LOTRO: Beyond the Veil of Shadow
I’ve had an interesting week. My wife and daughter have been out in California visiting family, which would normally mean that I’d spent an abnormal amount of free time playing games to fill the silence. Of course, this happened to coincide with E3 week, so I’ve probably spent far more time writing for Massively plus doing a huge amount of church work than tooling around in Middle-earth.
But that’s not to say no time, because my captain hit 50 on Monday, and I’m in the process of working through the bottom half of Volume I before Moria. I absolutely love the epic storyline, if for nothing else than it makes me care about the quests (and follow them mentally). They do a great job keeping me up to date on what’s going on, chaining the storylines together into a coherent narrative, and shaking things up with scripted instances and unique missions. I like that. I relished a fun short chain in Angmar where you travel with a dad who’s out for revenge for his daughter’s death. The bad guy in that instance did a suitable job taunting him, and when it came to the final battle, it really felt epic and challenging, despite the huge inspiration buff.
It’s kind of cool how Turbine uses the storyline to introduce the instances that they ask you to return to later. Some of us never will, to be sure, so it’s nice to see them at least once in a limited capacity.
However, one thing that bugs me is the lack of voiceover. I mean, these are very tense, very dramatic scenes with all sorts of emotions flying across the place, and we’re more or less stuck with reading chat text floating above heads. Once in a while you get a taste of how awesome full voiceover would be for these epic quests, such as the narrator giving an intro to certain instances, or the occasional NPC greeting line, but that’s as far as it goes. If wishes were horses and all that, I’d wish that Turbine would go back and redo all of the epic storyline with full voiceover.
I’ve also started getting Legendary Item drops like crazy — I think five weapons dropped for me in Evendim last night, and I have no idea how common that is at this level. I’m sure they’re all junk, but I found a burglar dagger that I can at least pass down to Syp.
So far, I think I’m on course to get through Mirkwood by the time Enedwaith hits this fall, and that’s even with taking time here and there for my Lore-master. Good stuff.
- Posted in: Lord of the Rings Online
