{"id":58286,"date":"2025-01-06T00:01:10","date_gmt":"2025-01-06T05:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=58286"},"modified":"2025-01-05T22:23:23","modified_gmt":"2025-01-06T03:23:23","slug":"a-last-try-at-lotro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=58286","title":{"rendered":"A Last Try at LotRO"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been listening to a lot of Tolkien universe (I know the common term is “legendarium”) over the Christmas holiday. This has prompted me to re-install Lord of the Rings Online<\/em> in a final attempt to “enjoy” the storyline into the post-Rings gameplay Standing Stone has been putting out for years now. I had to give a bit of thought to how to do this, actually. I think I have made it to a point that would have facilitated “moving on” to a new story, except I always seems to get stuck or confused. One thing is easy to straighten out: skip side quests until you have to level. The “Epic Quests” are the storyline of the game, and I *do* remember hitting a dead-end at one point by not being able to beat one chapter. Doing side-quests is *highly* repetitive, with only a handful of starting quests available. Let me rephrase that: there are *a lot* of side quests, but you preform them in all of the same areas. There are only a few starting areas, then after that they all concentrate into the same quest lines. You really need to just focus on getting one character through the storylines.<\/p>\n

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The second problem is that each “Epic Quest” is offered to everyone once you meet the minimal requirements…usually reaching the right level for the first several. To be fair and forthcoming, those are the only ones I’m familiar with, having not ever leveled a character past somewhere around 60. There is a new starting area that I am occasionally prompted to try, Before the Shadow<\/em>. But the traditional starting area is Shadows of Angmar<\/em>. There were originally two introduction areas although they started with 4 different beginnings, for Elf, Dwarf, Hobbit, and Man. The Elf and Dwarf areas collapse into one just as do Hobbit and Man. Beornings, High Elves and Stout Axes (and I presume the brand new River Hobbits) have their own introductions added. Next up is the Prologue Quest line, which leads to the first Epic Quest line.<\/p>\n

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And every time you reach a new quest line, anyone *could* be starting it from anywhere else, if I understand properly. The nearest I can tell, the traditional way to start the game is by far the most troublesome, complicated, and time-consuming. At least, all pathways added later seem to be much shorter. I should be able to report on that.<\/p>\n

The important part, as far as I can tell so far, is to focus solely on the “gold” ring quests, especially the ones that appear to be burning. As opposed to the more “yellowish” quests.<\/p>\n

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It is almost tiring to point out how good some of these older games look, at least within the areas they can be pushed.<\/p>\n

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The player characters don’t look nearly as good, in my opinion, as the characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic<\/em>. They did get an HD update several years ago, while SWTOR only recently started receiving this work. It’s worth noting, however; that SWTOR overall looks better. While the Star Wars title notably uses a customized, hard-to-update engine, it *is* four years newer, and that has to count for something.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t help that I’ve done this part of the introductory quests dozens of times. There is a bit of boredom, although playing with everything at max settings at least makes it interesting. I should note an interesting aspect of Linux gaming. Not that LotRO works just fine through Steam…although I should have mentioned it before, it *does*. My games install drive is actually a speedy, but old-fashioned magnetic platter; so loading new content is a bit slow compared to what it could be. An upgrade to a 2 TB SSD would be in order to make the one unpleasant part of my more-modern gaming experience go away.<\/p>\n

I am running a bit late on this update purely because I’m just speed-running the introduction as fast as possible, and even then I’m only to the SECOND level of INTRODUCTION…LotRO laid it on a bit thick.<\/p>\n

I guess the personal textures aren’t all *that* bad:<\/p>\n

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Nice to know I’m making popular decisions:<\/p>\n

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The “Introductions” go from a short scripted sequence, pictured above; to a collection of quests ending with the sacking of Archet, a suburb of Bree. A Dunedain ranger named Amdir is claimed by the Nazgul in a plausible but completely extrapolated implementation of someone that probably wasn’t meant to create lore. Following the fire, we’re sent to Combe, one of the three small settlements in addition to Archet and Staddle mentioned in The Lord of the Rings<\/em>. We will be sent to Staddle next, after a handful of quests.<\/p>\n

A thing that likely led to me doing more sidequests than I intended every time was the lack of differentiating pointers on the map. As the available map didn’t show a “gold” quest marker, I entered the inn which seemed to have a normal quest marker around the entrance. I therefore found I had guessed right.<\/p>\n

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Unfortunately, I went outside again before realizing my target must still be in the inn. And once again, it was only shown by a normal quest marker until I entered the room. HOWEVER, as far as I remember, you will never have more than one Epic Quest marker unless you enable multiple Epic Quests. Which I tried to explain how you could do earlier, but probably failed.<\/p>\n

Map of the starting area:<\/p>\n

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At the moment, I don’t have anything planned like Shamus’ Lulzy or Rix’larril’an of the Ascendancy, as I am simply trying (as I often do) to just make the game work for me. The last time I tried Lord of the Rings Online<\/em> I deleted every character I had created and tried to delete my Standing Stone ID, so something must have pissed me off. I know LotRO has a mixed reputation for how they represent different ideas and areas, but mostly they get a passing grade. After listening to a lot of Darth Gandalf and In Deep Geek, I have been wanting to revisit some areas of Middle Earth, like the former Northern Kingdoms. Maybe make sense of some of those ruins. And finally, maybe finally; enter and *stay* for a while in Moria. That’s all I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I keep missing how to do it (other than accidentally.)<\/p>\n

That’s it for this week. See you soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been listening to a lot of Tolkien universe (I know the common term is “legendarium”) over the Christmas holiday. This has prompted me to re-install Lord of the Rings Online in a final attempt to “enjoy” the storyline into the post-Rings gameplay Standing Stone has been putting out for years now. I had to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[638],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paige-writes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58286"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58338,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58286\/revisions\/58338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}