TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Tag: Lord of the Rings Online

  • Scattered Gaming: Monster Hunter World, LOTRO, Destiny 2

    I picked up Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) again after nearly a year of just logging in to pay my housing maintenance. I bought the Mordor expansion and figured I’d better get through it. Plus the buzz on the new Mirkwood/Laketown areas is that they look great (hopefully they’re fun, too). When I took my break, I had done most of the pre-battle Minas Tirith quests and was heading into the hills to help the Riders from Rohan and the Druedain. I picked back up in the middle of the Druedain camp doing fetch quests for them. Go kill 10 things, come all the way back to camp, then go kill 10 more and figure out why they’re there. This kind of tedious fetch quest needs to die. LOTRO is the only game I still play that pulls crap like that. Star Trek Online and Elder Scrolls Online are much more enlightened. Even LOTRO has become a little enlightened, since some quests can be turned in from anywhere, but most of them require tedious travel back to the quest giver.

    Since I’m in the mode of bitching about LOTRO, let’s talk lag, stutters, and warsteeds. I have a pretty decent machine (i7 and GTX 970), am running LOTRO from an SSD, and yet it still stutters quite a lot when I’m riding the warsteed. Even worse is the lag and rubber-banding. The responsiveness of even my light warsteed is terrible when travelling (it isn’t as bad in battle, and I mostly enjoy mounted combat). I’ve had cases where I’ve been riding along the clear road, then suddenly the combat music starts playing, even though there are no enemies around me, then a short while later, my warsteed will backtrack to some earlier point then race forward, missing a curve and barreling into a bunch of enemies. So the servers projected where I was going, but the game engine was lagging behind, so I was steering to what I saw, not what the server saw. Pretty frustrating. And all the while, the link meter on the screen shows no packet loss and less than 100ms delay.

    Complaints over: I do love the world LOTRO has created from Tolkien’s vision and it is mostly fun, so I’m enjoying playing it.

    I’m also enjoying Monster Hunter World quite a lot. While I complained earlier about the lightweight plot, it was pretty good in the end, and the combat is good fun, as is the diversity in monsters and the unique challenge with each. I’ve been grinding away to get great armor and weapons and have fairly good stuff (4 of 5 armor items are rarity 8, plus 2 rarity 8 weapons) now, but need more! I’ve been using the light bowgun, as it seems to me the best way to avoid trouble is to not get too close to it. On the other hand, I’m thinking of trying a sword and shield or other melee weapon just for fun. Or even an insect glaive, just for the challenge.

    Finally, I felt obligated to participate the final Destiny 2 Faction Rally of this season. The gunplay and many other aspects of D2 are so great that I enjoyed it, but I still feel like I’m banging my head against a wall. Maybe the new “go fast” patch will make it fun again, but we’ll see.

    So my gaming has been all over the place, but I’m having fun, so that’s OK…

  • My gaming news, including Skyrim SE, LOTRO, VR, The Division, & more

    Since my hiatus from Destiny has allowed me to play other games, I’ve played lots of them. Since I’ve had all these (mostly) good experiences, I thought I should write it down.

    I’ve spent most of my play time in LOTRO, which I mostly stopped playing when Destiny came out two years ago. I still logged in occasionally to pay my housing upkeep, but I let my VIP payments lapse (in terms of total dollars “invested,” LOTRO is by far my most expensive game, with maybe 5 years of VIP payments, plus buying all the DLCs – they’re good at extracting money from me). I made it to Gondor and did most of the Dol Amroth quests with my level 100 Lore Master, but then stopped. Now that they have tons of new content, I wanted to experience it, since I love the lore and the Tolkien universe.

    First, being in Middle Earth without being VIP is very constraining. Most of the quests are locked off, travel is expensive, and many perks are disabled. So within minutes of restarting, I was paying up for a few months of VIP. At that point, the quests unlocked so I could deal with the baddies in Perlargir and all around central Gondor. Hopefully soon I will hear over to Minas Tirith and experience more of the story.

    The game play came back very quickly, though I’m not as adept a Lore Master as I was, since I’ve forgotten what about half the skills do. The combat is quite boring, compared to Destiny and The Division or even Elder Scrolls Online, but it is a bit more strategic as I can’t just power through mobs, but have to worry about crowd control, debuffs, buffs, etc. And when I try to power through, I aggro a bunch of enemies that run over and kill my poor, squishy LM.

    One of my favorite parts about the Rohan expansion to LOTRO was the war steed combat. I loved that and ended up being pretty good at it. But in Gondor, the enemy density is high and the terrain isn’t well suited to it. However, I still use the war steed, because it is fast and I can mount in combat. Unfortunately, even a light war steed turns like an aircraft carrier in confined spaces, so I’ve died several times trying to maneuver through a narrow passage to escape a bunch of enemies only to become stuck, dismounted, and killed. Also, the rubber-banding effect where the game lets you progress past an obstacle you hit on your war steed only to pull you back a few seconds later is still present. In fact, I had one instance yesterday where I was maybe 5 seconds and hundreds of feet past the obstacle when it yanked me back. It isn’t a game killer, but it is an immersion killer and quite annoying.

    I also played with some VR games (well, really VR tech demos) on my new Playstation VR. It is a very comfortable unit and works quite well. The resolution isn’t great, but you quickly forget about it. I really enjoyed the shark encounter scenario in the VR Worlds Ocean Descent “game.” Even though I knew I was sitting in my chair at home, I was very concerned about that shark prowling around my cage, and when it attacked, I cringed in chair. Very well done!

    I played a little of, and then deleted, Transformers Devastation and Lords of the Fallen. Transformers was a pretty OK action game with some RPG elements. It had a cartoony look that fit the theme, but as I was never a Transformers fan, it didn’t grab me for too long. Lords of the Fallen is an excellent Dark Souls clone that was difficult and very tense. Unfortunately, I have Dark Souls and never finished it, so I’m sure not going to finish this one.

    So in my quest for action games, I went back to The Division. After this latest patch, it is quite fun. They’re trying to out-Destiny Destiny with all the loot that drops. I kill random baddies on the street and they drop top-of-the-line gear (though none better than what I had, so far). Some of the missions and encounters are still too hard to solo, at least for me, but it is a much improved game.

    Finally, I tried Skyrim SE. Since I already had Skyrim and all the DLC on Steam, I got SE for free, which is damn nice of Valve and Bethesda. Unfortunately, Skyrim SE doesn’t support my 3440×1440 monitor. Sure, I could and did edit the .ini file and make it draw at that resolution, but the UI is cut off at top and bottom in that case. (To be fair, the original Skyrim is the same.) It is sad that a new release is so limited in what it can support. Even LOTRO, STO, and Fallout 4 support my monitor with only a little stretching sometimes. In any case, I never played the Skyrim DLCs, so I had thought maybe I’d give it a shot in SE, but since I used mods in Skyrim that don’t work in SE, I don’t want to mess with trying to load the saves, and I sure don’t want to play the whole thing again! So perhaps I will go back to Skyrim some day…

  • Done with Destiny, Back to LOTRO and STO

    Between griefers and trouble finishing a Heroic Strike while wearing a Speaker mask, I’m just done with the frustration of Destiny and the Festival of the Lost. I’m tired of doing pointless quests for a random chance at crap. So I’m taking a vacation from Destiny (in fact, I nearly deleted it out of frustration, but held my temper in check).

    Now I’m going back to explore the last 2 years of content that I’ve missed in LOTRO. I’m also going to catch up in STO, too. And, frankly, I’m looking forward to getting back to significant story lines and (hopefully) fun quests. Sure, neither have combat that compares to Destiny, but they have atmosphere and are fun.

    Destiny, screw off!

  • Still gaming, just not writing enough

    I’ve been too silent on here for too long. I’ve been playing lots of games, but I haven’t been writing my impressions of them, and oh boy do I have impressions to share. So I’ll try to write more frequently about some of the games I mention here.

    I’ve finally broken Destiny’s hold on me, so I am playing other games. I still check in on Destiny a few times a week, but no longer have the compulsion to play it to the exclusion of all else. I’ve even done some good things, including killing Skolas in the level 35 Prison of Elders (I was helped greatly by two players that were very good and knew what they were doing). I also helped a friend’s husband conquer Hard Mode of both the Crota raid and the Vault of Glass (well, I participated and killed things). So those were good accomplishments.

    My newest addiction is Elder Scrolls Online. I got it on sale for PS4 and I really like it. It isn’t so epic as Lord of the Rings Online, but the combat is great, and the crafting is pretty good, and the story is fine so far. Every chance I get, I pop online and work on one of my three characters.

    Speaking of LOTRO, I still play it a couple hours per week. The story is great, so I want to finish exploring the end game areas. I must admit, however, that I have little hope of getting all 8 of my characters through the end game and level 100. Too much repetition…

    I also bought the Borderlands Handsome Jack collection for PS4. I’d already played Borderlands 2 on PC, so I started with the Pre-Sequel, which I’m enjoying. However, I started a Borderlands 2 character, since some friends are playing that, and I realized that Borderlands 2 is a much better game. The Pre-Sequel seems to be puny in comparison, and I’m near the endgame of it.

    I’ve also been playing a tiny bit of Dragon Age: Inquisition. The problem is, I’m just about to start the end game, and I don’t want the game to end. I’m invested in the story and the characters, and I don’t want to be done with it, just to be able to play a few bolt-on DLCs later. So I’m taking it slower than I probably should.

    Finally, I’ve actually started up Star Trek Online a few times recently, mostly because of the giveaways to build excitement for the new season. I realized that there are game mechanics that are new and I need to learn them. So when I get done with Borderlands or Dragon Age, I’ll take some time and get back into STO. I have a lifetime subscription, so I don’t feel too guilt about stepping away for a year, but it is getting to be time that I should come back.

  • A couple of relaxing evenings playing Destiny

    After last week’s rush to experience all the new things in Destiny’s second DLC expansion, I’ve been taking it easy this week, which means I’m more relaxed and less stressed while playing.

    For the last two nights, I’ve been playing with a friend from LOTRO (and her husband one of the evenings). We’ve just been doing bounties and patrol missions and generally killing the heck out of the roving bands of “wolves.”

    This kind of play is what makes Destiny fun for me. Sure it’s great to do the raids and such, but in those activities, there’s a lot of pressure to be good and not screw up. In the final stages of both raids, a mistake by one person can doom the whole team to have to try again. So, while those activities are fun and sometimes rewarding, they are stressful and sometimes take a long time.

    Running missions with friends, however, is pretty easy, very low stress, and generally more fun. Mistakes tend not to cause much trouble for others, so it is okay to experiment with new gear and techniques, and even to mess around a bit and just punch everything to death, for example (particularly if you’re a Titan and need to punch things).

    In short, playing Destiny with friends while doing low key, comfortable missions is Destiny at its most fun!

  • Fretting about what games to play!

    I have an odd problem, though probably not so unusual these days when people have Steam libraries that number in the hundreds of games as well as consoles full of PS+ and Games with Gold “freebies”: I can’t find a game that I want to play.

    I’m still playing Destiny more than is healthy, and I sometimes dip into LOTRO and Star Trek Online, all of which I enjoy, but I feel like I want something different. I don’t think I want another MMORPG, and if I did, I have Guild Wars 2, but never got into it. No, what I really want is a space game.

    Some of this came about because Elite: Dangerous became available on Steam, so that got me thinking about the genre. I love the X games from Egosoft, from X2 through the various incarnations of X3. I bought X: Rebirth some time ago, but just couldn’t get into it. I started it again last week, since many patches and expansions have claimed to have “fixed” and improved the game. As far as I can tell, nope. X: Rebirth’s universe seems at once more crowded, yet more tedious than those of the other X games. Travel is done via space highways, which seems restrictive compared to the time-accelerating travel mechanism in the other games. I presume they want to make the universe more connected and continuous than before, but so far, I have the opposite impression. And since stations are now massive conglomerations of modules, you have to hunt for places to dock rather than just approaching the station and asking to dock. Even after I’ve visited a station, finding the docking areas is still a huge pain. Maybe it gets better when I add more gear to the ship, but so far, the game remains almost unplayable.

    So looking through my enormous Steam library, I saw that I had bought Galaxy on Fire 2 HD when it was on sale some time ago. I also have it on my iPad, but the controls were pretty bad, so I hoped the controls and graphics would be better on my PC. Well sort of, but it is still a tedious and not fun game. It is basically a space dogfighter with little to no aim assist, with a little bit of trading and mining thrown in. In essence, not much fun. And, frankly, that’s what I’m worried Elite: Dangerous will be like. I would hate to spend $60 for a game that is by all  accounts half baked and have it not be much fun either. The reviews are suggesting that I’d like it, but who knows?

    So for a change of pace, I figured I’d try Baldur’s Gate 2 EE that I also bought on sale on Steam. I never played BG2, but I loved Neverwinter Nights, so I figured it would be good. Well, no, I don’t have time to manage the spells and attacks for a whole party through a tedious interface. In Dragon Age Origins, your party members act appropriately for the role you assigned, but in BG2, they seem pretty useless unless you micromanage them. Well, since computers are better at tedious micromanaging than I am, I think the computer should have done more.

    So I will not be continuing with BG2 or GoF2 since they are bad at letting the computer do things it should be doing. I may end up giving X: Rebirth another shot, but I don’t think I can justify $60 for Elite: Dangerous when I could hate it.

    Oh well, Destiny is calling, as always.

  • Finally arrived at Dol Amroth in LOTRO

    After a bit of questing in West Gondor, my Lore Master finally made it to the city of Dol Amroth in LOTRO. The city looks great with tremendous detailing on the stonework and the doors. Swans and statues of swans are present everywhere. The city has a number of districts, and you are given a quest by a grumpy guard to visit all of them (I say the guard is grumpy, because he didn’t have nice things to say about elves, the race of my LM). When I got to the dock area, I was given a couple of quests regarding fishing. So while I was sent off to collect fish and to fish from a pier, nobody even mentioned the Corsair ship blocking the harbor entrance, nor the Umbar fleet in the surrounding waters. Nope, far more important for me to collect crates of fish than to worry about the blockade…

    Other areas of the city have similar nuisance quests, yet there are some serious quests, as well. There is a quest line to join the city guard, which seems like a lot of work, but I’ll do it, most likely. Overall, Dol Amroth seems like it will be an okay place to stop and quest for a while.

    The amenities are all present, but somewhat spread out and inconvenient. The LOTRO designers made such brilliant crafting halls in Forlaw and especially Aldburg, where crafting stations, vault keeper, auctioneer, and forge/relic master existed in a small, convenient space, yet here they are spread over a wide area and in different buildings, etc. So not great for crafting, but I can always jump to Aldburg when I need crafting time.

    Dol Amroth in LOTRO’s West Gondor is a treat and looks so good it isn’t to be missed. I’m glad I made it.

  • Getting into LOTRO again

    I’ve been trying to break my Destiny addition, or at least tone it down to just a habit, so I can play other games. I bought Gat out of Hell (along with Saints Row IV) for PS4 and have played that a bit. I have many other games that need playing, too, but the pull of Destiny is too strong. Like an abusive relationship, Destiny mistreats its players and abuses them, then, occasionally, gives us a neat gun or pieces of armor, and all is forgiven. While I’m not trying to equate a game with spouse beating, I wonder if the mental processes may be a little similar, since so many of us keep coming back for more abuse with no guarantee of good rewards.

    I’ve been playing more LOTRO lately, after MONTHS away. I’ve been logging in to LOTRO once a month to pay my housing upkeep, usually a day or two after my house and kinship house gets locked because my prior payments ran out. So I’d pay to unlock the houses and then pay another month in advance, then not touch it again. Well that’s changed, and now I’m back playing.

    My highest level character, a Lore-Master, was already in Western Gondor, and, at level 99, was able to take on most of the enemies there. I still haven’t made it all the way to Dol Amroth yet, but I’m enjoying the area and all the quests and killing the Corsair invaders.

    A few days ago, I took the “swift horse” to the Dead Marches, which was pretty neat. The Dead Marshes are very well done and look great. I ran into a “warband” solo hunter guy, who promptly kicked my squishy LM butt. I saw in yesterday’s patch notes that he’s been made a little easier to kill, but I didn’t run into him last night before I left the Dead Marshes. While the Dead Marshes area is neat, and the quests are pretty good, including the flashback one involving Frodo and Sam, getting around is a terrible slog. We can’t use mounts in the Dead Marshes, so travel is slow. And there isn’t a milestone at the Gondorian guy’s camp, so we can’t zip back when our quests are done. So while I liked the Dead Marshes sequence, it’s a bit too much work for a game, and that makes it less fun than I’d like.

    Now that I’m back in West Gondor, I’ll continue on to Dol Amroth and wherever else my Middle Earth adventures take me.

     

  • We are not the chosen one! Why I like the narrative of #LOTRO and #STO

    Ars Technica has a very interesting commentary on The Elder Scrolls Online, an upcoming MMO set in the Elder Scrolls universe, like Oblivion and Skyrim. One of the points I found most interesting was that the game uses the old “you are the chosen one” story line, which is a little odd, given that there are thousands of said chosen ones playing an MMO. (Paraphrasing from the article)

    This is one of the reasons I like the Lord of the Rings Online so much. I am not the chosen one in LOTRO. Frodo is the Ringbearer, and Aragorn is the King, and I’m just helping out. Same with Star Trek Online: There are thousands of us Captains, and we’re helping the Federation, or the Klingon Empire, or the Romulan Republic (funny how my spellchecker knows “Klingon” but doesn’t know “Romulan” – must be weak Star Trek fans making the word lists), but we won’t rule them or otherwise change the leadership, for example.

    I don’t mind being the chosen one in single player games, so I enjoyed Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind, but in an MMO, it does seem a bit much. We are not the chosen ones, dammit, so make games where cooperation and heroism can work together!

  • A few thoughts on #LOTRO’s potentially boring year

    There have been lots of recent posts and tweets predicting doom and gloom for Lord of the Rings Online. I sure hope they’re wrong, but I do wonder if this year won’t be quite a rough patch for the game.

    When Turbine announced no new major content this year, people assumed the demise of the game. While the devs quickly assured us that wasn’t true, the subsequent layoffs of several LOTRO team members seemed to confirm a pullback in resources going to LOTRO. Sure, they’ll redo some early areas, but that may not be compelling for all us level 95 players. But those areas are not exactly what I’m writing about.

    The problem that I see in LOTRO, even more than for Star Trek Online, is that the top-level content is becoming less and less compelling with each release. For example, when my first character, a Lore-Master, hit Mirkwood years ago, I loved it! I had so much fun there, running skirmishes and instances with friends, getting max reputation with the elves there, etc. Even the crafting location was great, so I worked hard to get the “return to” skill so I could use it as needed.

    Then Rise of Isengard came out, and everyone raced to hit level 75 so we could do the Dragioch raid and get the dragon cloak materials. I got lucky and got those dragon scales on my first run through (I think I /rolled a 99!). So life was pretty good. Then Great River came out and we all ran over there and finished it, but the repeatable missions into the Limlight Gorge were fun, but not great. At that point, half my kinship got bored and bailed out of the game, never to return.

    Then came Riders of Rohan. I was late to RoR, because I didn’t want to pay full price for it. Once I bought it, I loved the mounted combat. A lot! My friends didn’t like it nearly as much, though a few times, a friend and I would romp through the fields of Rohan thumping down any enemies in our path! The big end-game draw were the Erebor instances, but I didn’t have a high level Minstrel or Captain, so nobody wanted a lousy Lore-Master (emphasis on lousy) for those missions, so I didn’t get to play. Then I tried hard to level my Mini and Warden up to 85 so they could join in, but medical issues took me out of the game for a few months. I didn’t quite get them to level 85 before Helm’s Deep arrived.

    Not wanting to make the same mistake as with RoR, I bought Helm’s Deep on pre-order, so played it right away. But this time, there were no great end-game instances. Instead, there were the Epic Battles at Helm’s Deep, but they can be run solo and by any level over 20. So there’s no really compelling end-game content to make me want to level all my guys up to 95 so they can join the fun. They can already do those missions at their level.

    Now I really enjoyed the story lines in Dunland, East Rohan, and now, West Rohan. My Lore-Master does every quest and I enjoyed almost all of it. But I have a lot less interest in doing all the same quests over and over and over again with all my other characters. So they’re slowly languishing, while my LM is retired-in-place at the Aldburg crafting hall (nowhere better to be!), while I play more Star Trek Online than LOTRO.

    Might be a long year for LOTRO…