The Lone Lands Become Awesome

Tony posted this on November 29th, 2009. It has 2 Comments »
Categorized as News, Patch.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2437

Orion posted a really great devel­oper diary that details the upcom­ing changes for the Lone Lands, which I am really excited about. Over­all, I’ve been happy with the changes to Archet, Bree-land, Ered Luin and the cor­re­spond­ing Epic Quests. Things flow more smoothly and the aspects of those areas that felt a lit­tle murky have really come into their own. The revamps of those areas have cer­tainly improved things, but the updates to the Lone Lands sound sig­nif­i­cantly more inter­est­ing to me.

Also dis­cussed is infa­mous Garth Agar­wen instance. Per­son­ally, I wan­dered into that area once and never ven­tured in again. I always feel a lit­tle lost in it and the strength of the ene­mies didn’t feel worth the pay off. Garth Agar­wen was the first instance Tur­bine designed from the game and it could cer­tainly ben­e­fit from what Tur­bine has learned since then. An entire page is ded­i­cated to the changes in Garth Agar­wen and I rec­om­mend read­ing it. The area is being split up into clus­ters and the entire thing just sounds like it will flow bet­ter and be more fun. I always felt like I was just “dropped” into that area, sur­rounded by a ridicu­lous amount of mobs who seemed to have no real goal beyond stand­ing in my way. It sounds like things will be sig­nif­i­cantly improved there.

The arti­cle presents some really great ideas for the Lone Lands, but they’re also great ideas for the game in gen­eral. I hope to see some of this cap­i­tal­ized upon through­out the rest of the game. I really sug­gest read­ing the full devel­oper diary, but a few things caught my atten­tion beyond the adjust­ments to the Epic Story, the abil­ity to solo more of the Epic Quest line (or con­tinue on as a group as in the past, if you wish) and the addi­tion of the Eglain faction:

Chal­lenges

With Mines of Moria™ we intro­duced the con­cept of hard mode, a more dif­fi­cult ver­sion of the instance that pro­vided play­ers with greater rewards. As we refined the sys­tem it became appar­ent that Hard Mode was not only a silly name, but also a rather obtuse sys­tem that did noth­ing to assist play­ers in under­stand­ing what the objec­tives were. In order to adjust this, we have cre­ated Chal­lenges.

Chal­lenges are daily quests that are bestowed to all play­ers who have not already com­pleted them for that day, and meet all other quest cri­te­ria – pre­req­ui­sites or level restric­tions. These quests will appear in the quest tracker and dis­play the suc­cess and fail­ure cases for the play­ers. Upon open­ing the quest jour­nal, play­ers can read the back­ground on the quest and see fur­ther instruc­tions on the chal­lenge before them[Rewards for Chal­lenges may vary slightly from instance to instance but, typ­i­cally, they will be the fol­low­ing: coin, fac­tion, and a barter token of some type. In the case of Garth Agar­wen, the barter token is used to pur­chase rewards from the Eglain at the entrance to the Garth Agar­wen area.

I’ve not played too many Hard Mode vari­a­tions on quests, but I’ll be hon­est: I think they’re weird. I didn’t feel that they fit the spirit of the game, but I also felt they were con­fus­ing. I like the abil­ity to choose a harder vari­a­tion of a quest; Dun­geons and Drag­ons Online han­dled this well, whereas I’m not so sure that LotRO did. In any event, chal­lenges make a lot more sense and the name is much more fitting.

Optional Objec­tives

In addi­tion to the new Chal­lenge sys­tem, we have added another piece of tech to allow for Optional Objec­tives to appear for play­ers inside any given instance space. Like Chal­lenges, these appear in the stan­dard instances and tar­get mon­sters or other tar­gets within the instance. Also like Chal­lenges, these quests can be com­pleted daily and reward play­ers with coin and/or fac­tion for their com­ple­tion. There can be mul­ti­ple optional objec­tives per instance. The first of these quests, appear­ing in the Garth Agar­wen Clus­ter, pro­vide up to four dif­fer­ent objec­tives within the instance. Optional Objec­tives may be dif­fer­ent for each player..

Optional Objec­tives are meant to fol­low the main path of the instance with min­i­mal extra effort so that groups can work together to achieve each other’s goals. Fur­ther, since the optional objec­tives can each be com­pleted once daily, play­ers will have rea­sons for enter­ing the same instance mul­ti­ple times per day.

I absolutely adore this idea. This con­cept is one of my favorite things about untold amounts of sin­gle player RPGs. Dun­geons and Drag­ons Online has cap­i­tal­ized on this idea as well, offer­ing addi­tional minor objec­tives in addi­tion to the main goals of each indi­vid­ual instance. It spices things up and makes the world feel a bit more alive. I’m extremely happy about this one. :)

There’s more to it, so be sure to read it all. Have I said that enough yet?

Next on Orion and Turbine’s revamp list? The North Downs. Sweet! :D

Orion Comments on Radiance Gear, Raids and Hard Mode

Tony posted this on July 26th, 2009. It has 9 Comments »
Categorized as News.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1958

Turbine’s Orion has been post­ing blog entries detail­ing how he deals with the devel­op­ment process. These are cur­rently most focused upon the Lone-lands, but he made a more gen­eral com­ment that I wanted to high­light here:

It was a rough night and I woke up early and read through some of the responses to the pre­vi­ous Blog. Lots of strong opin­ions out there. It makes sense. I am increas­ingly con­cerned that peo­ple believe we are not hear­ing them when they tell us about hard modes and gear gat­ing and radi­ance etc… I tried to appease folks in the com­ments sec­tion but that is likely to get lost so here goes a bit of a reprint:

When you deal with a mass of peo­ple all spout­ing opin­ions and every­one keeps harp­ing on one point or another it can be very dif­fi­cult to drill through to the core of the issue. This has been the case with Radi­ance Gear. At first, it appeared that radi­ance gat­ing was the only part of the issue because that was the breadth of the com­plaints. After drilling deeper and read­ing more and more from folks it became appar­ent that there were many symp­toms to the problem.

  1. Radi­ance gear is now required to enter raids.
  2. The only way to acquire radi­ance gear is to com­plete hard modes.
  3. Hard modes objec­tives are obtuse.

All good points, all taken to heart and all actively in the pipe for some form of retro­fit to address the core issues. No time frame yet. Just and admis­sion that we hear you, we under­stand you and we are com­mit­ted to rec­ti­fy­ing the issue.

I’m a more casual MMORPG player, so I’m not much of a raider. I’ve not even tried to get Radi­ance gear yet. That said, I know a lot of peo­ple are not pleased with this sys­tem and the gat­ing of raids and con­tent that it cre­ates. I also know that a lot of peo­ple have not felt like they’ve got­ten an ade­quate response to their concerns.

So hope­fully this com­ment from Orion can ease some of those wor­ries. Obvi­ously we have no idea when these changes will be made. I imag­ine they’re going to take some sig­nif­i­cant work, but I also imag­ine that this is higher pri­or­ity given the strength with which peo­ple com­plain about the cur­rent set up. I guess we’ll see.

I sup­pose, if noth­ing else, this does seem to imply they’ll be avoid­ing this sys­tem in the future. Poten­tially, that’s good news for the next expan­sion if you weren’t a fan of what Moria brought to the table for raids.