{"id":6424,"date":"2009-12-16T08:40:39","date_gmt":"2009-12-16T12:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=6424"},"modified":"2009-12-16T15:10:42","modified_gmt":"2009-12-16T19:10:42","slug":"lotro-welcome-back-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=6424","title":{"rendered":"LOTRO: Welcome Back Weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a free weekend in Lord of the Rings Online<\/a>. Thursday Dec 17 through Monday Dec 21 you can play for free. You don’t have time because it’s the holidays, but it’s the thought that counts, right?<\/p>\n

I’ve already used all my character slots on the Silverlode server, but I’m still in the “settling in” phase of MMO playing where I’m leveling lots of characters at once. Just getting a sample<\/em> of each race, class, and crafting profession is a major undertaking. The only character worth noting is “Rubytuesday”, my Hobbit Hunter. (That is, I’m a Hobbit who is a hunter, not a person who hunts Hobbits, although now that I think of it that would be pretty hilarious. Unsporting, but hilarious.) <\/p>\n

lotro_rainbow.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

I’m curious what other Tolkien lore-fans out there think of the writing and I’d love to read your thoughts on it. My own take:<\/p>\n

One one hand, I’m really impressed at the quality of the text. They were careful to have all the races speak in the appropriate “voice” and style. This would have been the first thing I’d expect them to screw up, and I’ve found very few spots where anyone seemed to hit a wrong note. (Exception: Some of the bandit taunts feel wrong. Nobody<\/em> should utter the words “You want a piece of me?” in Middle Earth. Sheesh.) On the other hand, they took great liberties with the setting. <\/p>\n

You can argue that the work, as written, doesn’t work as an MMO and that liberties had<\/strong> to be taken. I won’t argue with that. If we’re going to accept the idea of an LOTR MMO, then we need to be open to a few heretofore heretical ideas. Certainly a game where you fought nothing but Orcs<\/a> and Goblins would get old extremely quickly. It wouldn’t do anyone any good to cling so faithfully to the source material so as to render the game a dull, unplayable mess.<\/p>\n

In the books, it was a huge deal when the Hobbits returned to the Shire in war-gear and on mounts. It was a spectacle, and a really important moment in the story. The heroes came back to find the Shire changed, but they had changed at least as much. But that doesn’t work in an MMO. What are you going to do? Bar players from entering the Shire? Bar them from wearing armor and riding mounts? That’s not going to work. So the Shire in the game is thick with members of all races of Middle Earth, riding about on exotic beasts and resplendent in outlandish, brightly-colored armor. After seeing this, the gaffer himself wouldn’t look twice at our heroes when they returned. <\/p>\n

On the other hand, some of the additions to the story are perplexing and there are ugly seams between the canon and non-canon events. A lot of the quest content in LOTRO was messily grafted onto the original material with a hot glue gun.<\/p>\n

For people who don’t obsess over the Tolkien stuff and are just looking for an MMO, I’d say LOTRO is like World of Warcraft with a more polite and mature userbase. It’s absolutely<\/em> worth a look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a free weekend in Lord of the Rings Online. Thursday Dec 17 through Monday Dec 21 you can play for free. You don’t have time because it’s the holidays, but it’s the thought that counts, right? I’ve already used all my character slots on the Silverlode server, but I’m still in the “settling in” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6424","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}