What the heck?!? My Lore Master, who is a completionist and has done pretty much every solo and most small fellowship quests in LOTRO, didn’t see it. My Hunter and Warden also went through Great River, but were rushing to Rohan and didn’t do all the quests, so they didn’t see it either.
Last night, after my wimpy Minstrel became Friend of the Eagles (if you’ve done the quests, you know what I mean), he was given a letter that recalled him to Stangard to start a whole quest line, involving Sithric, treason in the Eorlsmead Tower, and more. I was utterly shocked that I’d never seen this quest before, but I was wondering what that tower was there for. Admittedly, my Lore Master ran through Great River right when it came out, so perhaps the quest line wasn’t in place yet, but I was floored!
Of course, it was given to me at the secret place where the eagles were based, which apparently everyone must know about, because I was sent there originally by a guy at the camp north of the Cuthstan, then a guard from Stangard came to deliver a letter while I was in the cave rescuing an eagle. So that’s a little silly – the secret is out…
This new (to me) quest line is good – I enjoyed it and I especially enjoyed putting Sithric in his place. I am at a loss about the tower, though. I showed there was treason there, so I expected to be sent by Stanric to clear it out or at least set them straight, but nothing of the sort happened. Maybe I missed that too?
Finally, a question: My Minstrel seems pretty wimpy for level 74. His Will is good, and Fate is OK, but his morale is only about 4,000. That’s even less than my Lore Master was at that level by quite a bit. Before I go off deeding to get Vitality traits, I wonder what a level 74 Mini’s morale should be? Please either tweet to me or use the contact page (you don’t need to put in a real email address).
I finished playing the fun BioShock Infinite last week and am finally getting a change to post about it.
First of all, the game is fun, which isn’t a surprise, since almost every other reviewer said the same thing. The skyhook travel system is great fun, but don’t mistake this game for an open world. It is a very linear game in which the skyhook rails loop back to the area you are currently exploring/shooting to bits. The combat is satisfying, with both gunplay and magic powers called “vigors.”
Sadly, you only get 2 weapons at a time, so ammo management is very important. In the tower defense-like section near the end, I ran out of ammo for both my weapons and would have had to scramble to find another gun if the fight went on any longer.
The graphics are generally excellent, except for flower bushes and other plants. Take a look at this video and see how poorly done they are. Even LOTRO does better than that!
While we’re complaining, the checkpoint system stinks. Really badly! Unlike good PC games that let you save wherever you are so you can quit and go to dinner, BioShock Infinite’s checkpoints were often 10 or 15 minutes apart, so if you don’t want to lose all that progress, you’d better hoof it to the next unmarked checkpoint. Luckily, dying doesn’t set you back that far. In fact, dying costs you a bit of money and brings the enemies back to full health (though the dead ones stay dead), so it isn’t a bad mechanism.
Your companion throughout much of the game, Elizabeth, the girl you are sent to “rescue/capture,” is a delight. She never gets in the way, tends to have good things to say, always keeps up, and keeps giving you money, health potions, and salts (to power the vigors) as needed. She’s terrifically done and should be a model for future game companions.
So the game is linear, but we get to make choices, right? Like in BioShock where we could choose to harvest Adam from the Little Sisters or to save them, right? No, here we play things pretty straight, and the few choices we make don’t have a huge good vs. evil impact. In fact, as far as I can tell, the ending is the same, no matter what we did.
And that ending…
Spoiler alert. Stop reading right now if you don’t want to know the ending and what my thoughts were. Now! Stop!
The buildup to the ending is pretty cool and set the stage for what the eventual ending was. After a battle, Booker DeWitt was to be baptized to be absolved of his sins (and apparently he had lots of them from the battle against Indians). In one timeline, Booker didn’t accept the baptism and decided to live with his sins and became a Pinkerton guy and was eventually sent to the cloud city of Columbia to rescue Elizabeth (his daughter, it turned out). In another timeline, he took the baptism and became the Prophet Samuel Comstock and build the cloud city of Columbia, and, since he was sterile by then, kidnapped Elizabeth (Anna) from Booker in the other timeline with fancy machines that could bridge the two.
So the solution is that a bunch of Elizabeths from different timelines got together and killed DeWitt by drowning him, thus preventing him from becoming Comstock and causing all the evil.
My thought as my character was being drowned by his daughters was “haven’t I seen this before?” Yes, at the end of BioShock 2, the protagonist is killed by his daughter and other Little Sisters. C’mon, not that again! Do the developers feel some sort of guilt and think their daughters should kill them? What gives?
I was also disappointed that not much was done with the heavily publicized racism aspect in the game. Racism is very present and is obviously depicted as evil, yet Booker doesn’t seem to have any racist tendencies, and his views on racism, if any, don’t affect the outcome in any way. Things are a little too scripted, and it would have been interesting to have the racism affect the player more than just showing it to him.
So overall a fun game and well worth playing, but it isn’t quite as great as many reviewers say.
My LOTRO kinship, Thirst for Power, has had a long, interesting lifespan with serious ups and downs, and is now down for the count. I am the only regular player that has been on for weeks. Sure there are one or two others that leave alts in the kinship, but no playtime logged except for me.
I was recruited into T4P when my Lore-Master was still hanging around Combe and Staddle by a very nice guy who helped me a lot, but declared he had an addition to the game and quit cold turkey, never to be seen again. I met a number of friends in the kinship and we played together for years. Some were a little flaky and jumped out of the kinship, then back in, the back out, etc. A core group of us played through thick and thin, building our characters as we went. Then there was a mass exodus fromT4P to another kinship whose name I forget. Almost all of us went, because it was a big, happening kinship with a charismatic, fun leader and a diverse set of players.
Meanwhile, the old T4P leader had been offline for so long that the game offered leadership to one of my buddies who left one alt in T4P. I put an alt there, so I was 2nd in command. And then our new kinship’s leader decided he was bored of the game and disbanded the kinship. So it was lucky that we could fall back to T4P. We rebuilt T4P with most of the old members and many new ones and had great times in Dunland and the end game instances around Isengard.
Then came Great River. We all raced through Great River and started doing the Limlight Gorge stuff, when many of our top-level members decided it got boring and simply stopped logging in. We survived with just a few members until Rohan came along and added great new content, but the damage was done. With just a few of us, we weren’t able to get groups together to do the end-game instances. Finally, my last friend in the kinship decided she needed a more active place and jumped to the kinship of one of the other ones that was in T4P when I first joined and was with us for a long time, but eventually left to join a raiding kinship. I have recruited a few people into the kinship, but they see how dead it is and either stop logging in or just leave.
T4P has maxed out lifespan and a nice kin house, so I will likely keep it with some lowbie alt running it, but I may look into joining active kinships for my characters when they get near 85. My LM, who is 85, would be a good choice, but nobody wants a lousy LM in the end game instances and raids. I’m working on getting my Hunter, Warden, and Minstrel to 85, because at least they will be needed by others. In the meanwhile, T4P is a member of an alliance, so I can help others and join groups fairly easily.
But it is a shame to see Thirst for Power fade away.
Today’s mounted daily mission video (and this is the last for a while, so you can relax and stop being bored by me) is the one given at Snowbourne, a large city in the south west of the playable area of Eastern Rohan. This is my favorite of the mounted missions because we need to kill more enemies (16 vs. 6 or 10 in the others) and the enemies are a little wimpier, so I can often kill them in one shot, which makes a wimpy Lore Master feel kinda studly. The video is less than 3 minutes.
Like the daily mounted mission from Harwick, this mission involves taking on mounted enemies while being on your war-steed. In this case, however, some of the enemies have about 5 times the morale (hit points) as the normal ones here and in Harwick. In this playthrough, I avoided those guys, but I’ve had to fight them in the past and they take a while sometimes to kill (and once, I think 2 of them ganged up on me and defeated me). The video is a little more stuttery than I’m used to, and I wonder if having FRAPS capturing the action slowed the game a little. It did smooth out, but the game was a little jerky at the first encounter, and I think that is visible in the movie. This was a quick mission and took less than 2 minutes.
In our continuing quest to travel to the ends of Middle Earth (at least without area transitions), we now leave the moron sons of Elrond and head to Rivendell to meet up with Lord Elrond in his library. We don’t take a hidden passage that Peter Jackson decided was appropriate for The Hobbit movie, but instead take the normal route. We ride from Thorenhad to Rivendell, still in the Trollshaws. We cross the Ford of the Bruinen and head up a steep trail to the High Moors, then down into Imladris. We enter the Last Homely House and visit Elrond in his Library.
The music in Imladris is some of the most pleasant in the the game, and the game has lots of moving music. The scenery is pretty good, and the water isn’t too bad. The biggest problem with Rivendell is that everything is too spread out to make it a useful home base for crafters. The changes to Bree recently have made Bree a great location for crafting, with vaults, fields, workbenches, forges, and ovens all in close proximity. The only better place that I can think of is Galtrev, which adds representatives from all the crafting guilds to a room off the crafting hall (so that’s why everyone should buy the Return to Galtrev skill when you become Kindred with Dunlanders, except, of course, Wardens and Hunters who can get their port skills earlier).
Also in LOTRO news, I picked up one of the new Teal Fireworks Steeds for my Champion yesterday. It was a new addition to the Anniversary rewards, and since I had last year’s one, which was still available, I figured I’d better get this one. Its colors are teal and purple, so it’s pretty effeminate, but my champ is a manly elf, so he feels perfectly comfortable riding a girly horse, at least until he gets to Rivendell, where the bored elves will tease him endlessly, until he thumps them…
Rather than bore you with more of the Middle Earth tour, I’ll post an example of a daily mission given out in Harwick. This mission is one of those given as part of the overall goal of rebuilding the destroyed town of Hytbold. Each mission earns 5 tokens that can be used to rebuild some part of the town (each component takes 5, 10, or 25 tokens).
This mission is being posted as an example of the mounted combat that came as part of the Riders of Rohan expansion to the game. I love the mounted combat, but make no claims of being particularly good at it, though I’m certainly getting faster at doing these missions. The whole video is less than 3 minutes.
Continuing the tour of the vast Middle Earth as presented in LOTRO, we ride from Ost Guruth in the Lone Lands to Thorenhad in the Trollshaws. We stop by Bilbo’s stone trolls and then end with the sons of Elrond. Unlike games like Skyrim and Star Trek Online, where most of the terrain is accessible, in LOTRO, there are very clear boundaries that channel the player along certain paths. On the way to the stone trolls, I took a wrong path through a bunch of live trolls (but too low-level to attack me) and ended up back near the road. I needed to use the map to find my way to the stone trolls, since I haven’t played much in the Trollshaws lately.
I end up at Thorenhad, where the moron spawn of Elrond hang out. I call them that, because in the Ford of Bruinen skirmish, one or the other brother needlessly attacks a couple of baddies that position themselves in an obvious, but out of the way, spot. This always happens at the most inopportune time, like when many other baddies are attacking, so if you don’t have a healer on your side, it could be bad, since you lose if one of the Elrond spawn dies.
I did the path on my war-steed since they are faster even than the rented horse rides between stable masters.
This was a good weekend to play LOTRO. Not only was the Anniversary Festival going on, they were running a special 100% XP bonus all weekend. Because of that, I didn’t do much with my Lore Master, because he is at the level cap, but instead took advantage of the XP bonus to work on my Warden and Minstrel. The Warden is questing in Dunland and went from level 68 to 71, while the Minstrel is in Moria and is now level 57 from 54 or 55. I also did a little work on my Hunter in Rohan, but he’s still level 79.
I did run the Hytbold dailies once on my LM and figured out what was going on with not being able to rebuild more of Hytbold. It turns out there are 2 rebuild quest givers in each area, once for when you are an Ally to the faction the area is named for, and another for when you are Kindred. I am Kindred with the Sutcrofts, so the 2nd guy showed up and I spent the more than 100 Hytbold tokens I’d built up. I am close to Kindred with 2 of the other factions and will continue working on it. Last week, my LM also finished the Eastern Rohan epic quest line, which ends with a bit of a whimper. The final prize is a 2nd Age Legendary Bridle for your horse, which is a great thing, but remember that the quest line in Great River gave us 2 Worn Symbols of Celebrimbor, so we could make 2 level 75 2nd Age Legendary Items. This Bridle seems like a letdown, though I’m sure the reasoning is that we should get all our really good stuff from the new raids (which I haven’t done, because nobody wants a Lore Master – they always call for healers or Captains).
Overall, a very fun weekend in LOTRO. I really like the way Moria has been redone. It is much easier to get around and the quests tend to be better. I suppose it is a lot of work and not very cost effective for the dev team to redo all of the areas, but some facelifts, particularly in Enedwaith and Misty Mountains would make them more appealing. Moria needs more fast travel routes, too. It’s annoying to have to take a slow pony to Orc Watch or some of the other southern locations.
Note: I’m truly horrified that I didn’t spell Hauppauge right in either the title or the article. And I knew better… Sorry Hauppauge!
I bought the Hauppauge HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition when it was on sale at Amazon a week or so ago, and finally got a chance to hook it up yesterday. As a test, I recorded the excellent Zen Pinball running on my PS3. This video shows one of the Avengers tables, which look and sound great. I am not a very practiced player, so the game is over mercifully quickly for those of you that watch the video.
The HD PVR 2 is a nice step up from the old HD PVR that I had before. With that one, I had to switch cables and do all sorts of annoying and tedious things to set it up for either XBox360 or PS3. The new one can have both attached at the same time, which is very nice. The biggest bummer is the lack of an easy way to switch between inputs without going into the software running on the PC. I also may return my unit, because it seems to have a cosmetic flaw: only half the unit lights up when it is in standby mode, so apparently some of the LEDs must not be working. Overall, the video quality seems good, so if you want to record your PS3 or XBox360, this seems to be the unit to get.