separate
quests to do them all). There's no indicator as to which quests is available on
any given day, unless you make the trek out to each of the four main towns and
ask the NPC that gives the quest.
 |
| Map of the town. |
To add insult to injury, the reward you get from doing a
daily Hytbold quest is a handful of tokens, which you use to rebuild parts of
the fallen town. You get 5 for each completed quest, and you need anywhere from
5 to 15 to build any ONE aspect of the town. There are enough pieces to rebuild
to require about 1,100 tokens at last count. That's 44 days of doing these
daily quests. To what end? You need to build certain locations or restore
certain groups to their homes in order to obtain your class armor, of which
there are three sets, depending on how you slotted your traits. You can mix or
match these various pieces, which require MORE tokens BTW.
Let me make a quick aside about one thing - money. The
in-game money (Copper, Silver and Gold) has never been easier to obtain than it
is right now. In the short time I was back I was able to collect about 5 times
the amount I've EVER had. That's NOTHING compared to the people who DIDN'T take
nearly 2 years off. Those people easily have 4-5 times more than I do. Though
this is all great, it means the economy is severely skewed. When the average
person (of which I am slightly below) has what used to be an exorbitant amount
of cash, the asking prices on the Auction House get inflated. Heavily inflated,
in fact. The "expensive" things used to be a few gold pieces. Now
it's a couple hundred gold pieces.
One such item I've seen on the Auction House is currently
going for 500 gold. 500. That's 20 times more than I'd ever had before my
hiatus. That's about 4-5 times more than I currently have on my main character.
For one piece of armor. ONE. You need 6 separate pieces (chest, legs,
shoulders, feet, gloves, helmet) to be fully equipped.
This brings me back to the Hytbold armor. It's not stellar.
The durability on the stuff is laughable (you'll need to repair it after every
quest). The durability of my previous armor allowed me to go about 5-6 hours
without needing to repair. This new stuff may hurt itself while you're standing
still - that's how fragile it is.
Look For Me At Dawn's First Light...
All in all I am pleased with the Riders of Rohan expansion,
but after I hit the grind-wall of Hytbold I quickly grew bored. Even
reconnecting with an old friend and making some great new ones isn't enough of
a draw to take me back to LOTRO in the capacity I used to endure. I haven't
been on much over the December holiday season, but I will make sure to hop on
there at least once a week in the coming months.
