Wednesday, December 1, 2010

New Elves and Dwarves intro is much better

Last night I did a friend and favor and rolled him an elf guardian through the newbie land tutorial instances of Lotro. I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did though. What I got instead of drudgery was completely revamped areas, quests, ominous plot buildups, a ton less running around for no reason, and an exciting finale where try to escape a collapsing tomb. They actually went through and added new 3D mob designs for the dourhand dwarves which look much more interesting and grouchy. They changed the countryside and added a dwarven stair shortcut, a dourhand mine, changed the silver deep to more obviously be the source of geodes which are used every year in the dwarven winter festival, and obviously used some of the things they learned from building Moria as well. All in all I give them a gold star for improving it, though at the very beginning there was a bit of talking. They also changed the layout of the text windows so that quest backlog is on one side and requirements are in yellow on the other making it easier for the many many people who don't care to read to just glance at what they need to do to advance while us more literate players can enjoy unadulterated text instead.

And that's just the intro, I wonder what else has changed....

2 comments:

Anton said...

Cool, so LOTRO is in step with WoW with all the fancy updating going on. I wonder if anyone else might join the MMO revamping bandwagon.

mbp said...

Even though I am unlikely to roll anew alt any time soon I think this revamping of starter zones is a great move for the longevity of the game. Every game needs a steady stream of new players if it is to survive and giving them some love is a great move.