Some ways into the Lord of the Rings Online three year anniversary welcome-back weekend I decided to stop playing my current characters on Winfola and Nimrodel and start a fresh set on a new server. If we were going to move the instance group to Middle-earth again, we would probably want to start fresh, which meant that the 1-20 game was of more immediate importance than the skirmishes of things you can do later on.
So I rolled up a new character on Firefoot.
I let my daughter create a character for me. She is always keen to play with the character creator in any game I play and she always wants me to play her characters after she makes them. This time she was going to get her wish. I chose the class, a warden, one of the new classes that came in with the Mines of Moria expansion. (Which was a while back, so “new” is a relative term here.)
Now have one of my few female characters, Terentia the warden, named after the wife of Cicero.
Terentia at level 17
I later created another character, a hunter named Silinus (which sounded roughly Latin to me, trying for a theme here), to run though some of the starting areas again.
Silinus at 15
I ended up with Terentia at 21 and Silinus at 15 after about ten days of relaxed play. They were both of the race of man, so I spent that time in and around Bree. And while I will get to writing up what I thought of playing an old favorite class, the hunter, compared with newer warden class, I will save that for another post. Here I want to remark on what I noticed changed since I last ran through these early levels.
Faster Leveling
Over the last three years the experience curve for LOTRO has been reduced twice, at least by my count. While that has given a boost to some of my older characters, it also speed up the job of getting through those early levels and picking up skills.
More Quests
My earlier impression that they have added more quests seems to have been justified. There are definitely more quests than I remember from before. Of course, not all of them are original.
More bears, more boars, more wolves. I got those along with a quest to head out to my favorite lake, Nen Harn, for snapping turtles. And, out there, I ran into more quest givers who were also looking for boars and bear and turtles, or parts there from.
Camping at the ruins near Nen Harn
The quests an Nen Harn though gave rare crafting items and recipes as rewards, along with the usual experience and coins. And they were repeatable, in case you need more crafting items or really dislike the local wildlife and want to mix business with pleasure.
No Night Quests
Along with upping the ante with the number of quests, at least four quests in the Bree area that required you to wait until night fell in the game have been changed. No longer do you have to wait until the game’s own day/night cycle to meet up with Bill Ferny, the informant from Sharky’s men, or the shade in Bree. They all show up in daylight now. In fact, to get Bill Ferny now, you just go up to his house and ring the bell.
Bill's Bell
Such convenience.
Better Placement of Quest Givers
There seems to have been a big shuffle of quest giving NPCs at some point, most notably on the Bree/Brandywine Bridge axis, though it is noticeable elsewhere. While this ends up creating quest hubs, little clumps of “quest available rings,” which some people think are a bad thing, it certainly does reduce the amount of running around. The road from Bree to the Brandywine Bridge is 75 miles in the Middle-earth Atlas. How many times should we be reasonably expected to run that route?
More Horse Routes
In addition to some NPC optimizations, there are new (to me) intra-zone stable-master routes. These appear to be scattered along some of the more notorious routes you end up running back and forth along. Now for 1 silver you can ride from West Bree to Adso’s Camp or to Buckland, since they haven’t eliminated all of the running from that corridor.
Quest Horse Route
Perhaps even better, certain quests now provide you a ride to your next objective. Specifically, when you’ve run up to Saeradan in the North Bree Fields and he turns around and tells you to head all the way back around to the Lone Lands to Candaith’s Encampment, which is stuck in a dell in on the bad side of Weathertop, he at least offers you up a ride now. And even on his fast horse, the journey takes several minutes. The thought of having to hoof it all the way there used to be one of those “done for the evening” moments.
Quest Tracker
This was actually just introduced at about the time I stopped playing before. It was being tested live back then. Now, however, it seems to be ready for prime time.
It has its own quirks of course. It took me a while to figure out how to get the quest tracker in the mini-map to focus on the quest I was interested in, not just what it picked. Fortunately, somebody mentioned right-clicking on the ring next to the quest for a menu.
Oh, hey, look at that!
And when the quest tracker is on, it definitely takes a while when you open up the map. This is probably what you should expect when you add on a feature like that.
But otherwise it is functional and has pointed me in the right direction often enough, though once in a while it seems to form strange opinions about where I should be headed.
Is It Good?
With all that, getting into the game and feeling like you’re moving ahead is certainly more tangible. A completionist like myself ends up chasing down more than a few green or grey quests. For me, this is especially try with the book-ordered epic quests, which I always try to run. Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars – combat, exploration and character progression. But with LOTRO, in addition to these they’ve added the fourth pillar to the equation; a story. That story leads you along with the action taking place in Tolkien’s books and helps to make the game seem more like Lord of the Rings and less like Kill Ten Rats Boars.
Now, is this speed up a good thing?
I think so. I have been a very casual LOTRO player, but this makes me feel like Moria and Mirkwood are not totally beyond my reach, even starting again from scratch.
Some people, however, view askance any easing up on the difficulty of a game.
Where do you stand on this? Is it a good thing or not?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 