Category: Gaming

WAR vs LOTRO: Why I may try to play both

Posted on by Nimgimli

Following up on my last post, I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings Online, and looking forward to the launch of Warhammer Online. The sensible thing would be to drop LOTRO when WAR hits. But I might not. And here’s why.

You hear the term “theme park” applied to MMORPGs a lot. What it means if an MMO is a “theme park” is that the player is guided from place to place and taken on various “rides” along the way. Warhammer Online, from what I’ve seen of it, is very much a “theme park” MMORPG. You log in, you immediately start questing and fighting and progressing in various ways. It feels like a pretty high-energy game. Mythic hasn’t put in fishing or smoking or even dancing (a staple of MMORPGs everywhere, for some reason). There’s no personal housing. Warhammer is very much a GAME. And I like that. It’s goal focused. Always moving. Always getting “wins.”

LOTRO, on the other hand, has all of that, but it feels a lot more low-key, and there is a lot of what Mythic calls “fluff” in it. You can sit around in an Inn blowing smoke rings, playing a lute, and listening to people gossip. You can spend some quiet time fishing, or go out collecting wood or veggies. You can decorate your house. LOTRO is still a theme park, but it’s a much more laid back one. Lots of quests require spending time to gather a group of folks to aid you (here’s hoping Mythic’s “Open Grouping” system gets copied by other devs). There’re lots of places to relax and socialize, and in this way it feels a bit more ‘virtual worldish’ to me. Sometimes I log in and just hang around the Prancing Pony and make no ‘progress’ but still have an enjoyable time.

I like both of these styles of gameplay and I’m definitely not saying one is better than the other, though of course we all have personal preferences and one might be better suited to YOU, dear reader. I happen to like them both, so perhaps I’ll try to keep a toe in the LOTRO waters while I’m fighting my way through the tiers of WAR.

Back to Middle Earth

Posted on by Nimgimli

So after I flamed out on Age of Conan, and used up my free EQ2 time, I was stuck with no MMO to play for August and the start of September. I didn’t want to burn out on the War beta, so I turned to Lord of the Rings Online.

When LOTRO first shipped, I signed up as a Founder (Lifetime) member. I’ve never regretted it, even though LOTRO hasn’t been something I play constantly. But I did it so I’d have a ‘fall back’ for just such times as these (I was actually unemployed when I bought the Founder membership; money was starting to get tight and I wanted to ensure I’d always have a good quality MMO to play).

Thing is, even though I’ve been playing on and off since launch, my highest level character was all of 23. I ran into some focus problems early on during my adventures in Middle Earth. I’m an alt-aholic in every game I play, so I was playing around between a bunch of characters. To make things worse, my friends kind of split between two servers (Landroval and Elendilmir) and I had duplicate classes on the two.

But the final nail in the coffin for me was Bree. One of the biggest problems I have with LOTRO is that Bree feels like such a bottleneck, with every race and class having to spend some time there. Which means every alt ends up doing the same quests, which meant, for me, that boredom set in. I’d log in, putter around doing Green quests, and log out, making little to no progress. Then something else came out to attract my easily distracted attention (Tabula Rasa, maybe) and I left LOTRO behind completely.

Until earlier this month. This time I focused on one solo-friendly class (Champion) and ignored all my alts. I joined a Kinship (though that didn’t last long…nice people but just not the right levels for me). I started doing PUGs for Fellowship quests, and was astounded that generally speaking that wasn’t sucking. I still struggled when I hit level 20 or so and was faced with (it seemed) nothing *but* Fellowship quests, meaning I had to have a good solid block of free time to progress. I almost quit, right there at the same level my 23 Hunter had. Something about those early 20’s just feel slow and thick and painful to wade through, to me. But sheer stubbornness helped me press on. I wasn’t going to have 2 characters stuck at the same level!

Last night I hit level 25. That meant I got to use my freebie “Founder’s Horse” (not as fast as a ‘real’ horse but still nice). I also bought my first house, which was kind of fun. Having a background in EQ2 does make the house decorating in LOTRO seem pretty anemic though. On the other hand, your house is a house, with a yard and neighbors, compared to the apartments of EQ2. And I’m finally pushing out into areas I’ve never seen, thank goodness!

It was a shock coming back though, and curiously I read Tom Chick’s post on this topic soon after I’d gone through the same issues, so I won’t recount them myself:

here’s the other thing that’s difficult about getting back into an MMO after a year away: “Holy cats, what is ALL THIS JUNK in my inventory? Look at all those buttons ON THE HOTBARS? Who can bothered to know all that stuff?” It takes about an hour of wading through grays and reading tooltips and hunting for hotkeys just to get back into the swing of things. At which point it’s “Oh lordy, what are ALL THESE QUESTS? What are these places? Who are these quest vendors? WHERE DO I GO?”

– Lord of the Rings Online: …and back again

The other odd thing is that everyone assumes you have a “main” somewhere and that you’ve done quests already. I zipped through a few quests in the Lone Lands last night so fast (had 2 level 50’s powering through everything, along with 4 23-25s) that I never even realized we’d completed the quests. Somebody carried a statue somewhere… I never even saw it.

I’m really conflicted about this, because I do enjoy the lore and like a good fight. On the other hand, clearing out a bunch of Fellowship-required quests in a single highly-chaotic hour was nice.

But WAR is Coming. When September 18th hits I’ll be all over Warhammer Online, and what will happen to LOTRO then? I’d love to say I’d keep playing it, as it offers things Warhammer doesn’t. But I’m just not sure there’s enough hours in the day to play two MMORPGs.

Warhammer Online Preview Weekend Begins

Posted on by Nimgimli

Actually, the title of the post says it all. A friend who has been playing in the Preview Weekend says that the servers are crowded but that everything is going very smoothly, with no crashes, very little lag, and almost no waiting to finish quests.

Let’s hope its an indication of what the live launch will be like.

Me, I’m going to be playing LOTRO this weekend. I’m very much anticipating the WAR launch, but I just can’t take another start and wipe at the moment. I want the next character I create to be my “forever character” (to borrow and pervert a term from the animal rescue people).

And I’ve been enjoying LOTRO more than I have since launch, but that’s a topic for another post.

New Playstation hardware revs

Posted on by Nimgimli

While the Great BlogWAR of Aught-8 was raging, the Leipzeig Game Conference was ignored here at Dragonchasers. Shame on me.

A couple Playstation-related hardware announcements cropped up. First is the PSP-3000, another rev of the familiar PSP, this one with a built-in microphone (for Skype or voice chat in games) and a screen that is supposed to have double the refresh rate of the old screen, a “color gamut” twice as wide (honestly not sure exactly what that means but I figure it boils down to twice as many potential colors) and 5 times the contrast ratio. Also the Home button is gone, replaced my a Playstation button.

An incremental improvement, for sure, but still welcomed.

Also, a new PS3 bundle. 160 gig PS2, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, DualShock Controller and a coupon for PSN game Pain, all for $500. Uncharted is pretty f’ing great, so its a nice pack-in choice. The downside is that, from everything I’ve read, this new 160 gig PS3 has no Backwards Compatibility. So presumably the MGS4 80 gig bundle now on store shelves is your last chance to get limited BC.

PSP-3000

Warhammer: The Hating Begins

Posted on by Nimgimli

So much fuss is being made in the Warhammer Online fan community about a post at a site called Virgin Worlds. I’d never heard of the site but I’m sure the author had never heard of me, either. But the Warhammer bloggers seem riled up by this fellow. Anyway you can read his rant here.

I’m tired of responding to the post in the comments at 101 different Warhammer blogs so I’ll just respond to it here.

I guess it depends a lot on what you enjoy about these games. This Brent dude is clearly sick of MMORPGs as we have come to know them. He wants *something else*. But how is that Warhammer’s fault?

Personally, I don’t want *something else*. Games like The Agency look interesting but I don’t really want an action-MMORPG. I want a stat-based game. I like stat-based games.

Current MMORPGs to me are like the old Avalon Hill or SPI wargames. I didn’t need totally new game mechanics to buy a new wargame. In fact, I didn’t *want* new mechanics that I’d have to learn all over again. What I wanted was a new game covering different subject matter, with a few “Special Rules” to make it slightly different.

Brent even acknowledges that it is “OK” for strategy games to work that way. Also its OK for puzzle games and FPS to maintain the same basic mechanics. But he has deemed that this is not Good Enough for MMORPGs, then he “jumps the shark” and says MMORPGs won’t be good enough “until we have environments nearing or exceeding those described in Snowcrash”. When I read that my eyes rolled so hard I was dizzy.

I’m thinking Brent just likes the attention, and hey, it’s working for him. It got me to his site for the first time. But slagging Warhammer Online for being exactly what it has promised to be is pointless. It’s like saying “I hate football and I hate sports games, and Madden ’09 is NO FUN.” Well of course if you’re playing a game-type that you don’t like, it isn’t going to be any fun. Duh.

If Mythic had been claiming that Warhammer Online was going to be some revolutionary virtual-reality game to rival Snowcrash, then Brent would be justified. I must have missed that press release.

Warhammer NDA Lifted, a cry of WAAAGHH!! fills the internet

Posted on by Nimgimli

So the NDA is lifted, huzzah!

A million war bloggers are posting a billion beta posts, great walls of text that will numb your mind.

Not me.

I’m going to tell you that my time in the Warhammer Beta has been a hell of a lot of fun. But character wipes have been frequent which is why I’ve backed away from it for now. Each ‘faction’ (3 per side) has its own starting area and starting quests, but still I’ve played them all a couple of times now and I just don’t want launch day to start with a sigh and a mutter of “OK, let’s get through this again.”

WAR: NDA lift-off and Preview Weekend

Posted on by Nimgimli

So the further Warhammer Online buzz today is that the NDA is expected to be lifted tomorrow, and comes with a big reveal as to why its been in place for so long. We’ll see.

Unlike a lot of bloggers, I don’t have a bunch of beta impression posts written and ready to roll out. Honestly there’s been so much Warhammer Online coverage around I should think we’re about at capacity. I will write up a quick post of my general impressions I suppose, just so I can go all fanboy for a while.

Other news is that the “Preview Weekend” is this coming weekend plus some, August 22nd – August 25th. This is an “invite-only” event, and it looks to me like you have to have pre-ordered to get invited. I suppose if you’re invited you’ve already got the email and if you weren’t, then you probably don’t care about the event! 🙂

Pile on Post: Warhammer Open Beta Sept 7th

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you’re following Warhammer Online at all you already know this (I really really doubt that Dragonchasers is your first stop destination for Warhammer news): Open Beta is scheduled to start Sept 7th.

Lots of speculation ensues, since we’ve been told servers go live on September 18th, and there’s a Head Start/Early Access program for pre-orders of an indeterminate length. Do the math and you get a really short open beta.

As I posted in the comment section of JoBildo’s site, I can only hope now that Mythic is treating Open Beta as a marketing tool and don’t anticipate making any major changes based on what they learn from it. I hate to see them rush-patching/fixing anything major in the last weeks before launch.

Stropp made a good point as well:

On the other hand, it’s probably a sensible move by Mythic. Open betas can be brutal on a games good PR. You always get a bunch of players who get in and rip the game to shreds. There’s always haters. Limiting the amount of time before release, limits the amount of time they get to spread negativity.

(read the rest of the entry)

I think there’ll be a ton of WoW fanboys who totally (and unjustifiably) slag the game as soon as they get a look at it, just because this is NOT WoW 2 in spite of what some people seem to think (using that “fact” as praise or derision, depending on what’s side of the WoW fence they live on).

The problem is going to be keep this illogical hate in check so that it doesn’t become a meme.

Back to the Beta-War for me

Posted on by Nimgimli

As I mentioned, I haven’t been *playing* the Warhammer Online beta for quite some time. I’d jump in and do testing as directed by the devs, but it’s been a long time since I just logged in and played the game as if it was in release and I was just playing for my own pleasure.

It’d been a rough week this past week, though, with very little gaming time to be found, aside from the odd quick Pixel Junk Eden fix (wonderful game, btw). So last night when I finally had some time, rather than playing LOTRO and being social with the semi-new guild (they probably think I’m dead by this point) I rolled a level 1 Warhammer Character and started playing.

I’ve mentioned ‘beta burnout’ and this is a good time to explain what I mean. With any MMO, if you’re an alt-aholic, you know the feeling you get with those first 5-10 levels after a while, where every class plays pretty similarly and every quest is burned into your brain and requires no thought and really it just becomes drudgery to get through them. I *really* don’t want to be feeling like that when War launches. The nature of beta (particularly one as long as the War beta; it was going strong when I got in it and I’ve been in it for 6 months) is that you get your characters wiped pretty often and that kind of forces the alt-aholic lifestyle on you. I absolutely love the game and really want it to feel as ‘fresh’ as possible on launch day.

The point of all that is, I decided to pick the 1 race/class profession that appealed to me that absolute least, because I figured there’s no way I’ll be playing that combo in release. I plan on my release main being Order, so I’d roll Destruction. I never like playing small races, so I figured one of the Goblin classes. Healers are always pretty helpful so there’s an outside chance I’ll roll one of those in release, so didn’t want to go that route, which left Squig Herder.

Here the gag of NDA starts to cut off what I can say. I’ve linked to the official page and its a bit out of date. I’ll add my cry to all the “Mythic, please drop the NDA!” pleas I’ve been reading.

Anyway this turned out to be an excellent acid test of the game for me. So I picked the single least appealing class/race combo I could find and started playing, and it was about 3 am by the time I finally pulled myself away. I did traditional quests, of course. I unlocked Achievements. I played through Public Quests and won shiny loot in various ways. Inspired by Rick I jumped into RvR scenarios, something I’ve quite frankly avoided (I’ve done ‘open world’ RvR but the scenarios have always felt a bit intimidating to me). I had an absolute blast, never really hit a ‘boring’ spot, found a few bugs to report (nothing major, the game is in great shape, but finding them made me feel like I was ‘doing my job’) and now the only problem I have is that I *really* enjoyed the Squig Herder. Dammit, another Alt in my future!

It’s going to be a long month, waiting for release… 🙂

Keep those access codes handy today

Posted on by Nimgimli

Thanks to Grishnar over at theBrasse.com for bringing this to everyone’s attention.

At some point today you’ll be able to enter your beta and headstart codes into the Mythic Beta Center. There’s really no rush if you pre-ordered the CE, but the first 50,000 ‘standard’ pre-orders to enter their codes will get an invite into the upcoming Preview Weekend. So keep checking! (I just checked at 8:15 am ET and my Head Start code was still flagged as ‘invalid’).

More details from the source:
http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsOverview.war