LOTRO: Checking Off The List
After last night’s disasterous DDO outing, I spent a couple precious free hours this morning with Cap’n Crunch, who was aching to be thrown into combat after three or so days of inactivity (plus all that yummy rested XP!). None of my kinnies were on — after all, it was a Thursday morning — so I buckled down to chewing through as many North Downs quests as possible.
You can categorize quests a few different ways, I suppose, but the three main categories for me are:
- Quests that take a lot of attention and effort along with a group of people (dungeon runs, fellowship quests)
- Solo quests that are different and unusual enough to require more than normal levels of attention (“Now what am I supposed to be doing?”), or have sufficient danger as to kill me if I don’t keep my guard up.
- Solo quests that are the online equivalent of mowing the lawn — relaxing, low danger with the promise of accomplishment at the end.
I like all three, and they each serve a different purpose. The last one usually gets pretty worked over on the blogosphere — the “kill 10 rats”, the “FedEx”, the “escort”, the “click 10 glowies” — and I understand why. I’m not against them being in the game, after all, I just think devs should abandon the fruitless efforts of quest writers to find the millionth different way for an NPC to tell me to go kill a baker’s dozen of wolves or whatnot.
When I’m in the mood to solo for a while and knock off a ton of quests, the third type are the best for these. It’s the “to do list” part of me that secretly loves watching a full quest log get chopped into oblivion as I plow through task after task. And because it is pretty mindless, I am able to bring over my portable DVD player and catch up on my Netflix rentals while occasionally looking at the screen to make sure I’m not running off of cliffs or getting between a mother bear and her cub. By the end of it, I don’t have any great stories to tell, but I do feel like I’ve accomplished something: I have more XP to show, quests crossed off, and a nice pile of loot and cash to line my pockets.
I was also thinking about how the traditional MMO setup of autoattack + special skills/attacks on the hotbar is coming under fire these days, as if it was a relic like the telegraph and cod liver oil. There’s a good reason why most MMOs have used this system, because latency and lag issues keep us from having instant response in combat. Even so-called “real time combat” isn’t quite so, although games like DDO, Champions and Age of Conan are striding forward in this regard.
See, I like the autoattack + special abilities. I’m very much not a twitch gamer; I appreciate measured conflicts that incorporate more strategy than clickclickclickclickclick. Yes, we tend to have our overused 1-4 hotkeys that are pounded on most every fight, but there’s an outer core of more situational skills and more powerful skills with lengthy cooldowns that have their place in combat as well. If you put LOTRO, WoW and WAR side by side, you’d see that they don’t have exactly the same way of dealing with this combat style, even though they’re using the same system:
- WoW depends far more on auto-attack, with either instant casts (once you hit something, it happens) or casting time spells (which start charging once you hit the button) being interjected into the fight
- LOTRO uses a lot of auto-attack, although it’s a bit slower, and skills are queued up with a delay
- WAR has auto-attack but it’s almost useless, instead relying on skills almost exclusively for attack and response — lots of instant abilities that are triggered during the fight
Just random thoughts from a Thursday play session.
I didn’t like combat in WAR – there was a pause between pushing a button and it being cast. It was very weird and annoying and made me feel that I wasn’t in direct control over my character.
How many special attacks do you end up with in LotRO? Enough to fill 3 hot button bars?
I’m a fan of auto attack + abilities as well. There is strategy to it if there are a wide variety of abilities. It can be as simple or as complex as a designer wants to make it.
I grew pretty tired of the AoC combos, especially in high lag situations.
Count me in as a fan of auto attack + abilities, too.
I like the pacing of games that play like this. I’m a Luddite who doesn’t much care for voice chat and with auto-attack you can communicate via text during a battle while still being effective.
I also like the laundry list quests.
In fact, I agree with everything you said in this post. It says something about your standing as an MMO blogger that you aren’t getting flamed to a crisp for stating such unpopular ideas. I’m pretty sure most bloggers would be!
Flames from a… DRAGON?
Thanks for chasing them away!