Rohan't

This is probably the longest consecutive run I’ve taken at Lord of the Rings Online, and probably my last run for a while. I continue to appreciate the scenery, themes, and lore, but the actual gameplay has hit a pretty rough patch, and it’s time to recharge my tolerance for tedious quests.

I think my last post covered up to through the end of the Rise of Isengard expansion, so this one covers the entirety of Riders of Rohan, as well as the Wildermore region. One obvious difference from the Isengard plot is a change of companions. The previous epic storyline focused on the Grey Company, a group of Dunedain Rangers heading south to unite with Aragorn and assist his quest. Things do not go as planned, and much of the fun of that plot dealt with the unexpected changes in the Rangers’ circumstances and fortunes. For better or worse, the Grey Company is very large, with about a dozen named individuals, and I always had a hard time keeping their various personalities straight.

MINI SPOILERS

Riders of Rohan shifts to a new and smaller party, which definitely helps as it’s easier to keep track of the individuals. Nona is a link to the earlier expansion: a Dunlending warrior, you met her in Galtrev with the Company and helped uncover the mystery of her brother Wadu’s passing. She steps into a larger and more rewarding role in Rohan. Early on you meet Horn, a Rohirric bard who was banished from Edoras for his songs criticizing Grima Wormtongue; he helps Nona find healing after she is stabbed with a Morgul blade, and is instrumental in assisting your party as you navigate the culture and politics of Rohan. Corudan is an elf who joins your group on Lorien and tags along… just for the fun of it, I guess? He seems much less invested in the plot than the other two, but has really good cheer and is always welcome.

Your party is following essentially the same path as Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas after the Breaking of the Fellowship (which is revealed in some pretty cool and narratively interesting Rashoman-esque flashbacks). You track Pippin and Merry via the orc party that captured them, eventually finding the site where Eomer’s war-band defeated the monsters. After this, you’re more or less on your own, narratively… a relatively short trip into Fangorn reveals that the hobbits are alive, well, and in the company of the ents. The bulk of your time, though, is spent in the Riddermark, visiting various towns and cities and assisting them. The country is in rough shape, facing an external threat but with a respected king who refuses to take action against it.

RoR is the darkest storyline yet in LOTRO, continuing the gradual slide towards despair that we’ve been experiencing ever since leaving the Shire. War has now come, and we see its evidence all around us: villages are burnt, soldiers and civilians slain, crops destroyed, refugees huddled on the road. The story really excels, though, in the detailed attention it pays to loss. You can visit a grave where villagers are buried - dozens of them! - and learn about each one. Who they were, what they wanted in life, what they were doing, how they died, who mourns them.

It becomes clear that this isn’t a story about valiant heroes triumphing over villainous heroes. It’s a story of grief, of loss, of mourning. You can defeat the bad guys, but that doesn’t restore what’s been lost. Once again, Turbine does a fantastic job at grokking Tolkien’s essential essence. The goal isn’t to amass power and destroy a threat. It’s to maintain your spirit: remain hopeful in the face of overwhelming terror and malice, and be receptive to unexpected grace when it appears.

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While I really dig the story, though, the actual minute-by-minute gameplay has been grating for a while. Most MMORPG quests are very repetitive - travel here, kill X enemies, click on these objects, return here - and the Rohan quests aren’t as good at disguising their same-ness as the quests in earlier regions. (As a counterpoint to the above, though, they DO start introducing some interesting branching plot lines and choice - absolutely nothing in comparison to a BioWare game, but it still seems like a significant departure to everything else earlier in the game. Refreshingly, these aren’t matters of “Will you do the good thing or the evil thing?" Instead, you might need to choose between honesty and love, or between caution and valor.)

The big hurdle for me, though, was the pure tedium of actually completing those quests. For me, LOTRO has been defined by its gorgeous settings. Even when you are killing 10 swamp rats, you’re doing it in a beautiful area. In Wildermore, though, the you need to travel through unnavigable terrain, sidetracking around long sheer cliffs that aren’t depicted on your map, while moving through dense thickets of hostile enemies, and all this often while in deep forest that doesn’t even let you look at pretty scenery while doing so. I do generally appreciate how each area of LOTRO looks distinct and unlike anything that had come before, but in this case, I really wish that they hadn’t done such a good job at crafting a hostile land.

While I feel some short-term frustration, though, my long-term heart still burns for LOTRO, and I’m confident I’ll return sooner or later. From some peeking around online, it sounds like the Helm’s Deep expansion may bring annoyances of its own (Big Battles, much like Mounted Combat, seems like another innovative idea that doesn’t really succeed), but beyond that lies Gondor, which seems prettier and more fun. It’s also exciting to see, big-picture, how the game is coming along: the latest update brings the action all the way to the Black Gates of Mordor, along with some other nice upgrades like new premium player housing on the Bay of Belfalas, and there are rumors of a proper expansion in the near future, which most likely would cover Mordor, maybe including Mount Doom or even Barad-Dur. And beyond that? Some rumblings of Erebor and the Scouring of the Shire. Tolkien created an enormous world, one that I could happily spent my entire life exploring.

So, here’s my latest album of screenshots, covering most of Riders of Rohan and the Wildermore region, along with a few odds and ends in Moria. Middle-earth is still very pretty!

The Mines of the Siege of the Rise of the Riders of Helm’s Deep

I’m occasionally struck by the big disparity between how long I spend with a particular piece of entertainment and how much I write about it on the blog. Particularly with the artsier games I’ve been playing lately, a game might say something really interesting over the course of just an hour or two, which will get a write-up that’s of comparable length to a roleplaying game that I’ve played for dozens of hours.

The biggest example might be Lord of the Rings Online. It’s been my side-game for a while now. I’ll go for months and months without even opening it, but when I’m in the mood to lose myself inside Middle-earth, it’s waiting there for me to dive back into it. It continues to be the most relaxing video-game experience I’ve had. The gameplay itself is rarely challenging… there are tons of activities you can choose between, only some of which require combat, and that combat almost never poses a worrisome threat.

Playing LOTRO may be the most peaceful, rejuvenating experience I regularly have apart from hiking. This may not be coincidental. Both take places in huge, expansive, gorgeous areas, one real and one virtual. Neither requires a whole lot of active thought, so my mind is free to wander while I feel like I’m making progress. I can feel a faint pride in my achievements and improvement without ever feeling like I’m being compared to someone else or need to compete to prove superiority.

Even when I am in the periods where I play a lot of LOTRO, I tend to take my time, which is definitely the best way to approach this. The game probably won’t satisfy people who are looking for intense tactical combat or looking for excitement on the bleeding edge of advancement. It’s at its best when you’re roaming through the landscape, spotting ruined watchtowers atop overgrown hills, spying a flock of doves soaring over Lindon, seeing the sun set from the foggy swamps of Dunland. This is a game where you immerse yourself into the world rather than prove your mastery over it.

As I write this, I’ve finally crossed over the Anduin and into Rohan. In geographic terms, this brings me roughly halfway to Mordor from my start in Ered Luin. In gameplay terms, this is the start of the “Riders of Rohan” expansion, the fourth of the game (after Mines of Moria, Siege of Mirkwood, and Rise of Isengard). My progress has been erratic. I’ll tend to move ahead to new areas that appeal to me, then backtrack and finish epic quest storylines for older zones, then spend some time wandering through areas for crafting materials, then get distracted by seasonal festivals, then catch up on Bingo’s adventures, then get back more or less on track with on-level content.

All that being said, I finally wrapped up the main Mines of Moria epic quest long after leaving the mines proper. In some respects, I really like doing these quests once I’ve overleveled them. Once you are ten levels above the enemies in an area, they turn gray, and will no longer attack you. This makes it much easier and, more importantly, quicker to finish the quests. Between the faster progress of epic quests, and ignoring the standard landscape quests (which I either did long ago or am skipping altogether), I’m able to keep track of the main storyline: who these characters are, what they’re doing, what our goals are. I found, for example, that while I enjoyed the Grey Company plot, I had a really hard time keeping track of the individual rangers. When blowing through the Moria quests, though, I could focus on their particular story, of pride and determination and doom, and it had a pretty powerful impact.

There are narrative advantages to this approach, but the gameplay can suffer a little. In particular, the epic quest line tends to reward the best equipment (well, better than standard quests at least). If you get them on-level, they’ll be the most useful items for quite a while, But, getting capstone items to Level 60 quests when I’m level 74 means a lot of experiences of “Ooooh, that looks awesome!” immediately followed by “Too bad this yellow gear from Dunland is better than that.” But, again, LOTRO isn’t hugely challenging anyways, so it isn’t worth worrying too much about.

I completely skipped the Siege of Mirkwood content, though I’m sure I’ll eventually come back to it. I wanted to get to Rohan so I could pick up my War Steed. These are an advanced type of mount: larger, faster, and more powerful than the standard horses you’ve been able to get before now. I’m not sure how much I’ll enjoy mounted combat proper, but I wanted to get a horse so I could start leveling it and maybe getting cool caparison at future festivals. War steeds are also much faster than normal horses, which could come in handy when I’m backtracking through earlier content again.

Mounted combat was a new mechanic added for Riders of Rohan, many years after the game first launched and many years before now. It’s been very interesting to encounter things like this: new ideas that were added to the game, with a lot of initial excitement, then later refined, then later… not exactly abandoned, but moved on from, with less emphasis as newer features came along.

Playing LOTRO sometimes feels like going on an archeological expedition: not only uncovering the rich history of Tolkien’s world, but also exploring the ten years of active development on the game since it was released. You’re witnessing artifacts crafted by prior developers, edifices constructed by earlier producers.

Or maybe it’s more organic than that. I have very limited experience with MMOs apart from LOTRO, so I’m fascinated by the idea of a game that grows so much after it is released. Single-player games almost always have a single, cohesive vision that guides and shapes them prior to release. Afterwards they may get patches and updates, perhaps some expansions, but always in a relatively short span of time and with the same creative team, and they have a unified feel. MMOs grow, though: not just adding more content, but trying out new systems, changing old ones in response to feedback.

So you end up with things that feel like evolutionary detritus: those weird glands and genes that do not serve any useful function in our human bodies, but are living records that show our evolutionary past. Wandering through the game, you come across characters like class trainers and bards, who used to be crucial elements of the leveling process but have been rendered entirely useless. And there are also things like skirmishes, which clearly had a ton of thought and effort put into them, but were not fully embraced by the community: they still exist, and at certain parts of the game are more prominent, but as a whole seem more like a vestigial appendage than a useful limb.

We’ll see where mounted combat ends up in the grand scheme of things. At a minimum, I’ll have a faster horse, and that will be pretty cool.

I don’t know how long I’ll stick around in Rohan, but so far I’m enjoying it quite a bit. One small thing in particular caught my attention. In the first village you enter, you meet the thane (the local lord) and his family. Speaking with his daughter, she says something like, “I will be Thane after my dad dies, and if I die, my little brother will become Thane after me.” It continues the great, understated and matter-of-fact handling of gender in LOTRO, where women are shown to be just as capable and important as men.

In some respects, that specific example might be considered non-canonical. To the best of my knowledge, Tolkien never wrote about women in leadership roles among the Rohirrim, and I don’t believe any female names are included in the lineage of Rohirric kings. However, I also don’t think it specifically violates canon, either. After all, the game isn’t saying that a woman rules Rohan; they’re saying that a woman can oversee a part of it. There are examples in Earth history where women could hold local titles and power, even if the national sovereign was always male (as in France, with the noblesse uterine). More importantly, it’s very much in keeping with the overall tone of Tolkien: after all, we are now in the land of Eowyn, Shieldmaiden of Rohan. As she says, “The women of this country learned long ago, those without swords can still die upon them.” She didn’t come from out of nowhere; she was part of a proud culture that valued martial strength, and it’s very easy to imagine that women could prove their worth through strength of arms in this land.

This is also a great opportunity to bring up Haleth, one of my favorite characters in the legendarium. In the first age, she was the chieftain of the Haladin: technically an ancestor to the Numenoreans, she and her tribe remind me much more of the Rohirrim: their relationship to the elves is much like that of Rohan towards Gondor. All that to say, I’m delighted to see Turbine drawing on the inspiration in the source material while also creating a world that feels inclusive and welcoming.

MINI SPOILERS

Earlier in Dunland, I ran across an even more extreme example of something that on its surface seemed lore-unfriendly, but tapped into deeper elements of his writings. A Boar-clan settlement at the edge of a swamp is under assault by abominations: orcs and trolls who bear the White Hand. However, they act differently from other monsters you have encountered: they sound genuinely fearful and sad when you attack them. One of the tribal members tells you that Saruman has corrupted them from captured Dunlendings, twisting them into new monstrous forms to serve in his army.

At the capstone of this short quest, after fighting your way to the home of the abominations, you encounter that rarest of all things in Lord of the Rings Online: a choice. Do you listen to the woman who urges you to show mercy and spare her kinsmen who have been led astray? Or to the man who warns you of the dire threat these monsters will pose to him and his family? I was delighted to be able to choose the former course of action, and got almost teary at the goofy, nearly cartoonish animations of happy orcs and trolls cheering for their salvation.

The ultimate impact of this decision feels ambivalent. The tribe is still arguing about it in a later meeting when they decide whether to throw in their lot to oppose Saruman. And the fight that follows that is brutal, when the Boar-clan is almost entirely wiped out. You might be tempted to think, did I make a mistake? Should I have struck when I had the chance, and would it have saved those innocent lives?

The whole idea of “good orcs” seems absurd at first glance: in the Lord of the Rings novels, they’re practically the definition of disposable and purely evil fodder. However, if you read Tolkien’s letters, you’ll see that he grappled with the problem of them. Did orcs have souls? If so, could they be redeemed? He never really resolved those problems before he died, and I think that ambiguity is very fertile ground for exploration and re-interpretation in a medium such as this.

MEGA SPOILERS

This quest was shortly followed by a trip to Isengard, which was also fascinating. That whole arc was unusually bleak: you aren’t triumphing over evil, but becoming aware of evil’s immense power and your relative hopelessness to overcome it. Just the sight of the immensity of Saruman’s armies is stunning, and once you see Isengard itself, it’s hard to be optimistic about your chances.

This is reflected very well in the gameplay: you aren’t fighting endless waves of enemies; instead, you are actually taken prisoner and forced to do menial and humiliating work in the dungeons below Orthanc. (And, side note, Turbine is REALLY GREAT at creating vertical spaces. I feel filled with awe when I look around those unfathomably deep areas, and am amazed when I can actually walk down into them.) You feel relieved once you exit: not filled with the pride of victory, but simple happiness at escaping this dire fate.

Isengard is one of the more dramatic examples of the incredible variety in environmental design and art. It’s shocking to see something so industrial plopped here in the middle of Middle-earth: smokestacks belching foul fumes into the air, giant gears slowly turning below the earth, ironworks pounding out immense quantities of weaponry, machines of war being constructed around the clock. The game does a great job at capturing and conveying Tolkien’s horror at industrialization, the destruction of nature, and the depersonalization of modern society.

While Isengard is one of the most drastic cases of original design, I’m almost more impressed by areas like Dunland, just because it’s amazing that they’ve been able to make a zone that could be described as “rolling hills” look unique and interesting and beautiful after nearly a dozen different zones. I love how, in an instant, you can tell the Lone-lands from the North Downs from the Trollshaws from Eregion from Enedwait from Dunland. Each of them is a grassy, temperate area with hills and occasional rivers, and it’s a remarkable achievement to make each one so distinct.

As I get further into the game, I’m also moving further ahead in time, to zones that were released more recently, and in some cases that also means seeing more advanced technology. While it’s fairly subtle, the landscape can seem more alive now. These are often little touches, like windmills that gently spin in the wind.

A more drastic example came in that first village in Rohan: in keeping with the increasingly dire sense of the plot, after finishing that quest chain, the village is attacked by Easterling raiders under the leadership of a Nazgul, and is destroyed. Coming back to it later, the walls and buildings still stand, but are constantly smoking as the fires within smolder. There used to be children running and playing in the streets, now they stand empty. The merchants who used to trade and repair goods are no longer accessible.

I think there have been a couple of cases before where areas update after a quest, but they’ve been fairly minor. In Angmar, some folks appear in a later area after you’ve beaten an earlier quest. The Rangers will appear or disappear from different villages depending on where you are in the Grey Company quest. And sometimes the interiors of instances (e.g., behind doors) will change. But this is the first time I can think of where actual structures in the landscape seemed to change in response to my actions. It was very impressive!

In a lot of RPGs, like Dragon Age: Inquisition or The Witcher 3, geometry updates are used to convey a sense of power and achievement: “I did this thing, and now I can see this testament to my glory!” It seems very appropriate that LOTRO, a game set in a world of decline, would invert this: good things are fading, happy times are passing, and more of the world is falling under shadow. It isn’t nihilistic, and there are plenty of opportunities for happiness, but that sense of fading-away is core to the setting, and, once again, it’s great to see Turbine embracing Tolkien’s spirit like this.

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My playing has been irregular, but it’s also been a really long time since I wrote about LOTRO, so I’ve accumulated more screenshots than necessary. I have very poorly organized them into several folders:

Oh That Is Pretty Part 7: 222 photos, starting at the climax of the Angmar epic quest (which I wrote about in my previous LOTRO post but wasn’t included in that album), and continuing into Dunland, with tons of side-excursions and backtracking to earlier epic quests. No captions in this one because, let's be honest, neither of us has time for that.

Oh That Is Pretty Part 8: A pitiful 41 photos, featuring the latter part of the Dunland quests, including some items discussed in this post.

Oh That Is Pretty Part 9: Back up to 126 photos this time. This covers the climax to Rise of Isengard, a very belated climax (?) to Mines of Moria, and the very beginning of Riders of Rohan, including many of the topics discussed in this post. This one does have captions because, um, I guess it turns out that I did have time for that after all.

Festival of the White Lady: My second time at this party, very fun!

Weatherstock: The concert event of the year, also a great social repeat.

So, yeah! LOTRO continues to be an engaging and surprisingly rejuvenating experience. It’s kind of astonishing to think that, for as much as I’ve played it, there are still huge parts of the game that I haven’t even seen: not just what lies ahead, but all the stuff I’ve skipped or ignored along the way. The day will probably come when I finally start playing one of the alts I have sitting at Level 1, and I’m looking forward to seeing even more of this wonderful world that they’ve created.

Royals

Hey, I’ve been playing more Lord of the Rings Online! I’ll break with tradition and present a link to my screenshot album at the top of the post instead of the bottom.

This period covers my time in Enedwaith, followed by a backtrack to Eriador to complete the Level 50-51 climax of Volume I of the epic storyline. Along the way are some adventures with Bingo Boffin, a trip to the Yule Festival, and a few other random quests. As usual, there are tons of spoilers and ramblings in the album notes. A few things that felt worthy of more detailed exposition are in this post.

One thing I’ve felt mildly but consistently disappointed in has been the lack of choice in the game. As noted in earlier posts, I’ve been spoiled by BioWare, even their own MMO of Star Wars: The Old Republic, in being able to chart my character’s course. I get why this is the case: to their great credit, Turbine is creating a game steeped in Tolkien’s values, so there’s no option to join the “dark side” or aid Sauron’s forces or any nonsense like that.

MINI SPOILERS

Recently, though, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the introduction of a few choices. They’re minor, but significant to me, and presented in a thoughtful way. One came during the early part of the Grey Company’s epic storyline, where you travel throughout Eriador to summon the various Rangers to travel to Rohan. Most of this is completely rote: travel to a spot, talk to a ranger, do a short quest for them, and then move on to the next. The interesting one, though, came with a ranger who was stationed in the Shire. He’s fallen in love with the people there, and wonders aloud whether he should leave. In either case, he wants you to bring the news to a hobbit who has been asking after his plans: one Lotho Sackville-Baggins.

Lotho? That rang a bell… wasn’t he a bad hobbit? I did a quick wiki search, and was confirmed in my suspicion: during the Scouring of the Shire, Lotho (aka Pimple) seizes control of the Shire, and his thugs enforce “Sharkey’s” (aka Saruman’s) malevolent designs.

Now, I don’t expect that my choice here will affect the ultimate outcome of the story - it isn’t like they’ll decide whether to scour the Shire or not based on one decision way back at Level 50. But it’s exactly this type of choice that’s perfect for the game and the story. There isn’t a “good” or a “bad” choice here. In one direction, you urge the Ranger to fulfill his duty, travel to the aid of his liege and kin, and trust that the hobbits can look after themselves. In the other direction, you urge the Ranger to follow the direction of his heart, and lend his sword to the people who need him most. While there may not be a major gameplay consequence, it’s a decision that will resonate as the story continues. Whenever the Grey Company faces obstacles, I’ll wonder if they would fare better with one more talented warrior by their side. Whenever I travel back through Brockenborings, I’ll feel a little happier knowing that at least one Dunedain remains to look after the little folks.

The second choice was even more interesting. The Yule Festival is pretty different from any of the other ones I’ve been to before. The Spring, Summer, and Harvest festivals have all taken place at the standard fairgrounds for the four races. Yule, however, is a bit more like the Treasure Hunt in that it takes place in an entirely new area. This new areas is considerably more developed, though, with a mayor and economy and traditions.

You tour the village on your arrival, and get a sense for its purpose. This is, to put it bluntly, a tourist town. They host festivals to attract out-of-towners like yourself. As you speak with more of the inhabitants and explore off the beaten path, though, you realize that it isn’t nearly as idyllic as it initially appears. The Mayor, in his quest to make a picture-perfect town, has quietly swept the undesirable beggars out to the far reaches of town. He squeezes the workers to work harder for less pay, so he can put on a bigger show for the visiting patrons.

Many of the yule quests have the same structure as the other seasonal festivals. There are quests to collect things (parts to build a snowman!), quests to defeat things (collect branches from ambulatory trees!), and entertaining bits of busy-work (bake bread! clean up dirty trash!). My favorite is a new innovation: the GLOBE theater (Green Lily Orators, Bards, and Entertainers), run by an enterprising troupe of hobbits. Impressively, the game recruits actual players to play roles within the play, while other players watch and show their approval or disdain by tossing rose-petals and rotten fruit respectively. (I gave an exemplary performance in my role as Partygoer!)

Now: I tend to say that you don’t have a choice in quests in LOTRO, but there really is one choice in every quest: whether to take it or not. For the most part, that isn’t really a choice at all; or, if the answer is “no”, it’s for mechanical rather than story reasons (it would take you too far out of your way, or take too much time, for too small of rewards). In the Yule festival, though, there are some quests that you’ll think twice before accepting. One quest, offered by the striking workers, asks you to give your hard-earned tokens to the unemployed. There aren’t any rewards to speak of for this; it effectively undos the rewards you would get from one of the other “real” quests. The only benefit is you feeling good about yourself. Conversely, there’s also a quest to shoo the undesirables off of the street. This is an easy job, with good rewards, and no negative consequences, other than possibly thinking less of yourself.

After the first day, I returned to the town, to find that the game had now progressed to presenting an actual mutually-exclusive choice. The Mayor asks you to infiltrate the workers and find information that would embarrass them into ending their strike. The workers, in turn, ask you to help uncover malfeasance in the Mayor’s administration and ultimately convince him to re-hire the proletariat at their original wages.

This was FASCINATING. For starters, it’s an asymmetric choice. The rewards you get from siding with the Mayor are MUCH better than siding with the workers; the poor only offer you shabby clothing and a unique title. This dynamic reminded me much more of the choices that Failbetter Games offers, where you feel compelled to take the “good” choice despite knowing that it offers fewer rewards; and the fact that it offers fewer rewards, curiously, makes you feel even better about taking it, as if it’s saying something positive about you as a human being rather than as a character in a game.

It was also surprising for its on-the-nose portrayal of inequality. I’m curious to see what year this was added to the game, but it must have been sometime after the 2008 financial crisis. LOTRO is a fantasy game, but in this one scene it feels a little like a small metaphor for the very real problems that people in the real world are facing.

It’s a delicate thing to present, and I’m a bit surprised that they attempted it at all. Tolkien isn’t particularly interested in poverty in his books, and in real life he was fairly anti-socialist (particularly later in life). But he was even more irritated at the factory-owners and industry titans, and you can sense that deep-rooted antipathy in (e.g.) his descriptions of Saruman overseeing the “factories” of Isengard or the Shire. Tolkien would have preferred that the factories be shut down entirely rather than turned over to the workers, but it isn’t necessarily out of character to offer this kind of story in Middle-earth.

Okay! So, yeah. That’s a grand total of two interesting choices in, uh, about ten months of gameplay. I’m curious to see if this pace continues in the future.

MEGA SPOILERS

As I noted before, one of the difficult things about playing this game as an MMORPG is how fragmented the storytelling can be. I think the epic storyline is probably good, but since I only experience it in short chunks separated by long periods of time spent doing other things, it’s hard to keep it all straight.

I’m a bit happier with how the conclusion of Volume I went. Part of this might be that it was just more memorable: you spend a lot of time with a handful of characters, rather than the constantly-changing cast that was featured earlier. But I think a big part is also because I was overleveled enough to just blow through it all. By this point I was level 67, far above the level 50-51 it was originally created for, so I didn’t have to waste any time discovering new fast travel points or while moving from point A to point B, and wasn’t distracted by on-level quests along the way. I could just do story after story and see how it all ended.

And there is a LOT of story! I was a little surprised by that. Because there’s so much STUFF in an MMO, I’ve tended to assume that it was filling out and covering up an anemic central plot. It’s complex enough to be the central thread of a single-player RPG, though.

I’ll probably go into this in more detail in the album, so I’ll refrain from the blow-by-blow recap here. But here are some musings on how well it worked for me big-picture:

The final conclusion to Volume I was very affecting. I was a little gun-shy at first after the Lorniel episode; I worried that Amarthiel was getting more development just to get shot down. That was… kind of true, I guess, but I ended up sort of loving how it was handled.

The whole arc with Laerdan and Amarthiel/Narmeleth is such a wonderfully Tolkienesque story. Its tragedy feels very much like something out of The Silmarillion: most of the tales in that book are stories of things getting worse and worse, of hopes being betrayed, of pride destroying chances of happiness. And yet, its conclusion rests on some of the values that Tolkien held most dear. It’s a story of confession, of redemption, of mercy, of sacrifice. Amariel can’t undo the deeds that she’s done, but her soul is saved, thanks to the hard work of others and her humility in accepting her own limits. (I hadn’t thought of it in these terms while playing, but it’s a very Catholic story as well.) Part of me wishes that Amariel had lived and could do more cool things, but as it stands she’s the most memorable original character in this game, and I’m happy with the emphatic conclusion to her story.

That kind of devotion to Tolkien’s themes is even more important to me than their admirable respect towards Tolkien’s lore. They bend over backwards, for example, to explain that Narchuil is NOT one of the Nine, or even one of the Seven (which I personally would have been tempted to do), but still manage to connect it to Sauron via the oblique passages describing the various other rings he crafted. And his appearance as the Gift-Lord is chilling and subtle, all the more ominous for how innocuous it appears.

END SPOILERS

As usual, the thing I love most about LOTRO is the feeling of physically inhabiting the space of Middle-earth. I’m glad that I’m now able to engage even more with the feeling of actually living there, making choices and inhabiting the emotional universe Tolkien created.

That sense of identification is strong, so much so that every once in a while I’m pulled up short by some quest I’m doing. I’m currently traveling through Enedwaith preparing the way through the Grey Company. Much of this is agreeable work - gathering allies, scouting roads, gathering supplies - but every once in a while there’s a quest like “Collect 8 Dunlending Cloaks”. Which must be done by killing Dunlendings. Which then plunges me into a miniature crisis - Dunlendings are people, too. These PARTICULAR Dunlendings are part of an army that seeks to overthrow the Free Peoples and plunge Arda into darkness, but does that mean that they can’t be reasoned with?

While the details sometimes make me question the game I’m playing, the larger picture stays clear. This is a game that presents the nuance and complexity in tribal societies, the mixture of good and bad people everywhere, or even in the same person. I was briefly annoyed recently by the revelation that a particular character wasn’t just a dwarf, but a Dourhand Dwarf. In the shorthand of this game, Longbeards = Good Dwarfs, Dourhands = Bad Dwarves. Every time you see a Dourhand, you kill it.

Except, this time, you don’t. Dourhands are rational, thinking, social creatures, just like you or me. This particular person was unhappy with the actions of several of his comrades, and works with you to undo the damage done. That really touched me - it’s just a single character out of the thousands of faceless foes, granted, but one is all it takes to show that genetics aren’t destiny, that you can’t dismiss a tribe or a race as being evil because of their ancestry.

And then I remembered that, of course, this isn’t some amazing new insight that Turbine has injected into the game. One of my favorite moments in the theatrical version of Lord of the Rings is probably when Faramir comments on the Easterling slain by his forces. Up until this point, we’ve known the Easterlings as members of a faceless evil “other”, the “evil men” who are supporting Sauron and so much be stopped. But in the midst of very real suffering, he ponders this man. He had a family, and people who loved him. He didn’t think of what he was doing as evil. He had accepted the call to raise arms, just as the brave Gondorians on the western side had done.

I can’t watch this scene without thinking of Tolkien’s time as a soldier at the Battle of the Somme, when he witnessed first-hand the awful waste of war. He saw bravery and sacrifice, and made those virtues in his books; but he avoids glorifying killing and battle. After the victory of the Battle of Morannon and the destruction of the Ring, Aragorn focuses on rebuilding, and creates a stable peace that endures beyond the end of his reign.

That’s the endgame. Not total victory and raising your side to supremacy, but removing the essential threat facing you, and then using the gifts of wisdom and diplomacy to raise everyone around you. That’s the moral universe that Tolkien created, and it’s one that I love inhabiting.

Meanwhile, in Middle-earth

I haven't kept up with writing about my ongoing adventures in Lord of the Rings Online, but I have kept up with taking a ridiculous number of screenshots, so I wanted to share those here while I was still thinking of it.

First, a fun concert from way back in the summer: Rockfest 2015! This was held at the Bree festival grounds; it's much smaller than the more famous Weatherstock, but was at least as much fun. All of my favorite bands from Weatherstock performed at this one as well, the crowd was great, and there were zero server crashes! I even learned about some new real-world songs that have now entered my personal library of favorites.

As for adventure, I have two mega-albums that cover my journey from level 50 to 60-ish. First, Oh That's Pretty Part 4: this is mostly focused on the Level 50 epic quest line, including more developments in Angmar, Evendim, and other regions of Arnor.

Next, Oh That's Pretty Part 5, a frankly ridiculous album that covers my time in Moria, and then doubling back to the parts of the epic quest line I had initially skipped, most notably Forochel. It ends with me working my way south, through Lorien and towards the Great River.

That isn't even what I've been doing lately - I'm currently in Eregion, helping the Grey Company prepare the way for the northern Rangers to head south and join forces with Aragorn in Gondor. It's the first time in a while that I've been on-level for content, and I've been enjoying it a lot. Plus, I can pick up some fantastic new emotes here, including dancing, spinning, and jumping moves that will help me be an even better concert-goer!

Nifty Fifty

Well, how's this for a milestone: I've reached Level 50 in Lord of the Rings Online! That's a nice, round number. Significantly, it was also the level cap of the game when it first launched. I'm now at what used to be the end-game grind; that was eight years ago, though, and now it's merely an exclamation mark on my journey to Mordor.

Turbine (the game's developer) has done a lot of work over the years to streamline the gameplay and make it less daunting for newbies like me. Back at launch, everyone was hitting the same content at the same time, so they could make certain quests and sequences challenging enough to require players to group up and complete them. Now, it's much harder to find a large group at low levels, so those big quests have been updated so they can be soloed by someone on-level. Most often, this is done by providing the "Inspiration" buff at the start of an instance, which massively boosts your character's Morale and other stats. The actual content still plays out the same as before, but you can do the work of six people.

This isn't to say that group content has been removed from the game entirely. There are still plenty of Fellowship and Small Fellowship quests along the way that provide more challenging goals for people traveling in a party. But content in the epic quest line and other significant gates doesn't require grouping, and there's plenty of experience and loot to be found elsewhere. The end result is that I've been able to play the MMO like I would a single-player RPG, which is exactly what I wanted to do. It's been really fun to solo, now that the grind has been streamlined away.

From a gameplay perspective, it finally started to get difficult near the end. I'm playing as a damage-focused Minstrel, and easily rolled through the first part of the game... I think I only died, like, once or twice before level 35, and only felt under pressure when tackling a large group of powerful enemies at once. As I got closer to 50, though, the strength of standard monsters increased more sharply, and I started actually paying attention to my build and skills and rotation and such. Here are some technical notes that nobody will care about:

• As noted before, I'm purely a Warrior-Skald ("red-line") minstrel.
• I unlock useful skills like Call of Orome.
• Since Ballads are low-damage, I don't bother with the traits that boost them. My goal is to focus on Calls and Cries as much as possible, not to improve the lackluster Ballads.
• I typically open from max range a fight with Call of Orome, which does a lot of damage and also lowers their Light resistance to my follow-up attacks. This does have an AOE, which can be good if I want to pull multiple weak targets; in the very rare case that strong enemies are tightly clustered, I'll open the pull with a Minor Ballad.
• Piercing Cry! Probably my favorite skill. It deals a lot of damage, and (once traited) has a high chance of stunning the target. If it lands, I have a great chance of finishing the encounter before taking any damage. If I'm 5+ levels above the enemy, they're probably dead by now.
• Call to Fate! This is the highest-damaging skill in my normal rotation. It hits like a truck. Any standard on-level enemy is probably dead by now. Signature enemies on-level are probably down to about half Morale. Lower-level Signatures have a sliver of health left.
• Note that these 3 abilities each have a 10-second cooldown, so they sync up nicely. As I'm running through an area, I'll burn down an enemy using these three; by the time I reach the next enemy, 6 seconds have probably passed and I'm ready to start over again.
• For tougher enemies, I'll need to keep fighting until my cooldowns finish. My standard MO here has been Minor Ballad -> Perfect Ballad -> Minor Ballad -> Coda of Fury. This takes 6 seconds to complete, preparing me for Call of Orome again. But that usually isn't necessary. The ballads do small damage, but the Coda hits about as hard as Call to Fate, so even on-level Signature enemies are usually dead by then.

For gearing, I prioritize Will, Fate, and Vitality, preferably in that order. I've just been using quest reward stuff so far, not bothering with the auction house or crafted gear. One tough call to make is when to trade in a matched set with lower Armor but extra set abilities for higher-level pieces with higher armor. Right now I'm still wearing the Fem gear at level 38, but will probably start swapping that out for level 50 Unique pieces.

Let's talk story, shall we?

First, a meta observation. MMOs like this are really broad. One of their greatest strengths is how non-linear they are. You're encouraged to explore, to figure out what part of the game is most enjoyable for you, and then focus on that. You might race ahead to a particular area or follow a specific plot line closely, and return to earlier ideas later or not at all. In some ways, they come closest of all RPGs to recreating the feel of a classic pen-and-paper RPG: there are very few restrictions on what your character can do. (Sadly, you are still usually very constrained on how to do something - any given quest will only have a single solution - but you have nearly boundless freedom in choosing what to do.)

That's great so far as it goes, but it does mean that in the eternal struggle between Elder Scrolls-style breadth and Dragon Age-style depth, LotRO tends more towards the former. The specific problem that I kept running into is that there are just so many characters. Easily hundreds of NPCs with speaking parts, probably thousands. The vast majority of them serve purely mechanical purposes: they'll stand in an area, give you quests while you're at a particular level, and then you'll never speak with them again. A few of them tie into longer-running and more important plot arcs. Unfortunately, though, it may be weeks between the time you first see a character and when they pop back up again, because you were too busy trying to catch rare fish off the docks in Celondim to follow the epic quest. And even if you just saw them the day before, the graphical character limitations make it really difficult to distinguish particular NPCs.

For example, later in the game, the Rangers of the North become rather important. There are multiple Rangers. However, they're all men who wear long green hooded cloaks, so their in-game models look the same. And we don't get strong, personality-conveying 2D portraits like you would see in Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights or Shadowrun Returns: there's a procedural portrait based on their 3D character model, and while these can have many technical variations, they don't differentiate as clearly from one another. Plus, for better and for worse there's very limited voice acting, so you can't necessarily tell them apart via audio, either.

All that to say: the story feels really cool, and individual parts of it seem exciting and lore-friendly and everything, but I often felt a bit lost. I'd be standing in the middle of some huge, climactic, epic confrontation, wondering ".... who are you again, exactly?" Of course, a quick trip to the Wiki will clear things up, but that makes me even more impressed at the people who played this game at launch: they didn't just need to play under a more difficult curve with slower progression and more grinding, but that also meant that they had to go for even longer between major story beats.

MEGA SPOILERS

There's one particular part of the plot that sticks out in my mind, for slightly negative reasons but also because it's interesting and recent. That has to do with Lorniel, the daughter of Golodir, one of the many Rangers who I can't tell apart.

As I understand it (from my scattered memories and a few quick wiki searches), Golodir was a lieutenant of Aragorn who defied his leader's order to withdraw from the northern lands. Instead, he gathered a few other like-minded followers and vowed to bring the battle to Angmar. They went north, and then disappeared. Most of the other Rangers believe that he must have been killed, but Lorniel is convinced that he still lives and enlists you to find him.

Eventually, you and Lorniel track him down in Carn Dum. He was captured and is being held prisoner by Mordirith, the Steward of Angmar during the Witch-King's absence. Mordirith himself was once a King of Gondor who fought against Angmar, but was corrupted by Sauron and turned to evil. Mordirith could easily have killed Golodir, but he had more sinister plans. He has allowed you and Lorniel to "rescue" Golodir, only to brutally murder Lorniel before her father's eyes. Mordirith then allows Golodir to leave, content that he has sowed the seeds of despair and hate that will bring him over to the Enemy's side.

I winced at that part of the story - it's a pretty textbook case of the Women in Refrigerators trope which is widespread in popular culture, particularly in video games. I'd enjoyed adventuring with Lorniel and thought that she could be a cool character in her own right, but instead she is killed off to give the male character angst and motivation to take action.

That said, while that particular incident was unfortunate, it did help highlight how, in general, LotRO is actually refreshing in its portrayal of women. Throughout the game you're just as likely to find women in charge of military outposts, leading villages or fighting orcs as you are to find men doing the same thing. And unlike a lot of video games, they're not stuffed into chainmail bikinis or skintight bodysuits or other highly sexualized clothing. They're equal partners in the struggle against Sauron, visually distinct and appealing but not objectified or marginalized.

And, even the specific Lorniel case is far from the worst offender that I've seen. The story focuses on her relationship with Golodir, not with you; it's not so much a hacky way to motivate the player as a somewhat lazy source of dramatic tension. And I'm holding out hope that the game will ultimately subvert the trope. Usually, these sorts of plots are rolled out to give an antihero protagonist carte blanche to perform all sorts of atrocities in the name of revenge. Given the values of the rest of the game, though, I wouldn't be surprised if Golodir ultimately finds redemption not through acts of vengeance but through acts of compassion.

END SPOILERS

So, while the plot's particulars may seem fuzzy and indistinct at times, I still unreservedly love it, because of how well it maintains Tolkien's flavor and a wonderful sense of moral centeredness. There's a beautiful line at one point in the game, when your character is standing on the ramparts of the ruins of Annuminas and gazes out at Lake Evendim: "Though all before you looks grim, hope shines in the distance." That's one of the most perfect distillations of Tolkien's literary style and philosophy that I've read.

Much of the Middle-earth writings, from the Silmarillion through Lord of the Rings, deals with the importance of hope. When the world turns dark and dangerous and ugly and scary, it's more important than ever for individuals to maintain true to their best selves, to act faithfully towards one another, to show mercy upon their enemies, to act humbly and accept grace. We must set our standards even higher when faced with adversity, not descend into the muck.

That's a rare outlook, and one that's almost completely missing from the world of video games. It's delightful to see it captured and expressed so well in Lord of the Rings Online.

n.b. I have of course - of course! - continued to take a ridiculous number of screenshots. This covers levels 44 to 49, mostly in Angmar but with a lot of time spent having fun with Summer Festival activities.

Weatherstock VII

I'm not a particularly social player, even in multiplayer games, but I've recently enjoyed participating in a few player-run events on the Landroval server. First up was the Festival of the White Lady. I randomly heard about this thanks to a Regional announcement when I happened to be traveling through the Trollshaws - I turned off World Chat long ago and am very glad that they advertised in this manner, because otherwise I wouldn't have heard about it.

As is my wont, I took a bunch of screenshots. It was a really fantastic, joyful, heartwarming event. A wide variety of people attended, and I saw pretty much all of the major Landroval kinships represented. Even though the weather was overcast, the mood was appropriately celebratory, with almost nonstop dancing throughout. The Remediators performed at all the stops and put on a fantastic concert. I was pretty happy to have invested time during the Spring Festival in learning several dances and picking out a nice outfit, and it felt very rewarding to put them to use.

This past weekend, though, was a huge event: Weatherstock! This is a giant concert that's held every year, with many different bands playing for the benefit of a crowd assembled at the ruins of the watchtower of Amon Sul. I'd heard a few passing references to it before, and was looking forward to checking it out for myself.

As a bit of background: Lord of the Rings Online has a surprisingly robust music system. There are a dozen different instruments (clarinets, lutes, drums, horns, etc.). Clicking an instrument will cause your character to strum a little tune, but the really impressive part comes when people actually play their instruments. You can press keys on your keyboard that correspond to notes on your instrument. Strike the right notes at the right time and you have a melody. Get a group of people doing this together and, hey presto, you have a band!

What kind of music do people play? Well, pretty much anything. There are some terrific transcriptions of popular songs, classical and folk music (including lovely versions of the music Howard Shore composed for the film trilogy), and more than a few original compositions. It's really fun to see such a mix, and I imagine that different people and playstyles will be drawn to different modes of recreation (with pure roleplayers avoiding anachronistic tunes while others embrace them). Much like a real-world big music festival, though, part of the pleasure of Weatherstock is all sorts of different fans coming together and getting exposed to music that they might not ordinarily listen to.

And, really, that's the part of this whole experience that fascinated me the much: just how much it ends up feeling like a physical concert, despite occurring solely in the Internet and in our minds. While there are a few explicit rules that are tied to the technological demands of assembling so many player avatars in a single place (take off your cloaks and hat, don't ride your warsteed), a whole slew of implicit mores are imported as well. In the game, unlike the physical world, there's nothing keeping two or more objects from occupying the same space at the same time: if you charge into another character, rather than bounce off of each other, you'll simply walk though one another. And yet, players are very careful to position their avatars to make sure that they give some "physical space" to other avatars. When dancing, they'll check and adjust their positions to ensure they don't clip through others. When someone is speaking or playing music, most players will be facing them, even though we as players can point the camera anywhere we want to.

What I found most interesting, though, was how players would smoke and drink. There's no in-game benefit for doing either of these. But, it's something people do when attending concerts; and this was a concert; and so people drank and smoke. I don't know why, but that fascinates me.

I shouldn't imply that I was some disinterested observer here, either. I did the same, following social cues and my own reasoning. For some higher-energy shows I attempted to "keep a buzz going" with periodic ingestion of alcohol; in the calmer ones, I relaxed and listened with clean senses. I've never smoked in real life, but in the game I would take advantage of a break between songs to pull out a pipe and have a few quick puffs. (As noted in my earlier festival post, the game has been a terrific outlet to have vicarious experiences that I've never encountered in the physical world.) Perhaps most interesting, though, the way I physically approached concerts was almost exactly the same as my standard MO in real life. I would come in and circle around the periphery of the crowd, keeping an eye on where clumps of people were gathering. As time went on and pockets opened up, I would gradually work my way closer to the stage: never crowding anyone, but steadily drawing closer to my goal, until I had arrived at an optimal vantage point.

This was the seventh Weatherstock, and the Lonely Mountain Band (the kinship who organizes and runs the event) has it down to a science. Most people met at the Forsaken Inn in the Lonelands for a pre-party, then we all mounted up and undertook an epic, ultra-laggy procession to the peak of Amon Sul. Along the way, the LMB helped keep the path clear of hostile critters - the enemies in this area are low enough that I and many more experienced players don't draw any aggro, but they can still be a threat to very low-level characters, and since many people log on to Landroval only for major events like Weatherstock, there's a good number of low-level people.

All of the LMB members who helped organize the event wore colored uniforms to denote their role: opening band, or security team, or the ever-helpful vending team members in yellow. I actually hadn’t ever done any in-game trading before and was curious how it would work, especially with such a large crowd. The answer is, very smoothly. I started up a trade session, the vendor immediately popped in a small assortment of festive supplies (ale, pies, Hope tokens), I entered a random amount of silver coins to donate, and boom! Traded! Later on, they announced a limited supply of drums for sale; I sent a tell to the nearest vendor, he initiated the drum, I donated some more. Boom! Sold!

One of the big concerns in a gathering of this size is lag. It actually was fine for most of the concert, probably because most people were well-behaved and followed the rules. Even with so many people around and dancing, the only time it slowed down for me was when spinning the camera around, and even then it would just briefly hiccup. In addition to the “no hats, no cloaks, no horses” policy, they also discouraged people from setting off fireworks, using forced emoted, or (especially) group effects like mass heals. One of these eventually brought the whole event to a crashing halt: at the end of one song, someone cast a mass heal, and everyone froze in place, most stuck in permanent healing bubbles. We could still chat, but nobody could move or take actions. Eventually, everyone got kicked out of the server.

It took a while to get everyone back in and get the concert going again. I was able to rejoin almost immediately, but apparently other people had more trouble and had to jump through some hoops to get back. To ease the load on other people, the organizers encouraged everyone to sit down and refrain from taking actions until most people were back. This, again, felt a lot like many of the “hurry up and wait” experiences I’ve had at concerts in the physical world: rushing to get to the right place at the right time, then sitting around waiting for something to happen. It was actually rather pleasant, though. People were in good spirits, and we heard a couple of lovely impromptu solo performances from a few talented minstrels in attendance.

Finally the band was back together and in sync, and the concert started again, and… another jerk did the same thing, crashing everyone out. People were understandably bummed, and there was more shrillness in the next recuperation period. I was a bit bummed that, even after we had recovered, a lot of people were ordering people to stay seated and not dance. Dancing hadn’t caused any of the problems, and in any case, that’s one of the best things to do at a concert! Fortunately, after their set finished, people got more relaxed and it returned to a fun atmosphere for the remaining bands.

I mentioned before that there’s a huge variety of musical styles from bands in the game. Even with medieval/renaissance instruments, you can get a lot of the feel of rock, pop, blues, and other recognizable genres. The thing that may have impressed me the most, though, was the metal band. Partly because of the music - getting something that sounds like heavy metal without an electric guitar is quite a feat - but even more because of the audience. I watched in bemusement as dozens of dwarves stripped off their shirts and started moshing in front of the stage, jumping up and down, bouncing all around as the singer belted out Danzig-esque lyrics. “Nazgul! Nazgul!”

Because of the crashes, the concert series went longer than originally scheduled, but it looked like most of the people who made it back stuck around for the whole time. There are two sets of awards granted at the end of the night: one voted on by the Lonely Mountain Band, the other a “Free People’s Choice” award voted by participants. My personal favorite band was Starlight, which was very talented and also had great stage presence. They didn’t make it into the People’s Choice awards, but did snag third place from the LMB. The top two were actually the same for both LMB and People’s Choice, The Rolling Kegs and The Remediators, and it was well deserved: both bands were fantastic (as were all the performers - there’s an auditioning/vetting process to even play in Weatherstock, so anyone who makes it this far  is already really good). It was especially nice to see the Remediators end up on top after having spent so much time with them at the Festival of the White Lady.

Everything got super-relaxed at the very end, with a very enthusiastic drum circle and people finally breaking out their fireworks. There was another mounted procession back to Bree, which initially was very laggy, but everyone got lost and ended up finding their own way back.

Anyways! I was really glad to have attended this. It was a weird but delightful experience, and I'm still mulling over the interplay between physical-world habits and virtual-world expression. It's tying into a slowly germinating thesis I've been gradually refining over the past year or so... that may be the topic of a future post, who knows!

Oh, That's Pretty! Volume 26: Yup, It's Still Pretty

I spent a very pleasant couple of weeks participating in activities for the Spring Festival for Lord of the Rings Online. Along the way, I've gained newfound appreciation for the unique pleasures of this game and my own evolving preferences for gameplay.

The festival lasts for a limited amount of real-world time, during which the game world offers a variety of fun activities and some rewards that otherwise aren't available. It exists in an interesting sort of parallel to existing game systems: you still gain XP as normal for completing quests, and I probably gained levels as quickly by celebrating as I would have through normal questing. But instead of getting level-appropriate gear and item rewards, you receive Spring Leaves or other special tokens which, in turn, can be redeemed for cosmetic clothing, household furnishings, steeds, and other objects which aren't swords. Not to mention that you can attend dance lessons and learn how to dance like a hobbit, like a dwarf, like an elf, or one of those silly humans.

I quickly got into the spirit of things and began spending all of my in-game time pursuing these activities. While in these social areas, I took advantage of the game's fantastic cosmetic outfit system, putting on something appropriately festive and spring-y. However, it began to bug me that Taharien was still visibly dragging around a club and a wooden shield: very useful items in the Lone-Lands, far less crucial when running through hedge-mazes. So I moved those items into my inventory, figuring that I could easily re-equip them when needed.

I think that might be the single most representative example of my time with the spring festival: I didn't even have a weapon equipped for well over a week, and didn't miss it at all. Instead of killing monsters, I was racing horses, balancing on wooden beams while blind drunk, picking flowers, stomping on shrews with giant boots, going on epic pub-crawls, scolding rambunctious tweens, confusing elves, delivering booze, chasing chickens, drinking some more beer, drinking cider, helping sweethearts find each other, dancing, drinking, planting flowers, and drinking. Oh, and also drinking a lot of alcohol.

Anyways! I was really impressed that, in a fantasy roleplaying game, there was so much fun stuff to do that didn't fall into the typical RPG loop of "kill monsters so you can get better equipment so you can kill more monsters." In my grumpy-old-man persona, I often point to the release of World of Warcraft as the turning point in the decline of western RPGs, particularly in how things like rogue classes are handled. In prior generations of games, RPGs were more about problem-solving, and classes like rogues could overcome obstacles through completely pacifist strategies like stealth and deception. With the streamlined combat-centric design approach of WoW, though, rogues were reinvented as nothing more than a burst DPS class, and even great franchises like Dragon Age have largely followed suit, losing the complexity and variety of different playstyles to instead focus on making the killing experience as engaging as possible.

So, it's both welcome and ironic that another MMO would give me one of the more satisfying combat-free RPG experiences of recent years, while I continue to blame the biggest MMO for taking those options away in the first place. (Not to say that there's no non-combat options in other RPGs, of course, but I can't think of the last fantasy RPG I played where I could literally go for weeks without fighting and deeply enjoy it.) I believe that a lot of the credit has to go to the source material. The Lord of the Rings obviously has fighting, both on smaller and larger scales, and the game does a great job at representing that part of the story. But when people think back on LotR, the battles aren't the only thing they remember. They remember the hobbits eating mushrooms with Farmer Maggot, meeting Goldberry by the spring, swatting away midges in the marshes, listening to Aragorn sing, wandering the halls of Rivendell, smoking pipeleaf in the ruins of Isengard, Frodo and Sam disguising themselves as orcs, and so on. Fighting isn't the point: it's something that's occasionally necessary, but isn't really glorified, and the ultimate hope of the entire quest is to put an end to Sauron's aggression. With all of that as backdrop, it makes sense (and is fantastic) that the game designers would put so much care and attention into the other activities that make up the game beyond combat. It feeds into what I love most about this game, how it makes Middle-earth feel like a place where people live, not just an orc-slaying simulator.

As I mentioned above, the spring festivities included a very wide array of drinking games. This included the pub crawl, an epic circuit through the Shire that requires stopping in at a good eight or so bars, downing a half-dozen alcoholic drinks at each one before moving on. As the “quest” progresses, your vision and movement grow impaired. Early on, the world seems to grow a bit brighter; after the first few stops, the camera begins to grow a bit unsteady, swaying off the center axis, making it a bit trickier to navigate; by the end, you’re suffering from double vision, trying to figure out which of the two floating mugs in front of you is the real one you need to click in order to down the next beer. Your character’s speech also grows slurred, and they start singing to themselves and hiccuping. It was surprisingly fun, and I spent some time thinking about why I was enjoying it so much. To put it bluntly, I’ve never gotten that drunk in my life: never had a blackout, never lost control of my movement or vision to that kind of an extent. The video game ended up being a way that I could sort of vicariously have that experience. This is the sort of thing that we often look to games for: to provide us with the experiences that we will never have in real life. I’ll never fight in a war, but I can shoot guns in Half Life; magic isn’t real, but I can cast fireballs in Dragon Age; I’ll probably never make it into space, but I can explore the galaxy in Mass Effect. And, on a more mundane level, I COULD get blackout drunk, but I probably won’t, and instead will experience a simulacrum of it in Lord of the Rings Online.

As I write this, I realize that it probably doesn’t sound like a good thing: drinking can be a real problem, and the lighthearted treatment here may downplay the risks. The worst example is probably that LOTRO has the most fun drunk-driving simulator ever. On that pub crawl, there’s a time limit involved, so if you want to complete the quest, you’ll need to hop on your horse to make it in time. But when you’re on that stretch from Stock to Frogmarsh, you’re three sheets to the wind, and your horse will be crashing into fenceposts, falling into ditches, colliding with other riders on the road. It’s all consequence-free within the game context, and very amusing from an in-universe perspective, but becomes rather horrifying once you make the connection from horses to automobiles. It becomes a relief when the next pub lies along a stable route, so you can take a “taxi” instead of driving yourself when you’re in no condition to navigate the Shire.

The pub crawl was the most memorable, but there are also quests that involve delivering speciality drinks to Inn League members, and one that involves drinking a Bullroarer concoction and then running along a plank without falling off, and my personal favorite, where you have to find the middle of the Hedge Maze, drink from a huge sinister keg, and then make it out of the maze before you black out. I failed once, and was delighted/terrified to find myself transported to frozen Forochel. And of course there are plenty of non-drinking games, most of which involve spring themes of planting and growth.

As a side bar, going through this festival has given me a better understanding of and appreciation for Fallen London’s own seasonal events. I’ve greatly enjoyed participating in Hallowmas confessions and Feast of the Exceptional Rose liaisons and Christmas lacre-shoveling. I’d kind of thought of those as being their own idiosyncratic things, but I now see how they fit into a larger tradition of time-limited events in persistent-world multiplayer games. (The two other MMOs that I spent any appreciable time in, Ultima Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic, were early enough that they didn’t have fully-evolved seasons, whereas LOTRO has had eight years to build up its traditions.) Of course, Fallen London isn’t an MMO, but these events do provide a similar opportunity to shake things up and interact socially with other players, as well as a chance to break up whatever routine your character is currently engaged in (leveling up, buying an Overgoat, gaining Notability, etc.) and do something that can be enjoyed at all stages of a player’s career.

Anyways. The spring festival is over. Oh! And the Steam Summer Sale is over too, I just realized I forgot to mention that. I’d kept my eye open and grabbed some good sales on the Quad Pack, Helm’s Deep Premium Edition and Steely Dawn. Those unlock most of the game for me, and leave me with a tidy sum of Turbine Points for grabbing the remaining quest packs I need along with some cosmetic/quality-of-life enhancements. Story-wise, I’ve completed the Lone-Lands and am now traveling through Evendim, along the shores of the beautiful Lake Annúminas. That should get its own blog post at some point - LOTRO continues to open up Tolkien’s world in ever-more beautiful ways.

Shifting from questing to celebrating and back to questing again, I’m finding that playing LOTRO is one of the most relaxing experiences that I’ve had. I’m surprised that I’m responding to it so positively, because “relaxing” isn’t something I typically look for in a game. I tend to play games because I want to be challenged, or I want new experiences. I’ve often looked down upon people who play “casual” games that seem to require little effort. After these last few weeks, though, I can totally understand the appeal. It feels so pleasant to log in, inhabit my character, and spend time just immersing myself in the calm beauty of Middle-earth. Yes, there's fighting, but there's also dancing and singing and drinking and sightseeing and wandering. Not all who wander are lost, and I feel like I've found the place I've been searching for since I was a little boy.

Edit: I forgot the pictures! Entirely too many are available in my latest photo album.