In my WoW hiatus I’ve been playing Lotro and since I purchased the Mines of Moria expansion but never actually got to see any of it due to my bad habit of deleting toons because I got bored with them I was determined this time.
The good news is that I hit level 50 this week and headed into the gates to Moria only to be presented with a string of quests all not-in-Moria and then given a quest that forced me to level a legendary weapon (something unique to Lotro) before I can consider getting past the Watcher in the Water and finally getting into Moria.
Another thing unique to Lotro is session play which lets you assume the role of an NPC to experience either a part of the story from a different perspective or even life as a chicken (which probably sounds ridiculous but it’s incredibly fun). Anyway, there is a session play quest as part of the quests I’ve done so far that shows the fall of the Mines of Moria. At least it would have if Turbine had the story-telling and technical ability with which to do so. The quest was supposed to be the fall of Moria, but it was actually the unveiling of the (a?) Balrog. It’s also worth mentioning that the Balrog looked bloody horrible, but I’m a bit spoiled after seeing one portayed in the films. Would it have hurt to use a few more polygons though? Anything with wings needs a lot of care!
As far as introductions go, Mines of Moria so far sucks. Developer Tip: Get people into the content as quickly as possible!
Contrast that with the latest WoW patch and it’s night and day. Lotro’s strength has historically been in story telling, but WoW is a serious challenger and with the phasing being improved in the future it will be even better. My guild was doing Ice-Crown Citadel on the weekend and managed to get the first three bosses down. The third boss, which is a battle between the alliance and horde gunships, is just about the most fun I think I’ve ever had in WoW. Now if only they’d let us keep the jump packs…
I thought your wow-leave was due to latency? If so, how do you manage with LOTRO?
It was, but it was really weird latency that didn’t kick in until we engaged a raid boss and even then it wasn’t all the time (just often enough to drive us crazy). The problems seem to have disappeared once more though.
Lotro is ok. It’s possibly due to their datacenter being located elsewhere (I don’t know where) or that their game systems are less dependant upon low latency.