Monday, April 27

Monday's Sunday Screenshot Showoff

Yeah yeah. So I'm a day late. You know our axim.
It's all Lani's fault!
Hmm, is it me or does this otherwise perfect escape clause leave yours truly kinda in a lurch?



This weekend (and this week to I think) has an offering for Lord of the Rings Online for $9,99
Now be warned, Turbine is extending this offer, not Codemasters, which means it's for the US only. Well, when Turbine says US only (in very fine print) they don't mean they'll exclude (or warn) European players off of their deal. They will however give you a client and account for servers in three world-time-zones, none of which are European.



Still, 10 bucks is 7.6 euro's (except when NCSoft is doing the conversion on their 10 dollar premium packs which come out at 9 euro's, which in turn convert into 12 dollars for our beloved Korean Grindfest Maker. So stop whining you US Superheroe crybabies. You're not being ripped off nearly as much as us folks in the Old Country). So I was willing to give this game one more shot. I've always been 'against' it due to Middle Earth being a vivid mental image/memory in my mind for over 20 years now and I'd rather not 'pollute' that any further than the movies did.
Not to say the movies are bad, far from it. Especially the first when the actors still tried to you know, act. But it's not the Middle Earth of my mind's eye.
A while ago Phè said I should treat it as 'Generic MMO' and ignore the rest.
I'd actually tried LotRO a long while back, back at the first free 5 day trial. I tried playing an Elven Ranger and I hated my Liv Tyler lookalike butt. It's obvious that Turbine had the same guy, or gal, who designed the Dungeons & Dragons Online hairdo's punished by having him make some more for the LotRO project. Good punishment mayhap, but why do we the player have to suffer for it?


I wonder what they do for vegetarians, or too them...

Picking up the $10,- digital download version (which includes Moria btw) on Satgurday morning as I came of my night-shift (great time for doing credit card purchases by the way) had me trying it out that same evening. This time I picked a Hobbit. Note the lack of Hobbit screenshots. There's a reason for that. Having decided that I hate LotRO, period I went and downloaded the WOW trial that Blizzard had been bombarding me with for the last two weeks. (I think my former roomy, an avid WOW player, may be behind that).
After that 47 minute (20 minutes longer than my previous record of in-game WOW time) lesson in relative suckiness, and absolute fugliness, I was willing to give LotRO yet one more try. I mean, the avatars sucked, but the land looked lush, and I could always hit that DX10 toggle. I mean, I got Vista and all, right?

So I decided not to try the last 'we have a human animation skeleton and we'll apply that to other races as no-one will notice the crappy movement' race, the unisex dwarf, but stick with a human. Somewhat lackluster and expecting the worst I was checking out the class choices when I stumbled upon a way down below entry of 'Warden'. Hmmm, Spear, Javelin (a game that knows the difference!) and a spear-wielder's shield. Interesting...
Ever since Mat Cauthon and especially Trull Sengar (just look them up, cultural barbarian!) I've had a thing for spear-wielders and judging by the little example-gameplay video for the class the animations for this class did anything but suck!


Now my little Warden Shelaugh is level 10 already and going strong. I'll be picking a crafting profession soon, so maybe that will restore my lack of faith in Turbine :-)

7 comments:

  1. Addendum: One thing I really like about this game, and which I haven't noticed since EQ-2, is facial expressions during combat. When my Warden shouts at the enemy, her mouth opens up and she screams and you see spittle fly. Which accounts for the slight DPS value to what's otherwise a pure Taunt.

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  2. Lol, I'm so glad you went back to WoW for 10 minutes, for some unknown reason I've been tempted to buy a timecard lately....dunno why, I think that £20 would be ill spent, I'd probably do the same as you, I have a lvl 68 Warlock that bored me to tears once I realised how hard core you needed to be to continue and I just aint that hard core.

    Was in the beta for LotRO and did the 'tempt you back' 14 day thing a couple of months ago, you definately do have to forget any of the LotR heritage and just treat it as any old MMO to get any mileage out of it, doomed to fail basing anything on something so magical and so well imagined by so many, perhaps if they called it something else then it wouldn't suffer from that burden?

    Didn't have much time during that 14 days to actually play, it looked lovely but my choice of class was a big mistake, a mandolin wielding minstrel I am definately not....

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  3. *Tries to imagine Geekzor weilding a mandolin*
    /Fail
    ...
    *Tries to imagine Geekzor weilding a mandolin*
    /Fail
    ...
    *Tries to imagine Geekzor weilding a mandolin*
    /Fail

    :-)
    I'm enjoying myself. Of course, I can't say if the Fun of Learning New Things will last beyond the single free month I got.

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  4. Oh and my highest level bored-out-of-my-skull WOW toon was level 3 and a Gnome... It lived 27 minutes.

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  5. As it turns out, Warden is a new class to LotRO and a good solo/group player to boot. I've been carefully checking out some other classes and besides the Runekeeper Nuker/Healer I find most of them to be rather lackluster mechanics wise. Minstrel is 'interesting' but icky. I'd almost say 'gay' ;-)
    Still having fun though.

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  6. I had started the Lotro download yesterday morning, and last evening it was still only on 80%. I had to pause it a bit so that I could play some Vanguard. There is an awesome crafting arc in New Targanor. It is actually more a running around arc than crafting, but it is great fun. I even met the King. I never knew there is an actual King there. This morning the download was finally complete, but I haven't installed it yet. Did you manage to get Ryzom up and running?

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  7. Well, you did better than I then :-)
    Ryzom was stuck on 20% after 8 hours. THe combination of FIrefox & Kaspersky then ensured I had to dl it completely again. I'll be making a 2nd attempt tonight after I turned off powersaving modes in Vista which may have been a factor.
    And I knew about the King. The Spellblades's leadership conducted a 2.5 hour Officer meeting under his nose while Gold Dupers would make the zone crash every 15 minutes because Mark's girlfirend felt the place had the right immersive ambience...
    Like the King of New Targonor wanted to be audience to the furboils of a 2-bit guild :-)

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