Reflections on Ered Luin

Tony posted this on October 20th, 2009.
Tagged as , , .
Categorized as Editorials and Thoughts.
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2313

I joined Cor Pethroni on the Brandy­wine server, so I’ve had to make a few new char­ac­ters (I was pre­vi­ously ded­i­cated to Glad­den). I’ve been play­ing for quite a long time, but unlike some of my fel­low play­ers, I’m not much of an alto­holic. Sure, I have some, but the like­li­hood of them even get­ting past Level 5 is extremely low. Even so, you still kind of get burned out on doing the same quests and see­ing the same peo­ple. LOTRO is bet­ter than many MMORPGs in that I feel there’s enough super­flu­ous quests float­ing about that you can try to do dif­fer­ent things each time … but even so, you’re going to repeat things and it gets to feel kind of same-y. It’s just how mak­ing alts in MMORPGs always works; I haven’t been in a rush to make a new char­ac­ter in a while because of it.

Since then Tur­bine has seen fit to revamp the start­ing areas. I’ve already expe­ri­enced this in Archet as a Man, but I’ve finally only just expe­ri­enced this in Ered Luin as an Elf. I have to say, they’ve really tight­ened things up. The most not­i­ca­ble dif­fer­ence for me was the changes in NPC loca­tions. Many are grouped together to encour­age smooth quest­ing and dis­cour­age need­less trav­el­ing. Trav­el­ing as a whole is just eas­ier in gen­eral given that Noglond and Thrasi’s Lodge now have sta­bles. The decreases in price since launch don’t hurt either. I remem­ber when the ride from Duil­lond to Celondim cost 5 sil­ver, which is a sig­nif­i­cant amount of money early on. Of course, back then you also needed to travel between the two a lot more often.

This is def­i­nitely some­thing I appre­ci­ate. It gives older play­ers some­thing new to do and makes the alt process smoother. It helps encour­age new play­ers to stick with the game too. Most impor­tantly, it allows the team to apply all of the lessons they learn to what is arguably the most impor­tant part of the game. I know peo­ple get hung up on the “end game” and spend a lot of time there, but I feel that if the out­set of the game isn’t com­pelling to enough peo­ple then you have a real prob­lem. The more enjoy­able the begin­ning and mid­dle are, the more peo­ple are going to bother to get to the end. I think it ben­e­fits all types of play­ers, quite honestly.

Really makes me look for­ward to what the team is doing with the Lone Lands for the next update.

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One Response to 'Reflections on Ered Luin'

  1. Docholiday says:

    I couldn’t agree more, I really like the new Erid Luin, it is MUCH smoother. And the bree re-vamp is pretty nice too. Although the first time I did it I got a lit­tle lost as I was try­ing to find where things used to be and not pay atten­tion to what I was doing :)
    Can’t wait for Lone lands, and I believe Orion has stated he’s re-doing all of the SOA content.

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