{"id":8168,"date":"2010-05-26T08:08:19","date_gmt":"2010-05-26T13:08:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=8168"},"modified":"2010-05-26T08:14:46","modified_gmt":"2010-05-26T13:14:46","slug":"shamus-plays-lotro-part-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=8168","title":{"rendered":"Shamus Plays: LOTRO, Part 19"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part 19<\/a>? We’re really on part 19 already? <\/p>\n

The game is structured so that the epic quests (the “main plot”, if you will) are broken up into books. The first is the prologue. This is made slightly more confusing by the fact that there is more than one prologue. There’s actually one for each stating area. (Dwarf, Elf, Human, Hobbit.) We’ve just finished off the Hobbit prologue. It’s been a bit long because we took a detour to do part of the human section in entries 6 through 8, and in fact we’re going to do a little more of the human stuff in the next few entries. <\/p>\n

A bit about the Golfimbul thing:<\/p>\n

I can’t really tell if the writers at Turbine actually intended the skull to be Golfimbul’s skull or not. The logic behind it – as I pointed out in this entry – is howling LSD-driven bowl-of-cocoa-puffs brand madness<\/em>. I want to believe that this is a story of a silly bunch of hobbits who happen to repel an invasion in the process of jumping at shadows and telling each other ghost stories. But I never detected the wink from the writers. Halros is, like most rangers, portrayed as very wise, patient, and circumspect. (And useless.) He takes the invasion seriously, but he never takes an official position on the authenticity of the skull. <\/p>\n

One thing I do notice about the writing is that they are far more careful about language than writing. Which is understandable, considering the nature of the source material. There are a lot of different groups in the game, and each has a distinct style of speech which is clearly conveyed in the quest text. This is particularly evident in your dealings with humans, where there are at least four styles or accents: Commoner humans, educated humans, rangers, and ruffians. There may be more and I’ve either overlooked them or I haven’t reached them yet in the game. <\/p>\n

But while they’re very careful with language, the writing itself suffers from a lot of the same blandness and Plan 9 logic that is common to all MMO games. I suspect they write the quests normally (“normal” in this case being “while in the midst of a self-destructive heroin bender”) and then hand off the dialog to a writer who will then “Tolkien it up”. It actually does a lot to make the quests seem less silly. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part 19? We’re really on part 19 already? The game is structured so that the epic quests (the “main plot”, if you will) are broken up into books. The first is the prologue. This is made slightly more confusing by the fact that there is more than one prologue. There’s actually one for each stating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8168","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=8168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}