Thursday, September 23, 2010

What's Hot, What's Not in Lotro

So I've been busy playing the new book chapters and trying out all the new fangled features. I've come up with a small list of likes and dislikes from what I've seen in the changes to the game.

Dislikes:
1. I don't like the color scheme of the exp bar, I liked the old one better.
2. I don't like the blaring annoying "Lotro store icon" in the lower right that is now always there instead of hidden away in a menu. (the marketing ninjas probably required that)
3. I don't like the names I'm seeing come up on some of the new players, they are rather offensive (prolly came straight from WoW :P)
4. I don't like how you can buy travel things/deeds/etc, that you used to and still can earn the hard way. I agree with Keen on this point, that it trivializes past accomplishments.
5. I don't like how low the population bar is set on the new area layering technology. It seems like if 40 people come into an area, it splits it into two instances of 20 people unless they are already in a raid
6. I don't like how they have given us "perks" that fill our already overflowing bags up.
7. I thought they said that the new area was going to be an alternative place to level from 60-65 but make no mistake about it folks. This new area (Enedwaith) is for lvl 64+ characters.

Likes:
1. I do like seeing lots of new players around everywhere. The game and world is alive again!
2. I do like chatting with people in OOC chat and there is a lot of chatting going on.
3. I do like they are making more real money off of the suckers willing to buy potions and perks in the game instead of craft/earn them so that they can afford to develop more gorgeous areas and more importantly, PlayerVersusMonsterPlayer skirmishes!!!!
4. I do like the new area they added (its really pretty), though the quest designers need to be given a lesson in creative quest design. They should all be sentenced to play Baldur's gate 2 for 2 hours every night, in which there are NO kill 10 rats quests and very very few "run to this side of the map and then run back" quests just to waste your time.
5. I do like that they upgraded the graphics engine to directx11 now.
6. I do like the instance join option. I may actually get to see some instances I never got to run now, like Annuminas!
7. I do like the newly revamped Hobbit/human area involving you with Aragorn and politics of the area more in the quest line.
8. I do like the fact that my friends who played WoW are now considering jumping (and some have) into Lotro.

All in all I think more good qill come of this than bad because if things get really unbalanced Turbine has thus far been pretty good at hitting things with the nerf bat eventually. But there's always the few who will buy their way to world domination and then leave cuz there's nothing left to improve and thus they get bored. They too help fund additions to the game so bully for them... (I guess I'm not a purist after all :P)

3 comments:

MMORefugee said...

I feel pretty much the same about that list. This move to F2P really came with a lot of good and bad.

Thallian said...

Glad to hear someone agrees. Did you think of any I forgot?

Anton said...

I generally feel like MMO online stores are obnoxious. It seems like a non-game element stuffed into the game, and it's located somewhere in-your-face in most games. I prefer subscription models. Then again, I don't pay for either right now. But I've been considering WoW or STO if I had the money and time budgeted.