Then Burning Crusade regaled us with the wonderful quest experience of having to dig through twenty bundles of gazelle crap in Nagrand to look for digested cherry seeds. Yum, amirite? Proximity to poo: touch. Unless you RP’d using a stick to sift through the things, which many a roleplayer has done, as I understand it.

Now come Northrend, I’ve taken part in two of these high-class adventuring quests. One in Borean Tundra where you not only have to administer (by way of tossing) a powerful laxative to some wolves so they can evacuate important microfilm fragments, which of course you have to sift through. Proximity to poo: touch. Again. Then in Grizzly Hills not only you eat a bunch of seeds, maliciously tempted by a yellow exclamation sign, but you then have to remove those seeds from the digestion equation by means of yet another laxative. This time one you must prepare and ingest yourself. Then you go to an outhouse, and in between aoe’s of mist and mini-earthquakes (I kid not) you emerge triumphant holding what laid hidden in your detritus: partially digested seed. Proximity to poo: touching. Touching your own poo, man. Far out.

Of course the seeds go back in the bucket for the next trusting soul to pick. It’s the cycle of life. And this is only at level 74 or so. What lies next? Is Kel’Thuzad, well, ‘blocked’? Gotta do something about that too? Do we find out about the Lich King’s irregularity? Is this what the plague was really all about?

One thing’s for sure, Blizzard sure loves shitty quests.

I am very happy with Mythic’s short term updates, and I am very excited to see the alleged 14 pages of updates notes for patch 1.10 of Warhammer Online.  Just long term I am not sure what the value is to subscribing (read: vesting myself) in to the hobby of a PvP MMO. 

In PvE MMO games, like Lord of the Rings Online, there is that feeling of the developer updating “further along.”  When Turbine updates the game with a Book update (as opposed to just a balance, optimization, and bug patch) they push the story further down the road.  We get new quests that expand the storytelling of the world, new instances and dungeons, and sometimes even new regions.  There is the value in receiving the content, but I think the bigger value is knowing that over the next big rise there will be more.

In PvP MMO games, like Warhammer Online, that feeling of moving “further along” isn’t quite there.  In Warhammer Online the ultimate encounter of fighting and taking down the King has been in the game since launch.  They can make more ultimate encounters when they add in the other capital cities, but that isn’t “further along.”  That’s just more of the same re-skinned.  The expansion is lateral.  Lateral expansion would also cover more scenarios, more classes, and more skills.  Lateral expansion is great, but at the end of the day it is usually more of the same.  The challenges pretty much remain the same whether you kill a player in one place or another.

Without moving “further along” the value in subscribing the game feels much less than a subscription game that does move “further along.”  This is compounded by the fact that plenty of other non-subscription PvP games laterally expand their content with new maps and class updates for free.  So, in my mind I am trying to figure out the difference.  Why is a PvP MMO game worth subscribing to?

This is not an “I quit” post.  Mythic has my business until at least April ‘09, and I plan on playing Warhammer Online weekly.  I really like the game, but I am having a little trouble finding comparative value in subscribing with Warhammer Online versus a PvE-type MMO… especially at the same price.  This was a very hard post to write, and I had to completely rewrite it three times in the hopes I could get my feelings across.  Is my subscription really just paying the cost of admission with the lateral expansions, or can Mythic give me the feeling that they will somehow be able to move a PvP MMO ”further along?”  Hopefully by April I can figure out the value in subscribing to a PvP MMO.

–Ravious
Who died and made you f’ing king of the zombies?

Anyway, the point of all this self aggrandisement is a chance to share some photos. Oh, and also to tell you about the last time I logged into LOTRO.

I haven’t played LOTRO in a while now, despite the fact that I’ve got a lifetime subscription and despite the fact that, on the whole, I quite like the game and think that Turbine have done a very good job with recreating Middle Earth and the experience of actually being there. They paid attention to every last detail that was put on paper by Prof. Tolkien.

Right on down to the endless running.

I remember it well in the book. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli running for days on end in pursuit of the Orcs who had captured the hobbits. The film trilogy captured it as well – marvellous aerial shots of the characters as they ran across the landscape. The music from the films became the tune that I couldn’t stop humming while my friend and I ran through the mountains – it became something of a theme as is evident from the picture below:

It’s titled “They’ve taken the hobbits to Isengard!”

So the last time I logged in, I found my character was still questing in the North Downs. I made my way from Esteldin to Nan Amlug and stood at the top of the valley looking down. My destination was the orc camp in Dol Dinen. I took a deep breath and thought to myself “Bugger this!”, hearthed back to the Tavern and logged out. I just couldn’t face the run across the zone and then back again. I couldn’t do it. In real life, if you put a long distance run in front of me then I’ll more than likely say “yeah, why not!” but I just can’t face the prospect of running across zones in LOTRO anymore. What’s worse is that the character is level 34 – one level away from getting his mount.

Funny how things pan out isn’t it?

(Curiously, despite people seemingly on a constant winge about the endless running in WoW, I don’t have the same issue. I’ve always liked running across zones in WoW. Apart from in Hellfire Peninsula. And Nagrand.)

Much geek love for this finally coming to portable. This, Secret of Mana, and Earthbound were my all-time favorite SNES games growing up. I’ve very nearly bought one of those emulator kits for my DS simply so I could play these games. With this release, I see the possibility for Secret to follow (Children of Mana was horribly disappointing) and perhaps, dare I dream, Earthbound. Ness, Randi, and Crono are the three kings of RPG history…

Oh, and have you seen comic book legends revealed? That one’s for you, Hudson!

: Zubon

This appeared on a linguistics blog because of Jacques’s particular problem: avoidance of evidence that he was in California. I encourage you to read the whole thing. He could read normally, but he could not consciously process the word “California” if it implied that Jacques himself was in California. For him, license plates were blocked, news reports were garbled, and postcards were illegible, but only the parts implying that he was in California. National news that mentioned California would have been fine; you could see those anywhere. His brain was effectively reading ahead, recognizing the word and the context, blocking it from his conscious awareness, and then rationalizing why the word was not there.

Prof. Zwicky has some comments about similar dementias. Others in the comments share their stories about caring for family members and their cases of implicit and explicit awareness. The dialogue draws out more details. It is a heart-rending account of loss.

And then one commenter tossed in, “TL;DR” Five characters, and I wanted to track the IP to put a brick through someone’s window or skull.

: Zubon

I love Lord of the Rings Online’s style.  It is all about the story.  A region is not just a place to kill ten rats.  It has a story.  The Enemy is at work everywhere, but not always in accord.  The Lonelands is cursed with the Red Maid, which is a truly epic almost heartbreaking story in its own right.  The North Downs has the story of the three races of Light trying to fend off orc tribe invasions from every angle, and it has the slight twist of the orc tribes not really working together.  Eregion also has it’s own story of Saruman’s search for ring lore to re-create the penultimate artifacts worn by so few in Arda.

The problem before was that getting a lot of the story required players to go through a tedious quest progression.  The basic formula for early Shadows of Angmar content went something like this: 1) complete solo first quest learning about “symptoms” and thinning said “symptoms,” 2) complete additional solo quest doing something to laterally solve the problem, and 3) obtain full fellowship for final quest to stop source of problem.

The problem is the final step.  The mini-story cannot conclude without a quest requiring a full fellowship, and it is very unlikely a player will find a full fellowship of players ready to do that quest.  Too many times I see a wall of text go up in the Looking For Fellowship (LFF) channel that lists five or six “final” fellowship quests.  It’s akin to anti-funneling.  With a limited quest log, people will abandon remaining fellowship quests when they move on to another region, and other people simply have not completed all the preliminary solo quests required to know what quest the LFF’r is talking about.

Eregion is different.  The basic formula that was overused in early Shadows of Angmar is nearly gone.  In northern Eregion there is one “final” fellowship quest, not five or six.  So players holding on to Leader of the Foul Wood will eventually group up if they watch the LFF channel.  The southern fellowship quests are three-man instances that are repeatable and rewarding to those that wish to repeat them without having quests for the instances.  On top of that there are four (to borrow from Warhammer Online) Chapters to Eregion in the form of quest hubs.  When players are questing from a certain Chapter they will mechanically be questing across a specific sub-region of Eregion and story-wise be learning about a specific corruption of the White Hand.  This is excellent funneling in my opinion.  Players can quickly buddy up in the Chapters for questing and create larger fellowships for that really well known content on the fly.

This gets me really excited to enter Moria, but I am taking my sweet time in Eregion because it is a blast.  I get on Turbine’s case a lot for holding to old ways a bit too much, but the way they are going right now with quest design seems to be the exact right one for Lord of the Rings Online.  Now, if only they would consider Hirelings for that game.

–Ravious
Trying for the subjective.

I wonder if they drive around town shouting out of the window “Hey, where is the Taco Bell?” to passers-by.