Okay. Now that I’ve written about how hunky dory LOTRO is, I have to put down some snark. I even got a very nice note from one of the Edelman folks (hi!) who were nice enough to send me a gratis copy. I was originally planning on buying a copy; now I guess I can lay that out on Guitar Hero II for the 360 instead. ;)

Just the same, I do have a couple of snarks I have to get out of my system.

• Quest balance. While the ‘group quests’ have all very much been right on the money (essentially undoable by solo, very pleasant in a group), I’ve found several ostensibly soloable quests that are too challenging for one avatar. I’m specifically thinking of the one where you help the idiot hobbits trying to knock the satchel out of the tree near Tuckborough. It’s slated as a level 7 quest, and the bees (the first critters you have to protect the hobbit from) are doable at that level. However, then you’re faced with a pair of bears; one is level 10 and the other is level 9. The first level I tried the quest at was 9, and I got creamed. Several times. Same at level 10. I waited until I hit 12 to take them on again, and used up a bunch of food and consumables before doing so. I *bearly* (no pun) squeaked past those bastards with a sliver of health left. I know I’m just a Minstrel, and I’m sure that more front-line folks probably have a better time of it, but I haven’t had any other problems like this with a solo-specified outing. Additionally, I’ve come across several other characters trying the quest that needed bacon-saving. I was happy to oblige, but if that quest is tuned for a group it should say so.
• Bugs. I have noticed several pinchers that made it through the Beta process. Nothing too major, but it’s a little annoying to see nonetheless. The “Honey-Bears” quest over near the aforementioned tree is the most consistent one I’ve seen. The bears spawn up near the top of a hill, and you have to protect Bolo Beekeeper-guy from the marauding ursines. The problem is they do this drop-from-the-sky routine, flickering in and out of existence. You have to run to the top of the hill and aggro them in order to get them to stay put. This quest *is* doable solo, but Bolo helps a lot on that front. By aggroing at the top of the hill you get a lot of damage that might otherwise have been spread around. That ‘drop from the sky’ bug is around a lot; while it makes some kind of sense for the spiders over by Overhill, wolves, bears, and slugs make a lot less sense. As a final wtf I spent about half an hour last night helping a guy get unstuck from the corner of a building, which he somehow managed to teleport himself into facing the wrong direction. IE: he saw his interface, but darkness beyond. /stuck wasn’t working, and we eventually resorted to my telling him which way he was facing and walking him into a building instance. When he turned around and left the instance, his sight was restored. For the most part, LOTRO has been such a smooth experience that these things stand out more than they would have otherwise, but they do bear mentioning.
• Quest Design. STOP SENDING ME BACK TO MICHEL DELVING. The Shire is actually a really small place once you step back and get a better view, but the constant run around back and forth gets old after a while. I think things got a lot better once I’d made my way to the eastern portion of the area (past the Frog swamps and into Scary). The quest that bugged me specifically was the spiders in Nob’s Bole one, where you eventually help the walking tree. I went from Tuckborough to Overhill several times; as I said, not a long trip. The repetition, though, was frustrating. I like feeling a sense of progression from my quests. A leads to B leads to C. We can go back to B, but then I should go on to C and D after that. The spider quest was more like A, B, C, B, A, B, C, A, B, C, A, B, C. This may have been part of their familiarization process for the Shire (and the game’s design philosophy, which I’ll get to below), but it started to get irksome during a long play session earlier this week. As a note, I should say that the frustration led to a really nice payoff. Escorting the walking tree was a blast, and the rewards for the quest were pretty good. Oh, additionally: escort missions are actually really cool in this game. I normally hate them, but all the escorts I’ve done so far have been for folks buff enough to either hold their own in a fight or stay alive well after I thought they should have. Low irritation that way, and it leads to my empathizing with the NPCs.

I have a few other snarks, but they’re really minor. (Why a slug-killer Title but no bear killer?) As I looked out across the Photorealistic landscape earlier today, an element of LOTRO’s design came to mind that I wanted to mention in this post that’s otherwise about negative elements. That element: familiarity.

Because The Shire and Bree-land are places we’ve all read about in books and seen in movies, we have expectations hung on them. Turbine has met those expectations by making them interesting places to explore and (unlike almost every other game I can think of) given the places a character of their own. While I complain about backtracking and one of the other mmogbloggers kvetched about the standardness of the quest design, it adds up in a way that I haven’t seen in other games. For example: I don’t give a flying fuck about Elwynn forest. I know the RPers on Argent Dawn just looooved Goldshire, but I couldn’t wait to get out of that place. Ditto with Westfall, Loch Modan, or almost any other zone you could mention. The only zone I’d say I connected with were Dun Morogh (shorties represent!) and Duskwood. I love the quest lines in Duskwood, play em’ every time. With LOTRO, though, the personality of the Shire has been etched into every little nugget of lore you stumble over. The pie-running, mailbag-delivering, goblin-killing, and slug squishing is all secondary to imparting the innocent and carefree nature of the Hobbit lifestyle to the player. Bree and environs similarly seems fairly over-run with character and nuance. I don’t know how much all this junk is going to impact me on a third or fourth play through, but my first two characters (my alt is a human champion) have definitely given me a sense of these areas; they’ve made an impression.

An aside: Every time I come up on Weathertop, I have to stop and just stare. It’s … absolutely perfect. Damn this game is beautiful.