Free to Play Lord of the Rings
I am really excited for this announcement. I have had multiple forays into Lord of the Rings Online in the past and I often think about returning to the game. I really do love that game and the atmosphere that Turbine created in it. My problem was mostly that I did not have the time to commit to yet another MMO subscription so I would always stop playing after a while.
When the free to play model launches, I am really considering trying to start a weekly adventuring group with friends. I know many other bloggers or people in communities do weekly adventuring groups and Lord of the Rings Online would be one of the best games to do that in.
Solving the Problem of Group Quests
I like group quests. No, I love group quests. I think properly implemented group quests can give a great sense of immersion. The problem is, so few group quests are properly implemented.
I was thinking back to Lord of the Rings Online. I love the game world, but the amount of group quests was wholly depressing. It was not because there were not enough but instead too many and mostly were poorly implemented. On the other side of the coin, when Blizzard revamped some of the leveling in World of Warcraft (I think it was around patch 2.2), they removed practically all group quests from the vanilla world.
Generally, the three main problems I have seen with group quests are:
- Flow
- Enemy Saturation
- Population Density
Flow
A group quest should be a culminating event. In Lord of the Rings Online there would be multiple times when the quest flow would be Solo->Solo->Group->Solo->Solo->Group. This can create massive roadblocks for the player. If you are doing the questline with some random PUG players and a tank or healer leave half way through the quest chain, it becomes a lot harder to fill that spot.
Proper flow would hopefully go something more like Solo->Solo->Solo->Solo->Group->Group or Solo->Solo->Solo->Solo->Solo->Group. All the group quests should be at the end of the quest chain so that everyone can get up to that point together. Furthermore, I think group quests should only be the final quest in the chain. Having multiple group quests in a row can be tiresome and still create player roadblocks.
Enemy Saturation
Dol Dinen (at least how it was when I used to play) in Lord of the Rings Online is a terrible way to design an area. The area is filled with literally hundreds of enemies and all of the enemies are elite. You need to have a full group to even venture into the area. If one person gets separated, they will die and you will have to clear the way to their body to resurrect them because they will not be able to run back to you due to respawns behind you.
Areas filled with elite enemies should only be in instances where you by design will be with a full group at all times. I do not believe that any area in the open world of an MMO should be filled with elites. The best solution would be to have the area filled with normal enemies and then just have the "big bad" of the area be elite to coincide with the group quest to kill them. This way, it helps the players fill powerful themselves by being able to solo the generic trash but still make the big bad seem a powerful foe.
Population Density
This might be the biggest problem with group quests. When new content or a new expansion comes out, it is usually simple to get a group together for quests as thousands of people will be doing the content. Six months later or even years later, it is much different. When leveling in the time after the initial rush of people, most players will just skip the group quests. It is just too much work to try to find a group for it. If there is a quest reward they really want or need, they will just get a high level person to run them through the quest.
There are multiple ways you can handle this. You could just not put any group quests into the game, but I think that is a poor solution and can easily be thrown out. You could, after six to twelve months turn all the group quests into solo quests. I do not like that solution since it generally ruins the "epicness" of the quest. The third option, and my personal favorite, is to give companions.
I am not a fan of full time NPC companions. I do not want everyone having a full party of companions all day every day and forever only running around in a group of companions. Instead, a few months after a new game's release players should be given something like a "companion summoning horn" or something of that nature. When used, it would summon companions to fill out your party. The caveat is that they would only last for ten minutes and the horn would be on a one hour cooldown.
With this solution, players can still get the epic feel of the group quest even when the main mass of players has moved on to the level cap. If it had been implemented in World of Warcraft, it could have initially been usable only from levels 1-60. Six months after the Burning Crusade expansion came out, they could extend the item to work from 1-70. Six months after Wrath of the Lich King's launch, the could once more extend it to work from 1-80. People in the initial rush would be forced to group with each other, but new players to the game after the rush or even alts of players would still be able to accomplish group quests without sacrificing the integrity of the quest.
Like I said in the beginning, I think group quests are a fun and immersive part of MMORPGs, I just think the implementation needs tweaking so everyone can do them.
The Best of Both Worlds
I am playing two MMORPGs right now. World of Warcraft and Darkfall. It would seem like those games are polar opposites of each other and that they would not go together. Well the do not go together and that is why I like it. I could be playing World of Warcraft and LotRO or World of Warcraft and Aion or World of Warcraft and Warhammer or Darkfall and Fallen Earth but in all of those cases, the games are the similar style (themepark and themepark or sandbox and sandbox).
Now, I have a great themepark game and a great sandbox game. If I want to go socialize, leasurely group with others, kill some random things, see purples fly, or even just sit in town and idle, I can play World of Warcraft. If I want to travel a harsh land fearing for my life and expecting death around every corner, I can play Darkfall. I think it is a logical fallacy to believe someone could only ever want to experience one of these feelings. Variety is the spice of life.
I generally save my larger play sessions for Darkfall now so that I can get more accomplished in that game, but I still will often alternate between the two. The other day, I ran an instance in WoW, then went to Darkfall for a few hours, then went back to WoW to run another two instances to take a break, and finally returned to Darkfall to do more gaming.
Having both of these games satisfies almost all of my MMO urges and lets me better game to my mood. I do not want to fear for my life every time I log onto a game, but sometimes I do. I do not always want to have rewards raining from the sky with zero risk, but sometimes I do. I think that playing both games helps me develop a greater appreciation for the differences in the two.
Both games tried to do something different. World of Warcraft took the Everquest model and opened it up to the masses while Darkfall went back to the MMO sandbox roots like Ultima Online.
All of this just hammers in the point that we do not need more of the same. We need more new ideas. Do you want a good themepark game? Play WoW or LotRO. Do you want a good sandbox? Play Darkfall or Fallen Earth. Now give me something different (here is to hoping Planetside 2 is good).
MMOs I Have Played – Pass It On
Taken from Trembling Hand, I thought this would be an interesting retrospective on my gaming.
How many MMOs have you played? How long did you spend in each one? Which did you enjoy the most?
They're the questions I asked myself the other day, and it resulted in the interesting list below (remind me: why do I still play MMOs, when I haven't enjoyed any of the recent crop?). I figured I'd also throw it open to the MMO blogging community and ask what MMOs have you played?
MMO -- months played -- star rating out of five*
- A Tale In The Desert -- 1 -- ***
- Aion -- 3 -- *****
- Cabal Online -- .25 -- *
- Chronicles of Spellborn -- .5 -- *
- City of Heroes -- 6 -- ***
- Dungeons and Dragons Online -- 1 -- **
- Earth and Beyond -- 5 -- ***
- Free Realms -- .5 -- *
- Guild Wars -- 6 -- ****
- Kingdom of Loathing -- 4 -- ****
- Lord of the Rings Online -- 6 -- ****
- Maple Story -- 3 -- ****
- Megami Tensai Online: IMAGINE -- .5 -- **
- Planetside -- 2 -- ***
- Pirates of the Burning Sea -- .5 -- **
- RF Online -- .5 -- *
- Rose Online -- 1 -- **
- Runes of Magic -- 1 -- **
- Tabula Rasa -- .5 -- *
- Warhammer Online -- .5 -- **
- Wizard101 -- 3 -- *****
- World of Warcraft -- 60 -- *****
*Star rating is an entirely subjective measure of how much you liked it at the time, not how much you'd enjoy playing it today.
Why Can’t Healers Be Awesome?
Why is it that healers have this stigma that they are not awesome? This sigma is often enforced by players as well as game developers. For me it is something that is most noticeable in Wizard 101 but has a presence within other games as well.
Within Wizard 101, my healing spells consist of a yellow and green pixie, a unicorn, a satyr that plays a flute while dancing, a dryad shaped like a tree and a giant hand that floats out of the sky to point at a player. My offensive spells are a tiny fiddle playing imp, a leprechaun that throws money, a tree, a female angel in flowing white robes and a centaur. Regina has skeletons, pirates, vampires, wraiths, and banshees. Other people have sharks, godzillas, trolls, krakens, blindfolded angels dealing out judgements, ice wyverns, evil snowmen, helephants, and hydras. It is no wonder no one ever wants to play a healer.
Keeping Old Content Relevant
Tobold and Ravious today posted about WoW's old zones are of no importance to high level chartacters and how this will cause WoW to eat itself. Tobold talks about how Luminous has you go back to farm low level zones for materials you need while Ravious talks about how Turbine is constantly revamping the low level zones to better streamline them and give old players a reason to start new.
Both of them are essentially looking at the same problem from two ends of the spectrum. Tobold is coming from the viewpoint of someone who has played WoW for years upon years and has no reason to ever go back to those zones. Even if he had to go back to those zones to farm crafting materials, he would be doing it solo. Ravious is coming from a viewpoint of someone new to the game or returning after being gone since just after release. For him, those low level zones are ghost towns and the few people in them are just soloing by themselves and have no reason to group.
I cannot help but wonder if in some ways, Guild Wars got it right and maybe the style could be modified for a standard MMO. With the Factions and Nightfall campaigns in Guild Wars, it takes a player about 5-10 hours to reach the level cap of 20. From there, they have access to almost every single zone in that campaign (aside from the very final stages of the campaign unless they are grouped with someone who has access).
Instead of railroading players down one or two set leveling paths in a game with the game, why not remove levels all together and just make all zones the same level but with varying levels of difficulty? In Guild Wars, I can go to the later zones from the campaign from the start but they will just require a greater amount of focus and concentration than the earlier zones.
What I would like to see is a game have a two to three hour introduction area similar to the pre-Searing in Guild Wars Prophecies or the level 1-6 racial introduction areas from Lord of the Rings. This introduction areas would be your tutorial to teach you the basics of the game and your class and if you have already done the introduction on a previous character, you can skip it and go right into the game proper.
You could take your friend to an "end game" city siege, raid, or whatever activities are usually exclusive to people at the level cap within hours of them joining the game. Since there would be no levels, all instances and zones would remain valid.
Leveling and constant stat increases just cause mudflation so why not do away with those systems? I used to only see a goal as new purples but playing Guild Wars has shown me thousands upon thousands of people who play just to get new skins for their weapons and armor. There are many people who would go kill things for house and guild hall trophies or materials to craft an insane looking axe.
While the foundations of the RPG is a level based system, I think it is time for the genre to evolve.
Also, you still have time to get your name in to win one of the two extra Aion beta keys I have. Just make sure you get your post in before the end of the day. I am going to close the post tonight and announce the winners tomorrow.
Spoiled By WoW
After being out of WoW for almost a month, I realize now how spoiled I had become by the game. While there were a lot of spoiling in-game conveniences, that is not what I am talking about as many games do in-game just as well if not better. What I am speaking of is the access to information out of the game.
Things like WoWHead, Thottbot, WoWDB, WoWWiki, Elitist Jerks and even the official forums have completely spoiled me. Due to the millions upon millions of people playing the game, there is more information than you could ever need. It never takes too long to find out what you need to know if you have a question.
Still not able to find what you need for that quest? Checking on WoWHead probably shows fifty comments of people on any little aspect of the quest.
Wonder what gear or build is best for your class? The official forums and Elitist Jerks are going to be filled with threads and posts by people who have crunched the numbers and can tell you which avenue is best.
This ease of information is not available for most other games. There have been multiple times in Lord of the Rings Online or Runes of Magic that I have been frustrated due to not being able to find answers to questions. People in game do not know, there is nothing on the forums and the wikis on the games are incomplete.
I think the game with the most complete out-of-game info is Guild Wars. The two wikis for that game are amazing resources filled with maps, mission walkthroughs, and quest information.
While many people may blast the WoW community, at least having that many people makes getting information easier.
Profession Cooldowns
I do not like artificial barriers. I do not like MMOs putting a limit on how much I can accomplish in a day. I should be the one to set those limits, not the developer.
Tuesday evening, my time spent in LotRO was used towards raising my Scholar crafting skill. I joined the Scholar Crafting Guild reached the Artisan crafting tier. When I joined the crafting guild, I got my first recipes with cooldowns. Two of the recipes have a 24 hour cooldown, two have a 48 hour cooldown, and one has a one week cooldown. These items crafted are used for the crafting guild reputation grind and for crafting special profession items.
I hate this type of design and feel it only punishes the player. Unless you log in and do your crafting every day at the exact same time, you are inefficient.
I know some people that can only log in once a week. They may have enough materials to craft 20 of an item and can play for eight hours on that one day they can log in, but due to the cooldowns they will only be able to craft one item a week.
Turbine's reasoning may be that they do not want people to be able grind out crafting guild rep overnight or perhaps they just do not want the market to be flooded with end game crafted items. One problem is that even those these long cooldown items are used for crafted goods, those crafted goods are soon replaced anyway.
It makes me think of the Titansteel Bars in WoW. A lot of people got those crafted but the crafted gear was quickly replaced with gear from Naxxramas.
So what is the point in having these crafting cooldowns? Should they just removed all together or is there a better way to handle it?
Redesigning Dol Dinen
Dol Dinen is a sub-area of the North Downs zone in Lord of the Rings online. The North Downs are an area north of Bree where there are human, elf and dwarf settlements. The land borders Angmar, the kingdom of the Witch King, and as such turns out to be the front line for the Witch King's invasion force. The initial settlement his forces set up is in Dol Dinen. The area is filled with elite trolls, orcs, and goblins as well as a vast amount of siege weaponry. The Ranger settlement of Esteldin is all that stands between the armies in Dol Dinen and the rest of the Free People of Middle Earth.
The concept of the area is fantastic but the execution falls a little flat in my mind. There are about four different quest chains for the area and while I was able to solo a few of the initial quests in the chains, the later ones would definitely require a group. I was lucky enough to piggyback with this person who was having a level 60 run them through and to do all the quest chains, it still took us over three hours to complete the area. I could see a group of at level people requiring at least 5 hours to complete it all.
When most people are leveling to cap, unless they have a friend at 60 to help them, they just skip the whole area as it is not an overly efficient use of time.
Over the weekend I started thinking as to how I would redesign Dol Dinen. Between breaking the assault into different waves, changing the concept of chain quest, world phasing, and group instancing, I think Dol Dinen could be a fun and much more exciting place.
The main the quest chains I am going to look at are the Troll Siege, The Black Tide of Angmar, and the Breaking the Front Lines chains.
The Breaking the Front Lines chain has you kill goblins and collect their slave collars, returning to kill a goblin task master, returning again to kill a warg chieftain and then continues when you pick up some orders from a killed mob and forces you to travel to multiple points across the zone to get the orders deciphered and warn others.
The Troll Siege chain is 4 quests long and has you killing a set number of Troll Siege members, returning again to disable their siege weapons, returning again to kill these orc bone-speakers, and returning a last time to kill the Troll siege leader.
The Black Tide of Angmar is 5 quests long and has you collecting badges from orcs on the outskirts of camp, returning again to kill three orc captains, returning again to kill vast numbers of orcs, returning again to kill the orc leader and steal his armor, and then the last quest sends you into an full multi-hour instance on the other side of the zone to kill another orc leader. The last quest is also about 5 levels above the previous quests.
I do not think the story for the quests has to be completely reworked. I do think the quest chains need some reorganization but I will be staying with 3 different quest chains with the same story for the most part, just changing the flow. One of the concepts I will be relying heavily on is changing the way chain quests work as I talked about in my previous post.
Starting with "Breaking The Front Lines", you would be receive the following request from the quest giver:
"We have received reports of a large invasion force from Angmar that has taken up occupation in Dol Dinen. The camps are thick with enemy forces and our scouts could not infiltrate deep within them. None of our forces can reach the orcs and trolls within the camps as the camp outskirts are filled with goblin slaves and wargs. We need your help to break their front lines.
Start by slaying the goblins in the area. Bring me 10 of their slave collars so that I may further investigate these bindings the Angmar Orcs are using. Following that, slay 10 of the wargs in the area to clear it out. With the wargs dead, strike at the chief warg. This will devastate their forces. Once you have finished that, scout out and slay the Goblin Chieftain. With the chieftain dead, check his tent for any information."
The Meta-quest "Breaking the Front Lines" would be listed in your quest log with 5 sub-quests as such:
Breaking the Front Lines
- Collect 10 Slave Collars
- Slay 10 Wargs
- Slay the warg chief
- Slay the Goblin Chieftain
- Search for information
All of these quests would be non-elite mobs and entire chain would be soloable. The quests would have to be completed in order, but you would not have to return tot he quest giver between quests. As soon as you finished the objective, you would receive the experience for that quest and the next one in the path would unlock. After slaying the goblin chieftain, you would find orc orders within his tent and with that step done, you could return to the quest giver for completion of the meta-quest. This would cause a phase in the world to pass (like World of Warcraft's world phasing in Icecrown).
Just like how the quest is in game now, you would be sent to another ranger to request he translate the orc letter. After having the letter translated you return it to the original quest giver and receive the next quest chain.
In the game as it is now, both the Troll Siege and the Black Tide of Angmar quests are elite chains. I think the area would be better served by breaking these up, move the trolls to the final quest line so the final quest line stays elite and make all the orcs in the area non-elite.
The quest giver would give you this new chain:
Stop the Black Tide
- Collect 10 orc medallions
- Kill 16 Ongburz Combatants, Kill 12 Ongburz Manslayers, Kill 6 Ongburz battlemasters
- Kill 10 Ongburz Bone-speakers
- Kill the Ongburz captains: Thorgal, Shum-batar, Dombri
- Search for intelligence
When your went back to Dol Dinen to do this quest chain, you would see the area where goblins and wargs used to be now destroyed. Goblin and warg corpses litter the area and their tents and defenses would be up in flames. You would fight your way through the orc encampments, basically doing mass killings of everything in the area, culminating with killing the three captains. Each captain would be more difficult than usual mobs, but not impossible to solo. After you defeat the third captain, you would find some more orc information in his tent.
Returning this information to the quest giver would reveal about the orcs' secret siege weaponry, their troll army and the name of the orc leader. The quest giver would give you the final quest chain, the world would be phased again, and we would tell you that you will need a group.
End the Siege from Angmar
- Kill 16 trolls
- Disable the troll siege weaponry
- Defeat the troll siege leader
- Defeat the head orc
When you returned with your group the final time, the orc camps are now destroyed, in flames, and littered with orc corpses. Trolls now fill the area and are looking for anything salvageable in the destruction. Your group would kill these trolls, push further to their siege weaponry and destroy it and then finally confront the troll leader followed by the orc leader. The orc leader would be a very difficult fight and require a full 6 man group.
In the end, I think this would tremendously improve that area. The player would only have to travel to and from Dol Dinen 3 times (compared to the 4-6 it is now) and finding a group would be a lot easier since the group has to just sweep through and do a quest chain that auto-progresses for them.
Quest Experience and Multi-Stage Quests
When two quests take different amounts of time, why do they offer the same amount of experience? When you know every level 30 quest gives the same amount of experience, why do the ones that take a long time? They are only inefficient if your goal is the end game.
The amount of experience a quest gives should be dependant on the average time that quest takes to complete in internal testing and beta testing. If a level 30 quest that takes 10 minutes on average to complete, a level 30 quest that takes twice as much time should give twice as much experience. A quest that takes 10 minutes on average and a quest of equal difficulty that takes 20 minutes on average should not give the same amount of experience. What is even worse is when there is a quest that takes 30-60 minutes to complete and it gives as much experience as a 10-15 minute quest.
There is enough information out there so that players know what is and is not worth their time. So please reward properly.
Group quests are another type of quest that do not seem to be properly rewarded. For example: last night, I was working with a group on the Book 4 questline in Lord of the Rings Online. The questline is filled with multiple group quests but the rewards seem uneven. The final quest, which is a group instance quest, took our four man group over a half hour to do. It may have been close to an hour, but I was not watching the clock. Either way, the experience given for completion was about the equivalent of 2-3 solo quests.
The instance quest was level 42 and took about 45 minutes. I can complete level 42 solo quests in 10-15 minutes each. So if me doing 3 solo quests is the same reward for me completing the group quest, why do the group quest? It is more work and takes an effort to find other people. That extra effort should be rewarded.
Another thing I have been thinking about is certain quest chains. While for the story of some quest chains, I can understand it, but why I do I have to return to the quest giver for completion of every quest.
An average quest giver will tell me "I want you to kill 10 orc grunts" and when I return he'll say "now go kill 3 orc lieutenants", followed by "go collect the orc orders" and then returning once more for he will request "go kill the orc boss." Why can we not have a quest giver just say "Go kill 10 orc grunts, once you finish that go kill 3 lieutenants. With the lieutenants dead, you should be able to find the orders in the tent. After you find the orders, head to the main tent and assassinate the head boss."
Your quest log could say "Complete Mayor Questgiver's requests." and then list all four major objectives he requested. They would be required to be done in order as the later quests are "locked" until the earlier quests are completed. But when you complete one of the quests, you would automatically be given the experience without having to return to the quest giver and the next quest would unlock. After you completed all his tasks, you would have the overall quest completed and be able to return to the quest giver for an item reward and some additional experience.
This would solve one of the most annoying things with questing in LotRO, and that is when you have a quest chain to go to a specific area but that quest chain is the only set of quests for the area and you have to make the long return to the quest giver in between each quest. It would not work for every quest chain because in many quest chains there are story developments, but for many other chains the quest giver knows every step he wants you to complete before you even start.