So I played a bunch of games over the last 5 months

First of all, let me get the 2011 Awards out of the way.

Worst Blogger: Me, for posting five posts all year, all of them in August, for no apparent reason.

I’ve meant to write a bit about some of the old and new games I’ve been playing over those five months, but I always want to write massive walls of text like I did for Runes Of Magic and Atlantica Online, and I never feel like I have quite enough free time. So instead, I’m going to try to bang out a paragraph or two about a few new games, a couple of old games, and a couple of betas.

Without further ado, here is the last five months in gaming!

Rusty Hearts

I picked up this free-to-play title in order to complete an achievement and get another entry in Steam’s Holiday Sale Gift Pile competition. I’ve slagged off Perfect World in the past for making an excessive number of excessively similar games, but this ”gothic themed beat-em-up” is actually quite a different kettle of fish.

Set in a Transylvania distorted by a heavy filter of Asian sensibilities and dialogue translations at the “martial arts movie subtitle” level of quality, the story is some preposterous tosh about heroic vampires that try not to drink blood and a village menaced by the shadow of Vlad’s castle. Gameplay is you versus swarms of enemies, smashing them to pieces with grand sweeping blows – it actually reminded me of some classic arcade games like Golden Axe. But then combine that with traditional MMORPG mechanics like levelling, skill cooldowns, “! over the head” quests, etc.

I’ve certainly gotten my bit of fun out of this. Steam says I’ve played for 17 hours, and I enjoyed them. I’ll fire it up again next time I’m in the mood for some bash and slash, and I’d say it was well worth a download if you think that sounds like fun.

Spiral Knights

Another free-to-play game I picked up for the Holiday Sale Gift Pile competition (by the way, I didn’t win anything worthwhile at all, just some discount coupons for games I had no interest in buying). This is a cutesy action RPG, I guess you’d call it somewhat Diablo-esque in style, with its view from above, running, dodging, kiting, shooting, etc.

I did spend a few more hours playing this after completing my competition achievement, so I’d have to say it was at least OK, but it didn’t grab me in any really meaningful way. I don’t regret the download (it was fairly small, well under a gigabyte iirc), but I don’t really see myself launching it again.

Uncharted Waters Online

This one was mentioned on a forum as an example of a shamefully overlooked “AAA sandbox MMO”. AAA is an exaggeration – it’s at a level of polish I’d say was roughly on par with Atlantica Online. It’s not bad but you’d never mistake it for a genuine AAA commercial title from a major studio. But with that out of the way, I’ve got a lot of good to say about this game.

Set in a sort of mashup of 15th and 16th century history, you play a sea captain, sailing ever-finer ships as you travel the world exploring, trading and fighting. You know what game it actually most reminds me of? EVE Online. You have a similar mix of non-combat activities (trading, exploring, manufacturing). You can learn to fight by hunting NPC pirates, and then venture into “hostile waters” to either hunt player pirates, or become one yourself. Your capabilities are heavily defined by the ship you are currently captaining. And you have that real sense of distance – travelling takes quite some time, and there are no hearthstones to magically take you back home again!

There are three main paths in the game – Adventure (exploring and discovery), Trading, and Battle. I’ve been dabbling in them all over the last week and am not sure which one I most want to follow, because I’m enjoying all three. Luckily the game allows you to develop your choice of skills, with a class system that allows you to switch classes, and where your current class really only defines which “favoured” skills advance more quickly than others. You’re certainly not locked into any one path.

Anyway, I’d like to write more extensively about the adventures of Banquetto the Portuguese chandler at a later date. Maybe I will even manage to do so.

The Lord of the Rings Online

This continues to be a bit of a “go to” game for me. I picked up the “Rise of Isengard” expansion – foolishly paying full price at release, since it went on sale before I got to the point where I was actually high enough level to visit the new lands. Anyway my Guardian main is now level 68 and questing in Dunland, and LOTRO continues to be a perfect “pay as you go” title for me. Sometimes I’ll play heavily for a couple of weeks. Sometimes I won’t even launch it for a month or two. But when the mood takes me and I do play it, I always enjoy myself.

Guild Wars

I did ease off on Guild Wars quite a bit, after playing heavily throughout June to August. However I had a few more good sessions which led to me completing my “Legendary Guardian” title – doing every mission in the three campaigns (58 missions in total, iirc), with bonus objectives / Master rewards, in hard mode. I’m actually pretty proud of this, since a number of the missions are regarded as being rather rough to solo. This was an achievement which made me feel that I had actually achieved something, in terms of testing my skills, and having to improve them in order to succeed.

I have 19 points in my Hall of Monuments, just one more needed to get another Guild Wars 2 title and pet. I could get that in the blink of an eye just by going to Kamadan and buying a miniature off someone. And if the mood takes me to go for the “Ascendant” title in GW2, I can probably get up to 25 HOM points just by splashing around some of the cash in my stash, on more miniatures, armour and weapons.

EverQuest II

So when EverQuest II merged their free-to-play “EQ2 Extended” model with their regular EQ2 model in December, I decided to take another look at it. Thought it might be fun to dig up the level 30-something Brigand I played for a month way back when. As it happens, I couldn’t actually track down the details of that account, so I just started a new character.

I got all enthused for a few days, and even dropped twenty bucks to buy the latest two expansions when they had a “triple Station Cash” sale on. And then I got sick of it for exactly the same reason I’ve gotten sick of EQ2 the last couple of times I’ve tried to play it: the combat is boring boring boring. By far the worst implementation of the “tab target, autoattack, buttonbar full of skills” MMO combat system I have ever seen.

Once my new Guardian got to the point where I had more than a full button bar’s worth of marginally different attack skills, all on 10-30 second cooldowns, I knew it was time to stop. Again. Oh well, enjoy the twenty bucks, Sony.

Diablo III Beta

Yes, about a month ago I finally got an invite to the D3 beta!! I wrote up some impressions over at the D3 forums, but here’s the conclusion I came to after playing through the (very short) beta with two of the five classes:

I have zero doubt that we're onto a huge winner with Diablo 3. I can't wait to get home from work and play the other three classes, and I really can't wait for release!!

It feels good. It feels really good. I have a few concerns regarding linearity and difficulty, which may be premature since the beta is so short (just part of Act 1 of the game), and I have some other concerns about the lack of reason to replay with new characters, compared to Diablo 2 which – for better or for worse – did force you to start fresh if you wanted to pick different skills.

But the day this title goes on sale, I will buy it. No doubt, no question, this is a release day purchase for me.

Path of Exile Closed Beta

Given my excitement about Diablo 3, it’s ironic that just a few days ago I got an invite into the closed beta of the earnestly D2-influenced indie title Path of Exile!

Now, there’s a lot of angst on the D3 beta forums from fans who see every divergence from D2 as a personal insult. It’s clear that what they want is Diablo 2, with ten years newer technology behind it. Well, they’re going to get their wish. It’s called Path of Exile.

I’d been following this game with some interest, thought it looked cool, and expected (being an indie title and all) that it would be pretty rough visually and technically, since small teams generally find it impossible to match the polish that a major developer can bring to the table. According to my beta NDA, I’m allowed to post “general opinions on the game,” so here’s one: I was completely wrong about that. This game absolutely oozes polish and the graphics are simply stunning.

The minute-to-minute gameplay is incredibly closely influenced by Diablo 2, right down to the near-identical health and mana balls. The character progression is quite different, but it’s identical to D2 (and very different to D3) in one important way. Let me quote from the developer’s Beta Manifesto:

We do not want players to be able to completely respec their entire character easily. The game is designed to be fun to play, so if you want to play a Bow character rather than an Axe character, you’re meant to start a new one.

Now that’s the Diablo 2 spirit!

This is another game I’d like to write more about, although I’ll have to take some care to abide by the beta agreement – I’m allowed to discuss “publicly available information” but not “unannounced information”, so I’d need to investigate what exactly has been made publicly available.

Switch to free-to-play makes a mess of LOTRO community, film at eleven

Many were the dire predictions that the LOTRO community would take a nosedive in quality once Turbine launched the new free-to-play business model. And they were right – sort of. This last week, reading the LOTRO forums has made me want to bash my head against a wall due to the stupidity and selfishness of a large slice of the community.

Needless to say, I’m not talking about the influx of new players since the game went free-to-play. I’m talking about a large slice of the old-timers.

Here’s a quick summary of what Turbine have done with LOTRO. Last week, you could:

• Pay $15/month and play the game, or;
• Pay nothing and not play the game

This week, you can:

• Pay $15/month and play the game, or;
• Pay nothing and play the first few zones, with some restrictions on bag space, etc., or;
• Pay one-off fees to unlock zones worth of quests, as well as other traditional cash shop perks such as mounts, storage space, etc.

You may notice that this week, you have exactly the same subscription option you had last week, plus the option to pay as you go, plus the option to at least log in and do some stuff for free. So, naturally, a large slice of the player base chucked a colossal tantrum and started carrying on like spoiled two-year-olds because Turbine didn’t give them everything in the game for free.

The core of the tantrum being people who felt that having purchased the base game box (Shadows of Angmar, aka SoA) at some point in the last few years should entitle them to unlock all the quests in all the zones in the base game. This is nine zones, which would cost a little over $50.00 to unlock one by one, and would, effectively, give anyone who ever had an account during the pre-free-to-play era a lifetime subscription. The majority of them could quite comfortably cancel their subscription, never spend another cent, and enjoy the game in a manner scarcely distinguishable from how it was previously when they were subscribed (since most character restrictions, like bag space, riding skill, trait slots and gold cap, are waived for characters created or played while a subscription was in effect).

Such a scheme would, as far as I can tell, basically destroy Turbine’s revenue stream, and kill the game. But regardless, it all boils down to one simple thing: these whining ungrateful little shits have just been given a bunch of stuff for free, not had anything taken away from them, and they’re screeching and crying as if Turbine just stole their teddy bear at gunpoint.

It makes me sick. Fortunately, I can mostly avoid it by staying away from the forums, and in-game, with the relatively inoffensive new players and their stupid names, “your gay lol” idiocy, and inane chatter about how WoW sucks balls and is the worst game ever made / WoW rulez and is a million times better than LOTRO. I’ll take a week of that over an hour of whining brats trumpeting their sense of entitlement.

In other news, I was quite proud when I got the ”Undying” title on my Warden. I’ve done it again:

And I’m even more proud to have achieved it with a completely untwinked Burglar on a new server – and a new server suffering from some heavy load and lagspikes - than I was with my Warden kitted out with the best weapons and jewellery that my other characters could craft.

One must queue to simply walk into Mordor

Something I have never seen before in LOTRO:

 

This was on the new server Crickhollow I chose – there was also queues on a number of other servers. Looks like I’m not the only one enjoying the free-to-play relaunch!

LOTRO Free Middle Earth arrives

So, Turbine’s new “Free Middle Earth” free-to-play version of Lord of the Rings Online has landed, hot on the heels of EverQuest II Extended. I jumped on briefly last night, creating a new character on one of the four new servers, to see what was happening.

First of all, the game is buzzing just as crazily as EQ2X. The server was packed with players, and from the conversations in chat, quite a lot of them are entirely new to the game. I think there is definitely potential for this to replicate the success Turbine had with D&D Online when they relaunched that as free-to-play.

Secondly, LOTRO was always an attractive game, but since I last played, I’ve replaced my PC with a new rig. The patch that accompanied the free launch added DirectX 11 support, and by happy coincidence, my new machine has a Radeon 5770. So I enabled the new DirectX 11 stuff, cranked all the settings up to high and turned on anti-aliasing, and now we are talking a seriously attractive game.

 

Those looks, running at a rock solid 60 fps, definitely put a smile on my face. It’s hard to believe that this game is well over three years old and has had its graphics kept up-to-date like this.

I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about LOTRO’s free-to-play / subscription hybrid model yet, but I have to say, I expect it to be much better suited to my playstyle than EQ2X’s “subscribe or bust” approach.

Turbine makes me an offer I can't refuse

All the LOTRO expansions you don't already have, plus a month's play time, all for only $9.99? Now that's an offer too good to refuse. I jumped onto LOTRO's latest free weekend this morning, knocked over a couple more stages of the now-soloable epic questline (finally, Dori, you are free, after a year or so on my quest log!), and then found this deal being advertised.

I haven't actually applied the key to my account yet, since hey, I'm playing for free this weekend, might as well make the most of it! And I have to say, I'm not sure that the Mirkwood expansion offers a whole lot for my puny level 39 self. But $9.99 to lock in a month's playtime, and getting my account fully up to date with the latest expansion in the process - that, I had to say "yes" to.

Fellowship of One

So, Lord of the Rings Online has just had it's first major content patch since the Mirkwood expansion came out: "Volume III, Book I: Oath of the Rangers". Although, as the name suggests, this moves the epic storyline forward into volume III, the patch also includes "massive changes to the first Volume of The Lord of the Rings Online Epic Story."

There's a developer diary about these changes, but basically, they acknowledge that the steps of the epic questline which require a group can be frustrating to do these days, since LOTRO is a mature game with a predominantly max-level player base, making it often difficult to find a group to do these quest steps with. So, they have reworked all of volume I, apparently, so that every step which previously required a group can now be done either in its original state, or in a solo version where you are heartily buffed to make it possible.

I've written before about being frustrated when looking for a group for the epic questline, and how I was looking forward to this change. This definitely makes me want to re-subscribe to LOTRO for a spell. Well done, Turbine! Now I just need more hours in the day to fit this in alongside Atlantica (still having lots of fun there), WoW (my guild is now up to the Lich King in 10-man, and only a few bosses short in 25-man) and everything else (like spending more time on my Darkfall trial).

Marchomir the Undying

Well, I said my LOTRO Warden was getting close to the tricky "Undying" title..


..made it, no problems.

This thread on the LOTRO forums was helpful, although I didn't follow all the advice there. In particular, I did a lot of lower level quests, simply because I was questing through The Shire for the first time (my other two characters are a dwarf and a man), and wanted to enjoy all the content. Doing quests below your level is obviously quite a safe way to level, but also slow, and for many people, the Undying attempt goes wrong not due to trying to do something difficult, but simply bad luck like a network dropout or game crash while in combat. So the slower you level, the more risk there is of that happening.

But yeah, I just ground it out, solo'd all the group quests in The Shire (although outlevelling them when I did), went to Bree-land at about level 17, and popped out quests there until I hit 20. Oh, and I had top-quality crafted weapons all the way due to my Champion being a weaponsmith, upgrading to a new crit crafted weapon every two levels. So my damage output was pretty high. That went a long way towards reducing the risk of multi-enemy fights.

Turbine finally got me to open my wallet

Well, Turbine's second free "welcome back to Lord of the Rings Online" week did the trick and got me to open my wallet. I found I spent the week pretty much playing LOTRO to the exclusion of other MMOs, and the $9.95 "buy Mines of Moria including a free month's subscription" deal was finally too good to pass up.

So, now, with the Moria expansion installed, I was able to check out the two new (OK, they're not new any more, but new to me!) classes, Warden and Rune-Keeper. Inspired by this post on Dub's Diatribe, I decided to try a Warden, and I'm quite glad I did - I'm finding the "gambit" system quite fun, and it certainly seems to be a unique mechanic amongst the many MMOs I've played.

The super-quick summary is that it extends the "combo point / finisher" system used by WoW's rogues, LOTRO's champions and WAR's witch-hunters by having three different colours of combo points. Different colour combinations lead to different finishers, starting off with simple two-colour combinations (e.g. green-red is "Persevere", an attack that also places a mild heal-over-time on me) and apparently builds up to mighty five-colour combos like green-yellow-green-yellow-green, "Conviction", which places a heal-over-time on your entire group and also transfers threat from every group member to you. So far the most complex ones I have are a couple of three-colour combos, it does a good job of gradually increasing your options, with a new gambit being available every couple of levels.

I'm currently level 17 on Marchomir the Warden, and have not yet died. So I'm closing in on the apparently fairly challenging "the Undying" title which is awarded for reaching level 20 without dying. Once I hit, I think, level 10, I decided this might be fun to focus on. I'll be happy to get it, but I will confess that as I get closer and it feels like more is at stake, it is sucking some of the joy out of the gameplay. I'm not about to flex my muscles trying to solo a fellowship quest with a risk like that. Oh well, it'll be over soon one way or the other, then I can cut loose!

So much gaming going on #2

Over at Player Versus Developer, Green Armadillo posts about having too much gaming to do and not enough hours in the week. I know the feeling! I'm no less busy than I was last time I posted about so much gaming going on.

I landed in the closed beta of Allods Online, a new free-to-play MMO coming out of Russia. That runs for two weeks. I've only played one session last night, not enough to put any real thoughts together, but it's a slick and polished looking game, with a pleasingly different feel to its setting - it starts you off on board a flying ship locked in a cannon battle with another from the opposite faction, a far cry from the usual small village in a lightly forested, lightly hilly piece of Olde Englishe countryside.

Mechanically, I didn't see anything particularly original in my brief play so far - probably the most novel thing is that the combat doesn't seem to have any auto-attacks, it's purely the usage of special attacks. My biggest criticism so far? I have to say, it takes a tediously long time to beat a lower level enemy to death. The actual pace of the cut and thrust of combat feels fine - it just takes a. lot. of. hits. to take down an enemy - even one that poses no particular threat to you.

And now Lord of the Rings Online has just kicked off another free week. I kind of feel like the last one ran out before I made a conscious decision about whether to resubscribe or not, so I'll give it another chance. Especially since I read over at Keen & Graev's blog that Turbine are looking at re-working the epic questline to make it much more solo-friendly, to combat the problem that in a mature game with most of the players sitting at the level cap, it's not so easy for new players to find people to group with while levelling. This was something that bummed me during my last free week, as my quest log filled up with fellowship quests and I didn't see a lot of people to try to do them with.

On top of that, things are working out nicely on Frostmourne, my new WoW server. I hadn't raided since mid-July, but my freshly reassembled guild has run Trial of the Crusader 10-man the last two weeks. It's a fun little raid, for sure. No trash, five fights which are all pretty fresh and fun. Not very hard (talking normal mode here of course, not hard mode). And it's great to be raiding with the guys again, with all the trash talk on Vent and so on. I'm also (finally!) levelling a death knight, just so I have an alt on the new server, and it is definitely a fun class. I should have tried it sooner! Halfway through level 74 at the moment.

So, the stuff I was up to last time? Obviously I got my Alganon thoughts posted when the NDA dropped - and some links sent my way by Tobold and Lum the Mad gave me some rather unexpected traffic. I doubt half a dozen people had ever read anything I posted prior to that, and suddenly there were thousands of hits. Not to mention that it was very nice to get linked up from two blogs that I've been reading and enjoying for quite a long time!

Fallen Earth, to be honest, I didn't get a whole lot of play in during their free trial. Some, and it certainly felt better than it did when I tried it during beta. Didn't quite grab me though, and I can't exactly put my finger on why not. I think the hybrid of regular MMO combat with more shooter-style action was a big part of it. I'm sure a lot of people like it, but it just doesn't hit the spot for me.

So, plenty to do! And so few hours in the week! Between WoW, LOTRO, more of the Allods beta, taking another look at Alganon as it gets closer to its next release date, and who knows what else (WAR's endless trial maybe?), I see myself glued to the screen for a while!

So much gaming going on

So many MMORPGs, so few hours in the day.

My Lord of the Rings Online welcome back week ran out - I haven't taken up the $9.99 Mines of Moria + a month's play offer yet and don't plan to in the immediate future. It may still happen though.

I have been beta-testing Alganon and working on a long blog piece about it, which I need to finish up ready for when the NDA drops on October 26th.

I have also been playing some Runes of Magic these last few weeks and working on a blog piece about that. It's not nearly finished but I probably should drop it out there as part one, and write a second part at a later date.

And Massively just gave me a key good for a 15-day free trial of Fallen Earth. I beta-tested that one a few months back and thought it had real quality issues and some serious design flaws, so I never even considered buying it, but since launching it has attracted a fair bit of praise from bloggers whose opinions I quite respect, so I'll take another look - if only I can find the time!

Because on top of all that, a bunch of guys from my World of Warcraft guild (which scattered so completely a few months ago) have reassembled on Frostmourne, an Oceanic server. They have formed a new guild with an eye to getting 10-man raiding back in action and maybe recruiting back up to 25's. So I transferred one of my characters (my main, a dwarf priest) over there to see how things go. I would really like to see Icecrown Citadel when patch 3.3 lands, and see it with my friends, not trying to pug it months after it's old news.

Unfortunately, in a moment of Friday beers induced foolishness, I completely forgot to stack my character with money before transferring him. I intended to take the maximum, 20,000 gold, with me, since I'd be on a strange server without all my tradeskill alts and supporting infrastructure, but no. As soon as I arrived I realized I only had what I'd been carrying, just over 2,000 gold.

Well, it will have to do!

LOTRO: The moral of morale

As I was walking to work this morning, something that occurred to me about Lord of the Rings Online. A tiny change of terminology takes a mechanic that is common to basically every MMORPG in existence, and makes it make a lot more sense.

So you have this green bar. When bad people hit you, it gets shorter. When you use healing spells or bandages or such things, it gets longer. If it gets down to nothing, you're dead and have to respawn at a graveyard, or run back to your body as a ghost, or some such thing. Some games call it "life", some call it "health", some hark back to D&D and call it "hit points."

LOTRO calls it "morale," and their take on the concept is a clever one.

When your morale falls to zero, you're not dead - you've been defeated. And you don't respawn at a graveyard - you find yourself back at a safe spot to which you have retreated. So there's no suspension of disbelief about dying and dying and dying again.

Similarly, on the healing front, instead of magically "healing wounds", various means exist to "rally your morale". This works well, because while Middle Earth is certainly a world of magic, the magic in the world is ancient and powerful, and not really the domain of player characters. There are no low level priests and mages running around. So "healing" is the domain of minstrels and their inspiring tunes, or captains and their rallying cries.

Mechanically, scarcely a difference from WoW or any other fantasy MMO. But just that little tweak to the terminology makes such a difference to the feel.

Welcome back to Lord Of The Rings Online

I played The Lord of the Rings Online for a month back in July 2008. I didn't set up a recurring subscription, just played the free month that came with the game. But afterwards, if you'd asked me "why not?" I would have found the question hard to answer. There was nothing specific I could put my finger on, just that, like many other MMORPGs, LOTRO didn't quite "grab" me.

A well-timed email from Turbine arrived the other week, offering a free reactivation of my account from October 15-21. I was in a bit of an MMO lull, my World of Warcraft subscription is still active but I've not been playing a lot since the spectacular disintegration of my guild a couple of months back, so it was a fine time to revisit Middle Earth. They had released their first expansion, The Mines of Moria, since I left, and the word around the internets was that the game was in good shape with a small but satisfied subscriber base.

I spent a fair slice of the weekend playing: I took my dwarf champion Maligalin from level 23 to 27, questing around Bree and in the Lone-lands. I finished Book One of the epic questline and did the first couple of quests of Book Two. I got up to expert weaponsmithing and completely mastered journeyman weaponsmithing. And I knocked off a few deeds along the way. So now I'm ready to ponder what I'm liking and what I'm not.

What I'm liking

First thing I noticed when I got back in: wow, my memory of what a good-looking world this game has was not wrong. It is seriously attractive. I've always been an advocate of art direction being far more important than polygon count or shader complexity - which is why I laugh at people who say WoW has bad graphics - and LOTRO's artists have nailed it. This really is the world of Peter Jackon's movies brought to life. The rolling landscapes, the ancient ruins, and especially the doorways to hobbit-holes in the side of hills - just perfect.

Captain Beliandra stands in front of a hobbit-hole in north Bree

I don't think I really got my head around the character development options when I played last year. But I'm digging the way that the unlocking of virtues and class traits through deeds adds another dimension to your character development beyond a straight line from level one to sixty. I'm quite happy with the class traits I've unlocked on my champion - I currently have Deadly Strikes, Vicious Strikes and Blood-lust from the Berserker set equipped, since I figure questing is all about pouring out the single-target damage. But my virtues I'm not so happy with, I know I don't have five slotted which I can look at and say "yep they're all great for me". And I like the feeling that, instead of just focusing on leveling, I could choose to pore over deed lists and figure out what I could do to improve my virtues.

Crafting, when you get right down to it, is just another example of a "fixed set of recipes, make a bunch of rubbish to get the skill to learn better recipes" system, like we've seen in so very many MMORPGs. But I do think LOTRO has done more with the paradigm than most. With the mastering of tiers to open up the chance of critical success, the optional rare components to boost crit chance, the different quality tools, the single-use recipe drops, the quests to learn new tiers of crafts, and the crafting guilds with their rep grinds: they have certainly put in a lot of stuff to liven up what could easily be a pretty stale mechanic. I can't deny that it got me interested in keeping my weaponsmithing progression going alongside my levelling,

What I'm not liking so much

I find LOTRO's combat.. fiddly, I guess. I feel like my champion has more moves than he really needs: why do I have both Swift Strike and Wild Attack as fervour builders? Having Savage Strikes, Brutal Strikes and Relentless Strike as finishers to spend two, three and four fervour respectively seems like overkill - flexible, but fiddly. And the mechanics of queueing up skills, waiting for them to start their animation, then queueing another skill, while monitoring my fervour (which ticks up by itself over time when I'm in my offensive stance, as well as being generated by moves) and dealing with short cooldowns (four to ten seconds on a lot of skills).. well, I find myself spending fights squinting at the wee buttons on my action bar. It's obviously going to take more than just a solid weekend of play to get a reflexive feel for this.

"There and Back Again" - it's not just a alternative title for The Hobbit, it seems to be a guiding principle of LOTRO quest design. I lost count of how many times a questgiver would do something send me off into some den of goblins to kill a bunch of them - and then send me back there to, oh, gather some crates - and then send back there again to kill their leader. I'm not a fan of the hyper-streamlined quest design WoW has moved towards with Wrath of the Lich King, which seems designed to prevent you from ever going somewhere twice to do two things rather than making a single trip. But really, even in a couple of days play, I was feeling the overkill on the back and forth.

What I'm not sure about

LOTRO is a game that gives you ample opportunities to grind. But I don't think it really insists that you grind.

Certainly the levels I gained from 23 to 27 didn't require any grinding: there were heaps of quests and I found myself doing a bunch that were well below my level purely because I got into the rhythm of doing anything an NPC asked me to do.

The monster-slaying deeds can be a grind and then some. Some of them, like wights in the Barrow Downs and goblins in the Lone-lands, I completed in the process of questing. But others, like killing a total of 240 crebain (blackbirds) are a little intimidating. But then you have to ask yourself: why do it if I don't want to? To be honest I probably wouldn't even slot the trait that it provides (Honesty, giving bonuses to power, fate and armour), but even if it was something I would use, slaughtering hundreds of birds for a few stat points is surely optional unless you're a hardcore mini-maxer.

Crafting, if you gather all your materials yourself, seems to require some grinding. I got a lot of barrow iron while questing but I was still a distance from mastering journeyman weaponsmithing by the time my progression had taken me into areas where it had been left behind and replaced by tier three ore spawns. So this meant some running around Bree-land mining. I don't see this as a bad thing though: mastering crafting probably shouldn't be something you can do without making any extra effort, just gathering everything you see while you're levelling.

What's next?

The point I'm up to in the epic questline is a group quest, "Breeders of the Dead". Given that I'm in Australia and thus my evening play time is deep in the middle of the night for the North American playerbase, it will be interesting to see how easy or difficult I find it to get a group. The server I am on, Elendilmir, I chose because it was recommended for Oceanic players, and I've seen a few mentions of Aus/NZ guilds, so hopefully I'll find it at least reasonably alive during Aussie primetime.

First two days impressions, though, are pretty positive. I'd say I'm leaning in the direction of at least splashing out the $9.99 to buy the Mines of Moria expansion and the month of playtime that comes with it - it's a generous deal and really not too hard for Turbine to sell me on!

I shall write more in the days to come.