Skimish Experiences

Tony posted this on December 4th, 2009. It has 2 Comments »
Categorized as Editorials and Thoughts, Siege of Mirkwood.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2453

By now I imag­ine many of you have tried out the new Skir­mish sys­tem. I pur­posely avoided a lot of the more detailed infor­ma­tion on Skir­mishes and was able to go in pretty fresh. My gen­eral thought? They’re awe­some.

In a lot of ways many of them feel almost like a Tower Defense game. You have areas to pro­tect, while ran­dom groups of ene­mies and lead­ers make their way in to push you back. It’s quite action packed and I think it finally gives PvE play­ers a sense of being in an actual war. Plus, it’s just awe­some to see famil­iar areas in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions. Bree cov­ered in tons of snow and being invaded by brig­ands is not some­thing you’re used to seeing.

I espe­cially like the amount of con­trol you’re given over the sys­tem. Once you com­plete the entry quest (which is rel­a­tively sim­ple, but kind of a downer) and the tuto­r­ial, you can join a skir­mish at pretty much any point. These can be adjusted by area, level, dif­fi­culty (there’s three tiers of this). The way it’s designed, there’s almost no real way to get tired of it aside from over­ex­po­sure. Con­sid­er­ing there are some addi­tional skir­mishes that were in the beta but are still being worked on (as noted at CStM), I think we’ll have a good amount to do for a while.

The Skir­mish Marks you receive dur­ing these bat­tles are barter tokens. You’re given a sol­dier to help you out and these tokens can give them new abil­i­ties. You can trade for all sorts of items for your char­ac­ters as well, includ­ing class quest items. There’s some unique items as well, some of which I’ve got my eye on. Even so, I’d  cer­tainly rec­om­mend mak­ing your sol­dier as strong as pos­si­ble early on. The stronger the sol­dier is, the eas­ier it’ll be to amass those marks.

Casual Stroll to Mor­dor also has an excel­lent post with answers to com­mon Skir­mish ques­tions. I really sug­gest you check it out if you find your­self confused.

How has every­one else’s expe­ri­ence with this been so far?

Moormur Demonstrates Siege of Mirkwood’s Skirmish System

Tony posted this on November 19th, 2009. It has No Comments »
Categorized as Siege of Mirkwood.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2409

LOTRO­Cast presents an exclu­sive Video Pre­view of Siege of Mirk­wood.

Want some footage of Mirk­wood? Want to get up-close and per­sonal with the Skir­mish sys­tem? Check out part one of a Video Pre­view series pre­sented by LOTRO­Cast: The Lord of the Rings Online Pod­cast at http://​lotro​cast​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​0​9​/​1​1​/​s​i​e​g​e​-​o​f​-​m​i​r​k​w​o​o​d​-​v​i​d​e​o​-​p​r​e​v​i​e​w​-​p​a​r​t​.​h​tml.

Skir­mishes are turn­ing out to be a bit cooler than I even thought they would be. :)

Siege of Mirkwood: The nitty-gritty details begin to emerge!

Isy posted this on November 8th, 2009. It has 1 Comment »
Categorized as News, Siege of Mirkwood.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2373

LOTRO_Mirkwood_Logo

Tipped off by my kin­nie Havborn, I have come across an exclu­sive album of Siege of Mirk­wood screen­shots at The Mad­house Tav­ern (a Euro­pean LotRO fan­site). I strongly rec­om­mend head­ing over to the site to peruse the pic­tures your­self as they reveal a lot of small but rel­e­vant tid­bits relat­ing to the Mirk­wood region and skir­mishes!  Some of the most rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion includes:

  • Hunters and War­dens will be able to port/muster to Mirkeaves if they gain acquain­tance rep­u­ta­tion with the Malladhrim.
  • Carn Dum and Uru­gath class items (e.g. Putrid Slime of Helchgam) is trade­able with Skir­mish Marks
  • Skir­mish marks can also get you a lot of craft­ing mate­ri­als includ­ing shards (e.g. Mithril Flakes and Ruby Shards). The craft­ing sec­tion also  includes ‘Tomes of Mid­dle Earth’ which may be new crit-items or ingre­di­ents for craft­ing items between Lvls 60 – 65.
  • The in-game menu has been updated and includes a more colour­ful lay­out with more options. Our char­ac­ter pan­els will also be sub­di­vided into tabs based upon our mit­i­ga­tions and damage-output. Minor  but pos­i­tive changes!
  • At least 3 skir­mishes will be based in Mirk­wood / Dol Gul­dur, and are designed for those at the new level cap of 65.

Thanks to the Mad­house Tavern’s brief write-up of Krispy’s hands-on with the expan­sion, it seems that:

  • Crafters can make 1st Age legendaries.
  • Some class leg­endary skills which the player-base have deemed use­less, are being replcaed or modified.
  • You get to use war-machines dur­ing some of the quests/skirmishes!

Accessing Skirmishes

Isy posted this on November 6th, 2009. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Siege of Mirkwood.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2365

The lat­est, and penul­ti­mate devel­oper diary for skir­mishes, was  posted a short while ago on the offi­cial LotRO web­site. The arti­cle can be found HERE.

Some of the infor­ma­tion the diary con­veys has already been cov­ered in part by inter­views and devel­oper com­ments, but is still worth a read. In sum­mary: Read the rest of this entry »

Skirmishes, Storage and Mounts, Oh My!

Tony posted this on September 29th, 2009. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Siege of Mirkwood.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2202

Saluting on a Horse -- Yeah, that's right.

Salut­ing on a Horse — Yeah, that’s right.

Along with the date, Tur­bine has also posted up a few more devel­oper diaries con­cern­ing Siege of Mirk­wood. They’re really worth check­ing out.

Skir­mishes

Zom­bie Colum­bus has a two-page diary that cov­ers the new Skir­mish sys­tem. It will be fol­lowed by even more Skirmish-related diaries in the weeks to come. Be sure to read the whole arti­cle (it’s not too long and I found the sec­ond page to be espe­cially inter­est­ing), but here’s a bit on their vision for the system:

To cut right to the chase: Skir­mishes are short, acces­si­ble, ran­dom­ized, scal­able, story instances with incre­men­tal rewards. Why Skir­mishes became this can best be explained by dis­cussing what the designer’s goals for the sys­tem are. Every­thing we added to Skir­mishes was done with a high level “vision” in mind. By shar­ing this vision with you, I hope that you will see why we made the choices we did, and how we ended up where we are now. Our goals were to:

  • Cre­ate finely crafted instance con­tent that can be played by dif­fer­ent group sizes and levels.
  • Keep play-time short, allow­ing Skir­mishes to fit into other activ­ity cycles. Inter­nally we’ve called them– “Pop-corn” expe­ri­ences. If one is short and good, why not try another?
  • Add ran­dom­ized ele­ments into Skir­mishes to keep replays interesting.
  • Encour­age a rota­tional play of Skir­mishes, to keep them fresh and pre­vent them from over­shad­ow­ing exist­ing playstyles. Skir­mishes should com­ple­ment the game, not alter it!
  • Set up an incre­men­tal reward struc­ture, like the instance barter systems.
  • Allow play­ers to feel that any amount of play time was a step closer to a desired reward.
  • Give play­ers a feel­ing of par­tic­i­pat­ing in epic strug­gles, and of being lead­ers of small armies.

I like the idea of Skir­mishes. In some ways, it’s like hav­ing a Leg­endary NPC in addi­tion to a Leg­endary Weapon. I’m always big on ran­dom­iza­tion in MMORPGs and I hope that Tur­bine con­sid­ers using it in more addi­tions in the future.

Stor­age

By now you’ve prob­a­bly heard about the addi­tion of Shared Stor­age, but Tur­bine is offer­ing more details (and some images) of the sys­tem in action. I like the over­all con­ve­nience of it, espe­cially because the it hooks into the exist­ing Vault sys­tem. You can trans­fer items to and fro as you please. It can even han­dle bound items, although as you may expect, only the char­ac­ter who that item is bound to will be able to see it.

Shared Storage in Action

Shared Stor­age in Action

Mounts

This change is a big deal, in my opin­ion, as it really opens up a lot of future poten­tial for mount use. The Devel­oper Diary on these changes is the most inter­est­ing to me, espe­cially because it gets a bit heav­ier into how and why Tur­bine makes design and usabil­ity decisions.

For those inter­ested in the end-results, the new sys­tem most directly offers the following:

Read the rest of this entry »