BE VERY AFRAID - OR AT LEAST, A LITTLE UNEASY...

We have a new splash screen, according to which Book 8: Scourge of Khazad-dum is nearly upon us - and very good news that is, too. But I am made more than a little uneasy by this chap, who figures mightily in the splash screen and, is, presumably, the Scourge personified. Now, I definitely don't want to sound negative before Book 8, upon which so much rests, is actually released; also, I remember an old Hawaian (I think) proverb which says, roughly, that if you're rude about your own coconut tree, it will drop coconuts on your head.

But - and I don't know how to put this diplomatically - dear old Scourge does not look very... Tolkienesque. Particularly not the blue neon highlights, of course, but also the fact that I'm prepared to eat my boots if he doesn't turn out to be half the size of a mallorn tree. Now as I've remarked before, I'm not a lore fanatic. LOTRO's designers have come up with a number of monsters perhaps undreamed of by Tolkien which are nevertheless perfectly convincing in terms of the mythos, or which at least fit in more-or-less comfortably; Gaunt Men, Morroval, Rogmul, Doom-singers are all both imaginative and appropriate.

The rot set in with Mines of Moria (where have I heard that comment before?), and specifically with the dreadful Foundations of Stone, whose shameless steals from "Alien" are not only contemptibly lazy, but also wildly out of place in Middle-earth. I sincerely hope that Book 8 isn't going to continue that trend, but Scourge here looks as though he belongs firmly in World of Warcraft. There's nothing wrong with WoW, in it's own place, but (and we really have to be firm, here), LOTRO is not WoW, and the last thing it needs is WoW's cartooney design. I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Fingers crossed.

TO GOAT OR NOT TO GOAT...

In the depths of Moria, the mount of choice is the goat - indeed, it is the only mount available. An extensive and reasonably well-placed network of goat stables allows normal and even (after you achieve a high enough status) some rapid goat travel to most of the points of interest in the mines. However, players can also acquire their very own goat from the Iron Garrison Miners: a rather slow Tame Redhorn Goat costs 1g, 255s and requires Friend standing, but if you've achieved Kindred standing and have a spare 6g, 24s, you can acquire the faster Nimble Redhorn Goat. Actually, this is pretty much the only reason for striving to reach Kindred with the Miners.

Even by current inflationary standards, 6g is nothing to be sneezed at for the average player. Is it worth the effort and expense? Well, it's an oddly attractive beast, has a cute miner's lantern swinging from the back of the saddle, and, unlike its goat express cousins, it doesn't suddenly spin round and round whenever it gets confused about routing... but to be honest, you won't be using it very much. The problem is that it is extremely vulnerable to attack, and can be brought down by about three hits, or even a dirty look and a spit. Which is about all the standard LOTRO horse or pony can take, too, except for the fact that out on the surface, if you stick to the roads you will usually get home safely. In Moria, however, the passages are inevitably narrow, there are endless choke points and little or no room for evasive manoeuvres and, above all, the mines are positively crawling with orcs and other nasties. As a result, you will rarely stay in the saddle for more than a few minutes or even seconds, with the added bonus that when you do come off, you are welcomed by all the mobs you've pulled along the way.

There are of course a few routes in Moria which are pretty much free of lurking enemies: the Wide Halls and Broad Way in Zelem-melek, and the long winding passage from the Great Delving to the 21st Hall, for three. On balance, however, the Moria goat remains a luxury for the rich or the obsessive completist; for everyone else, swift travel and the goat express service are definitely the better bet.

THE MINES OF MORIA CONSIDERED AS A CHINESE BANQUET

An old western libel, no doubt invented or at least perpetuated by French restaurateurs, would have it that Chinese banquets, though impressive in quality, quantity and variety, somehow leave the diner with a feeling of emptiness, as though he had partaken of an oddly unsatisfying fairy feast. I have often thought over the last few weeks that in that sense, the Mines of Moria have much on common with that mythic Chinese banquet…

Make no mistake: there can be no two opinions about the quality of the graphic design. Almost three months down the road, I still hold by the view I published here last December: “This is by far the most impressive game environment I have ever seen. For once, the pre-launch hype didn’t lie. The Mines of Moria are breathtakingly grandiose and wonderfully imaginative”. The problem is that after a few weeks, the game started feeling repetitive, and, like the aforementioned fairy feast, oddly unsatisfying. And judging by the comments of other players (thoughtful players whose judgements I respect), I was not alone in feeling disappointed.

Why? I don’t think there is any single reason for this sense of flatness, rather a whole series of minor reasons. First of all, perhaps, the almost universal disappointment provoked by discovering that the eagerly awaited legendary weapon system was nothing of the sort. Secondly, the absence of a good, meaty twelve-man raid involving a series of bosses – another and better Rift, in other words, which one could really sink one’s teeth in. Now I know that long-term raiding isn’t necessarily everybody’s cup of tea, but the thing about the Rift was that it kept an awful lot of players beavering happily away for well over six months. Third, the way reputation with the dwarf factions turned out to be, well, almost completely useless, with the exception of the Hunter and Warden quick travel skills. Fourth, the pointlessness of mounts in a dungeon environment, in which a rider gets knocked off his goat roughly every twenty paces. Fifth, the excessively fast levelling between levels 50 and 60, which meant that players stopped gaining experience points after completing no more than half the available quests.

At the end of the day, and despite the excellent Eregion prequel, this was, after all, largely a dungeon crawl. And the problem with that is that dungeon crawls are, by their very nature, overtly linear; despite the many nicely executed larger areas such as the Waterworks, one still had a sense of being herded along far too many dark, narrow passageways. As a result, the relief one felt at finally emerging into fresh air at the Dimrill Dale was palpable, and very real (so kudos to the designers for that!). On balance, I suspect that had MoM shipped, as originally planned, with all or most of the Lothlórien content included, it would have made for a much better balanced game. Hopefully, Book 7 will help restore that balance.

ARMCHAIR STRATEGY IN LOTRO

Armchair strategists and military scholars in LOTRO are no different than in real life: they tend to base their arguments on what should be, rather than what might actually turn out to be the case in practice. In the months before the German army overran France in 1940, the French general staff insisted that there was absolutely no way the invasion would come through the Ardennes, since tanks couldn’t negotiate the terrain – never mind that General Guderian, who led the invasion, had actually published a book explaining very clearly what he planned to do. Reality check…

A recent and very interesting debate on the Codemasters forums has been running under the title “Hunters are NOT tanks! Please, people!”; it includes a lot of stern comments by Guardians and the like ticking off Hunters for having the gall to think that they might sometimes find it necessary to tank an opponent. This is, of course, absolutely correct in principle, and under normal circumstances no Hunter with an ounce of sense will do something as stupid as pulling aggro off a Guardian. This is fine as far it goes… assuming the fellowship includes a competent Guardian.

Thing is, most of the arguments in the thread are predicated on the performance of an ideal fellowship, namely the classic two heavy, two crowd-control and two ranged setup. Unfortunately, unless you have the good fortune to belong to the kind of über-military Kinship which maintains one of each class online at all times, fully equipped and ready to go, your average player will find himself or herself all too often questing or raiding in a very mixed group indeed – and I don’t necessarily mean in a PUG.

In the first two months or so after Mines of Moria came out, my kinship experienced a temporary shortage of heavy tank classes, so that in a number of cases I found myself leading 6-man raids without a Guardian, indeed sometimes without any kind of melee class at all. As a result, I had no option other than to tank myself, and while of course this ended in tears a number of times, we eventually got the hang of it; by the time things got back to normal, I had successfully tanked four out of the six Moria instance bosses. Let me quickly add that this was entirely a group effort, and that I would have been ground hamburger in no time without the sterling efforts of a dedicated Minstrel and/or Lore Master – but the point is that in war as in the legal profession, hard cases make bad law. It’s easy enough to lay down rules under ideal circumstances, and those rules are obvious enough. It’s the less than ideal, or frankly chaotic, situations that are a damn sight more challenging, and that’s when the rule book won’t necessarily give you the answer.

http://community.codemasters.com/forum/showthread.php?t=331537

MORIA TROPHIES

To be honest, the first couple of Moria trophies to come my way have been a bit of a disappointment - certainly not a patch on the Shadows of Angmar trophies. The Fire Orc Banner drops from the Fire Orc boss in the Grand Stairs instance, and Morhun's Gemstone from the final boss in the Treasury instance. Neither are exactly earth-shaking: the banner looks a bit like a traffic bollard, while Morhun's Gemstone reminds me of nothing so much as a fancy bell-push (it also underlines the inanity of hooks in housing: once in place, it stands in solitary splendour on that stretch of wall, to which nothing else can be added).

Hopefully, things will improve, but at the moment, it looks as though so much imagination went into designing Moria, there was none left over for the trophies...

EREGION & THE MINES

Mines of Moria, the long-awaited Volume II of Lords of the Ring Online, has been up and running long enough by now for us to get over the original high, take a couple of steps back and evaluate it as calmly as possible… First of all, there can be no doubts at all about the graphic design: this is by far the most impressive game environment I have ever seen. For once, the pre-launch hype didn’t lie. The Mines of Moria are breathtakingly grandiose and wonderfully imaginative; I almost wish I had a l.70 character whom I could take for a leisurely tour of the whole region, unbothered by orcs, goblins and other such irritants.

Unfortunately, for the first couple of weeks many of us couldn’t properly experience the game’s glories at anything better than the “low” graphics setting, since the huge numbers of players gathered in Moria, particularly at choke points such as the Deep Delving and the 21st Hall, slowed all servers down to a crawl or worse… Fortunately, measures seem to have been taken with the latest patch, and the situation is noticeably better - but it still isn’t advisable to log out in the 21st Hall, since coming fully back online could take minutes.

The success of Moria itself shouldn’t blind players to the less dramatic but still very effective design of Eregion, the region leading to the mines; once again the designers have come up with a wholly successful concept for a semi-desolate no-man’s-land, this time with the emphasis on eroded hillsides, boulder-strewn plains and dried-up riverbeds. Kudos also to those responsible for the final instance of Volume I, namely Book 15, chapter 12, to my mind perhaps the single most effective episode of the game so far, combining as it does a very tough fight, an extended follow-up and some very strong plot elements. Many (perhaps most) players skipped this entirely in their rush to enter Moria, and they would be well advised to go back and try it; if nothing else, a successfully completed instance presents players with the single best reward to date. Also highly recommended are the School and Library sequence of 3-player fellowship quests near Mirobel.

All in all, Mines of Moria has proved that it is possible to make a good game substantially better, and Turbine fully deserve the increase in player base which this upgrade has undoubtedly provoked.

MINES OF MORIA DIGITAL PURCHASE

Very much at the eleventh hour, though of course better late than never, Codemasters have announced that Mines of Moria can now, as of November 15th, be purchased online. Go to http://community.codemasters.com/forum/showthread.php?p=4656514#post4656514 for details.

HICCUPS ON THE WAY TO MORIA

Poor old Codemasters! It really does look as though they need somebody new in charge of sales and distribution (or perhaps, just somebody in charge?)...

With the LOTRO community in a feeding frenzy over the coming of Mines of Moria, rather more than the usual distribution problems are cropping up - yet again. For instance, as of today, it looks as though anybody who pre-ordered from Amazon, and particularly from Amazon.uk, will have cancelled their orders. Why? According to the official Amazon response one anxious purchaser posted on the forums, "Sometimes unexpected fluctuations in supply can add time to our original availability estimate. We have learned that "The Lord of the Rings: Mines of Moria - Compendium" is now back-ordered and we now hope that your order will be delivered by early December 2008". December? You have got to be joking - this is a client base which develops acute anxiety attacks if its update is more than twelve hours late, and you expect it to wait patiently for two to three weeks for the game's first major expansion? Get real, Amazon... and by the way, Codemasters, why doesn't a major distributor like Amazon have sufficient stocks on hand, eh?

More serious, if only because failure here is utterly inexplicable, is the whole question of downloading the game (or rather, just the game key) online. This would be fast, practical, cheap and far more environmentally efficient than posting large cardboard boxes full of assorted land-fill fodder around the globe. It could also be implemented by a twelve-year old with an internet site, access to a decent server and a PayPal account. Online availability becomes particularly important when retail purchase is not an option - and according to forum posters, most games retail outlets across Europe are not and will not be stocking Mines of Moria (why they won't is another issue entirely - incentives, anyone?).

So it was a relief to find that on Codemaster's own e-commerce site, MoM could in fact be purchased for download - as it says, above, "ALSO AVAILABLE ON PC DOWNLOAD". Except that it isn't, because clicking on that little promise takes you to the second screen image above - the one that says "No Results". Yes, you can't get there from here, and we don't do that sort of thing in this company, no sir!

Maybe, just maybe, it's time for Codemasters to hire a marketing manager? I can recommend a smart, savvy twelve-year old who lives just down the street from here...

MARKING TIME

Three weeks, more or less, till Mines of Moria is released. Turbine have been very clever about building up expectations, releasing little bits of information here, dropping hints in dev chat there, and generally winding everybody up. It helps, of course, that by all accounts vol.2 of the LOTRO saga will include a mind-blowing amount of content - almost enough to qualify as a brand new game.

In the meantime, we are all - particularly us grizzled level 50 veterans of countless battles with Thorog and Thaurlach - marking time. Useful (and even less useful) traits have been long-since maxed, our complete sets of Rift armour are showing the ravages of time and combat, we peacock about in all-teal splendour and try to occupy our time as constructively as possible. Those who enjoy that sort of thing struggle to reach the dizzy heights of rank 8 in the Ettenmoors, the obsessive collectors amongst us are well on the way of acquiring one of each of the boss trophies (I have all but the two skulls), fishermen curse and spit at the seeming impossibility of ever completing the fishing deeds, while tacticians plot and plan how best to conquer the Rift with a six-man raid, or Hellegrod with a mere dozen.

There is of course always the time-honoured occupation of building up alts, and many players are doing just that - some of them, indeed, creating entire families. Personally, I've always found the idea of alts oddly schizophrenic, but to each his own. I'll be working on taking down Thaurlach with a five-man team of Hunters on skateboards - that should fill in the time nicely till MoM turns up and we have to understand exactly how the legendary weapons system is supposed to work...

LATEST NEWS FROM MINES OF MORIA

Whether officially or unofficially, a number of interesting screen shots from the Mines of Moria beta have appeared on www.lotrolife.com. Things in beta are always subject to possible change, but nevertheless, some useful hard facts can be deduced from these images.

MOUNTS
Player mounts in MoM will be, yes, mountain goats. It can now be confirmed that not only will the game’s Pony Express service (sorry, Goat Express) be equipped with them, but it will be possible to purchase one as well, albeit after some considerable time. To acquire a Redhorn Goat you will have to have reached Friend Standing with the Iron Garrison Miners, while the faster Nimble Redhorn requires Kindred Standing (both going for 6G, 24S).

Incidentally, the enemy will have access to mounts as well – in their case, fighting mounts. Moria Warg-Riders are a formidable-looking skeleton-giant warg combo.

QUICK TRAVEL/PORTING
Hunters will continue to have an edge in the taxi profession in MoM, but once again, it may take some time to acquire the relevant skills. At l.56, for instance, Hunters can purchase the ability to “swiftly travel to the Twenty-First Hall of Moria”, taking a party with them. Wardens, on the other hand, can also acquire a corresponding skill at l.56, but can only travel solo.

THE ECONOMY
I have long suspected that in-game finance will suddenly become important again with MoM, partly simply through inflation, but also because the various procedures associated with identifying and manipulating legendary items may well incur (probably high) charges. Certainly the first assumption appears correct: Tomes necessary for the acquisition of various Traits appear to be on offer for 2G, 500S. Various other items on sale at faction shops appear to be priced up to twenty times higher than their current equivalents.

LOADING SCREENS
Judging by the example above, the MoM screens will be considerably better drawn than the weirdly distorted and downright ugly images we have put up with so far – think of the current Rivendell loading screen, with its dwarfish and club-handed Legolas.

http://www.lotrolife.com/news_full/new_mom_screenshots/294/

LATEST DEV CHAT DIGEST

Shorn of verbiage, bad jokes and waffle, here is the gist of the information released during the latest Dev Chat session. Probably more hard information percolated through on this occasion that is usual in these sessions.

NEW REGIONS IN BOOK 14
Book 14 has little in terms of new playable landscape for players to explore. We are introducing a small portion of Eregion to support our epic story but mostly the efforts of the World Team for Book 14 settled firmly in the realm of bug fixing.

NEW INSTANCES IN BOOK 14
Q: Where will the new 6 man instances take place and what size will they be?
A: They will take place in... familiar locations. As for scope, I designed them to be pretty quick, a 1/2 hour to an hour, but unpredictable and a bit random. Let's just say, you haven't seen any instances like this in LOTRO before.

NEW SCHOLAR RECIPES IN BOOK 14
There are a number of new scholar recipes coming online in book 14 - some for potions, others for new dyes and wall colours for your home, improved battle lore scrolls, and one-use recipes that allow you to make items that will be very handy for other professions.

THE RAIDING BUG
Q: Will the infamous raid vitals bug that is afflicting European LotRO players be fixed in time for Mines of Moria?
A: I have been told that the Raid vital bug has been fixed for Book 14. Or so they tell me!

ANUMINAS & OTHER ARMOUR SETS
There are new armour sets in book 14 and the Annuminas armour set has seen a very good upgrade. Additionally, helegrod has been changed over to use bartering.

UNSPECIFIED BOOK 14 CHANGES
I'm pretty excited about Book 14. I got to create something for this update that I have never done before, and we have never seen in LOTRO before. I am going to be REALLY vague about exactly what is coming, but let's just say I'm trying to make the story much more important to everyone in the game, not just those of high level.

SKILL COOLDOWN & WEAPON SPEED
Q: I have a game mechanics-related question. This has been discussed both recently and in the past, and even the lorebook gives contradictory information on this. Basically, are skill cooldowns affected by weapon speed or are those solely dependent on skills? If so, is there any other use for weapon speed besides seeing what your auto-attack cycle speed is?
A: Individual skill cooldowns are not affected by weapon speed, only the time before you can next execute subsequent skills. Attack with a fast weapon and you have to wait less time after that skill is done before your next skill will start. Some skills are designed to ignore the weapon speed related timer, but those are usually quite special and built [to?] allow a faster response.

MORIA: NEW MOUNTS
Any new mount variations made available between now and Moria will mostly be saddle and color variations. However, we have a region coming up (you may have heard of of it) that ponies (and assumedly horses as well) dare not tread. This means that something new is coming.

MORIA: WARDEN & RUNE-KEEPER CLASSES
The Warden is a more "tank-y" class and is a master of marital combat, and must strike his blows in such a way to best finish off his enemies. The Rune-keeper is a master of words, and uses those to either damage his enemies or inspire his allies.

SUMMER BLUES?

The next two to three months will likely prove important to the future of LOTRO. I'm assuming that Mines of Moria will not be released until September at the very earliest, with October being much likelier and even November an unlovely possibility. In the meantime, the game has been hit by an unfortunate combination of three factors; any one of the three alone could easily be shrugged off, but it's bad luck (and some bad management) that they should have hit simultaneously.

The first is simply seasonal. In the summer people go away on holidays (usually quite long ones if they happen to be Europeans), the days are longer, outdoor pursuits beckon, parents, significant others and spouses become even less understanding than in the darker days of winter and, what with one thing and another, most people spend significantly less time playing computer games. For the same reasons, people also buy fewer new games, which in turn leads to a small but significant drop in new players.

The second is the arrival of Age of Conan which, whatever its virtues or vices, has attracted a number of LOTRO players simply on the basis of novelty value. Some of them will stay with AoC, some are playing both games and most of them will, I suspect, drift back to LOTRO when the glitz has worn off. In the meantime, however, that represents another drop in activity.

Finally (and this is where bad management comes in), no matter what goodies Book 14 or, most likely, Mines of Moria eventually brings, it was a bad idea not to provide LOTRO players with some new raiding opportunities at the beginning of the summer. I know, I know, raids are not the be-all and end-all of online gaming. The point is, LOTRO is now 15 months old, and includes just two sets of raids, Helegrod and the Rift; this is plainly not enough. Most serious players have completed both raid sequences several times; in the case of the Rift, maybe even dozens of times in order to acquire complete armour sets. The result is that boredom is beginning to set in.

Consider: most average keen players probably hit the l.50 cap around Christmas time, so while they will have completed many of the new Forochel quests out curiosity, quests are simply never as interesting if you can't get experience from them. On the other hand, there are only so many times you can repeat the Rift raid chain, and once you have completed your set, it all becomes increasingly tedious (I know that if I have to face Barz one more time, I shall cut my own throat). Helegrod offers a more varied and interesting environment, but to be honest, how many kinships can rustle up 24 reasonably competent players often enough to make Helegrod adventuring accessible on a regular basis? A new 12-man raid coming out at the same time as Book 13 would have been an intelligent marketing move, particularly as the arrival of AoC was a known factor. I sometimes wonder whether the Delvings of Fror in the Ettenmoors may not perhaps have started out life as a potential raid venue which got side-tracked...

On balance, none of the above will in my view be enough to hold back LOTRO in the medium to long term, given its core client base of Tolkien fans and the very real positive aspects of the game (in a nutshell: looks, plot and updates), but it promises to be a slowish sort of summer... unless, of course, Codemasters choose to surprise us all.

LOOKING TOWARDS MORIA

So, it's Moria after all. The smart money was on Moria all along for the first big expansion; after all, the regions of Middle Earth guaranteed to generate the most player excitement have always been Moria, Rohan, Gondor and Mordor, and it was obvious that in a plot-driven game, Moria had to come first. Lots of goodies are promised, including two new classes, a variety of raids (including more 24-man raids), six new books and a cap level of sixty. Most players seem to welcome the increased cap, though there has been some inevitable grumbling about the extent to which this will devalue the major boss fights in the Rift and Helegrod. Personally, I think it's a good thing - after all, the bosses in the new expansion will inevitably be even tougher, and the new cap will prove an additional incentive to go out there and quest. Plus, in a game obviously designed to have a lifetime of several years, a fixed cap would sooner or later prove a recipe for stagnation.

To my mind, the most exciting innovation sounds like it will be the forging of Legendary Items. According to the official Codemasters release, "Players will be able to forge weapons and class-related equipment and evolve them to build a legacy the likes of Bilbo's Sting and Gandalf's Glamdring. These legendary weapons will level-up along with the player, allowing customization by advancing the item's virtues, adding runic legacies, modifying its titles and forming fables". Now this is something genuinely new and original. If it works along the lines suggested, it could mean an end to the constant upgrading and replacing of weapons (and armour?) as better and better sets become available; this way, once you had acquired, say, a legendary sword (which presumably would in itself require considerable effort), the sword would increase in capabilities alongside you as you leveled up. You might perhaps even be allowed some latitude in selecting the increased capabilities: for instance, higher fire damage or improved speed?

Those who have played Baldur's Gate II will remember that brilliant invention, the talking sword Lilarcor, which apart from an endless stream of wisecracks was also capable of self-improvement.