The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Review: Part Two

 

Note: This review is broken up into two parts. In the first half, we covered the early game, levels 1-25. In this half we will be covering the later levels, and the end game beyond. If you haven’t read Part One yet, you can find it [over here].

The Honeymoon is Over

We had such a good thing going, you and I. I honestly thought that it was true love. And yet, now it ends in divorce.

Where did we all go wrong?

Was it your plethora of quests? Your relatively faithful interpretation of the world of Middle-Earth? Or, perhaps, the ease and intuitiveness of your gameplay?

No… like so many divorces, it’s impossible to pinpoint any one single element that brought the relationship to ruin. It was a combination of things. Let’s just call it…

Irreconcilable Differences

I hit level 50 some time ago. Since then, I’ve been partaking of the usual activities of a capped out player in an MMO: Leveling alts, farming for gold, gearing up for raids, and, of course, waiting for a patch.

Man oh man, was I ever waiting for a patch.

The cracks in the game’s polished veneer had begun to show through even as I was wrapping up Part One of this review, when I was still under level 40. Don’t even get me started on how many horrible, horrible quests there are in the North Downs.

At the time I was seriously considering knocking points off of the score, as I could see the quality of the game dropping precipitously with no recovery in sight. But, as Part One was meant to be a review of levels 1-25, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I felt that I had to leave the rating untouched.

Aside from which, even I’m not so jaded that I wasn’t willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and hold off on any rush to condemnation until at least the first major content patch. Perhaps Turbine was well aware of the late game’s shortcomings, and intended to fix them shortly after launch, when most of their playerbase would only just be starting to experience them.

That patch has now come and gone, having resolved few of the prior issues, and at the same time creating a host of entirely new ones.

So it is now, with a clear conscience but a heavy heart, that I may write what I must:

LOTRO turns into a Tolkien-themed Asian grinder after level 40.

There. I said it.

Don’t get me wrong… I’ve got nothing at all against a game ratcheting up the difficulty in the later levels. If LOTRO were the same at level 50 as it was at level 1, they may as well have implemented a level scaling system like Oblivion.

But, this is not mere difficulty adjustment; this is blatant, unapologetic, make-work time sink generation.

I don’t go throwing around accusations like that about a game lightly, so, allow me to introduce you to two of the prime suspects which would cause me to say such a thing:

Legendary Traits

The grind that had been so refreshingly absent in the early portion of the game manifests itself with a vengeance once you hit level 40 and your Legendary Trait slots are unlocked.

Anyone who ever played FFXI into the later levels will undoubtedly recall, less-than-fondly, the concept of “genkai.” For those of you who skipped FFXI (a wise decision on your part), in a nutshell, every five levels after 50, you were forced to complete a mindless, soul-numbing quest in order to further increase the level cap of your character.

These quests often involved agonizingly long camp sessions which were impossible to solo, forcing your team to wait for hours on a rare drop item to materialize so that you could run half way across the world and repeat the process all over again.

Now, imagine that instead of having to do that every five levels, you had to do it just to train your best skills after level 40.

Welcome to the Legendary Trait portion of LOTRO.

Skills available from your class trainer dry up in the late thirties. We were at first mystified as to how we were meant to advance our characters after that… Until it became apparent that Turbine intended for the attainment of Legendary Traits to take the place of standard training.

Obtaining Legendary Traits is a three step process, each more painful than the last:

1: Find (or buy off of the auction house at exorbitant expense) a rare drop book from a random level 39+ humanoid, somewhere in the world.

2: Find (or buy off of the auction house at exorbitant expense) four rare drop pages for said book, somewhere in the world.

3: Finally, just to make quite certain that not only you, but also five of your closest friends are going to be wasting time, find four more pages which are not only rare, but also no-trade, and only drop from level 40+ elites.

[EDIT: People flaming me over on the LOTRO boards have kindly pointed out that I am full of hyperbole and BS, as many Legendary Traits do not require camping elite mobs for pages. See, I need friends like you when I'm writing an article. When I asked mine to proofread, they all said they couldn't find any mistakes. Incidently, I would like to weigh in on your critiques of my critique, but unfortunately I no longer have an active account. Feel free to use the comments form at the bottom of this page.]

To give you a ballpark figure of how long getting these pages takes (this is personal experience, and your mileage may vary):

A friend of mine obtained one of the aforementioned books on her Burglar, and a quick check of Allakhazam revealed that half of the pages she needed dropped from a certain type of elite spider in North Trollshaws. As we all had quests for these spiders anyway, we selflessly volunteered to assist her.

Over the next six hours of farming, our team got the deeds Spider Slayer for 120 kills, Spider Slayer Advanced for 240 kills, and finished five Fellowship quests.

The Burglar got one page.

We kindly informed her that perhaps she should get into the market for some new friends, as we were never returning to that place again for so long as we lived.

In all fairness, you do get one Legendary Trait for free, as a reward for your level 45 class quest, no pages involved. Of course, once you see the requirements, you’ll be begging for a nice, easy six hour farm.

Deeds

In the first part of this review, I gave an example of a Slayer Deed for killing 60 slugs in the Shire. At the time, I thought that was a good rounded number. About 30 to 45 minutes, depending on spawn rate, to complete. Not too high, not too low, based on the relatively small bonuses Virtues award.

What I didn’t mention in Part One is that the number of mobs that you have to kill for deeds doubles roughly every ten levels. If you’ve ever heard that old story about compound interest with a penny doubling daily, you can see where this is going already.

From 30 for the Title and 60 for the Virtue when first starting out, it goes to 60 and 120, 120 and 240, 180 and 360, and, so far the highest I’ve seen, 240 and 480.

No, you didn’t read that wrong. In the later levels you are going to have to kill 720 of the same mob to attain a modicum of improvement for your character.

It could of course be argued that both high level Deeds and Legendary Traits are purely optional—so long as you’re willing to forfeit your character’s best skills—and the people being masochists by just having to get them are bringing the pain upon themselves willingly, thus being unworthy of sympathy.

That may very well be true… but Turbine did not market the game to masochists. They marketed it as the kinder, gentler, “play it after work” MMO. The MMO someone with a family working 60 hours a week could enjoy just as well as the unemployed college student who plays 60 hours a week.

As far as I’m concerned, turning the end game into a massive grind is at best a betrayal of the spirit of the early levels, and at worst, a bait and switch on the playerbase.

Now, I’d like to touch on some of the issues I said I’d cover more in-depth in Part One:

Instances

The instances in LOTRO are, by and large, extremely repetitive in nature, confusingly laid out, and poorly itemized… which is rarely, if ever, a good combination.

The first major instance you encounter in the game is The Great Barrows. It’s hard to screw up a hole in the ground with dead guys in it, and, overall, I felt it was largely true to the description in the books. You could get lost for hours in its claustrophic twisting hallways, interspersed with larger caverns here and there.

So far, so good.

The problems begin at the next two instances after The Great Barrows: Garth Agarwen, and Fornost.

Despite the fact that both of them are ostensibly outdoors, the majority of their areas are made up of the exact same twisting, narrow passageways (but not quite claustrophic, as you can see the sky overhead), intersperced by the occasional larger open areas that you already came to know and love in the Barrows.

But unlike the Barrows, where such a layout is befitting of a catacomb, the mazelike structure of Garth and Fornost only serve as a refresher course in linear level design, chokepoint after chokepoint leading you by the nose from one repetitive encounter to another, eventually reaching a boss when you come to a dead end, whose loot (if they have any at all) is so uninspiring as to make the entire journey feel a wasted venture.

As for the bosses themselves, in nearly every case the differences between them were minimal. Not unlike their quest archetypes, Turbine chose not to go out on a limb with AI or scripting, and, as a result, nearly every encounter seems to follow three distinct patterns:

A: The boss will summon adds every thirty seconds.

B: The boss will stand there and let you hit them until they’re dead, using their special ability every thirty seconds.

C: The boss will summon adds and use their special ability every thirty seconds.

Option A was, by far, the most common choice. This got predictable to the point that before every fight we’d say, “Alright. You know the drill. MT on the boss, assist OT on the adds.”

These factors, among others, added up to the point that I am not exaggerating when I say that I have played through better dungeons in MUDs, over ten years ago. When a guy in his underwear sitting in his mother’s basement writing mudcode in Notepad is outdesigning a title with an entire extra dimension and a budget in the millions, something is seriously wrong.

Raids

So, obviously, I wasn’t particularly fond of the instances. That’s fine. Generally I’m not a real “small dungeon crawl” type as far as MMOs are concerned, anyway. I’m a raider. I love the feeling of leading my guild into the unknown, getting them working together like a well-oiled machine, and taking down an encounter that has never known defeat.

Through it all, the book grinds, the 720 mob deeds, the repetitive instances, my guild and I held on to the glimmer of hope that the forthcoming raids would be the panacea that would cure all of our ills with the game.

If Turbine really nailed raid content, perhaps all could be forgiven.

In the end, the only thing that got nailed was us.

On patch day I rallied my guild together for a raid on Helegrod. They didn’t need much encouragement. We had been awaiting this moment for weeks, collecting the best available gear, maxing out our Traits and Virtues, hoarding potions and scrolls from our scholars… If anybody was ready, it was us.

In true LOTRO style, every member of the raid had a dozen quests a piece for the new instance, and we were all looking forward to the phat lewt and good times that the new encounters were sure to provide.

That is, until we actually got inside.

There we were, 24 people with a dozen quests a piece. Quests, which we rapidly discovered, mostly required item collection… in particular, items that only dropped from bosses. Once per kill.

Meaning, if everyone in the raid wanted to complete a particular quest, we were going to have to kill the same boss…

Two. Dozen. Times.

In all of my considerable years playing MMOs, I am hard-pressed to recall any dungeon that I ran two dozen times, even during those dark days in WoW when the only thing to do was blitz through UBRS to get people their Onyxia keys.

Still, we could live with that. Not everyone can complete every quest, making the rewards different and unique for the ones who did. If the combat was up to par, and the encounters were challenging and engaging, we could forgive a lot.

In an epic night in which near-lethal levels of caffeine and tens of thousands of calories worth of junk food were consumed, we fought our way tooth and nail through the Dwarf fortress, searching for the evil within.

The first boss we came across was a rather unfriendly looking spider, so we quickly got down to the business of cheering it up by killing it.

After several false starts, involving the encounter resetting itself, and the spider death touching the entire raid for no apparent reason, we soon thereafter savored the sweet taste of victory, and were rewarded by a large and conspicuous treasure chest which mysteriously appeared atop the spider’s dead body.

Despite the fact that such overt displays of magic as a spider swallowing a treasure chest whole were not supposed to be such common occurances in the world of Middle-Earth, we decided we could let this one slide.

Upon opening the chest, there was much oohing and ahhing–and several groans–as it was revealed that the chest contained one quest item, and one pair of gloves for the Loremaster armor set. Bind on pickup. And we didn’t have any Loremasters in the raid.

Still, they had to be worth something at the vendor. So, we rolled for greed… and, immediately thereafter, the chest vanished into thin air, taking the loot with it.

Alright, alight… that was just an isolated incident, we told ourselves… Patch night jitters…. Surely they’ll have a hotfix for that in the morning. We didn’t need those gloves, anyway. We elected to press on.

We came to the next boss, an equally unfriendly looking giant, eager to try again.

We got him down to 30%… to 20%… then, under 5%, on the very cusp of victory, when we were already discussing loot distribution, and pronouncing a curse on the designers should we get any more Loremaster gloves… he entered into Anti-Exploit Mode and healed to full. He then proceeded to stand there doing nothing for half an hour as we attempted in vain to reset him, whereupon he, too, promptly vanished without a trace.

Most of my guild cancelled their subscriptions the next day.

Crafting

Do you enjoy spending dozens, even hundreds of hours of your life farming for materials from heavily camped rare spawn mobs, only to have the one-time use recipe it took forever to find produce a sub-par item inferior to quest rewards?

Then the world of Master crafting in LOTRO is for you.

Even with the best crafting equipment, the critical component item, and a buff from a scholar, you are never guaranteed a “critical success” item, which are, in general, the only items in the game superior to quest rewards, or even five man instance drops.

I haven’t met many designers who would think it fun and endearing to players to have them spend all day grinding out a level, only to have a 50% chance that once they got there, their character would spontaneously combust and they’d end up back where they started.

Who thought that it would be fun to use that system for crafting?

I understand the need to reduce mudflation and keep prices for player-made items at a reasonable level, but in this case, the ends do not justify the means. There are many other routes they could have taken to reduce the commonality of high-quality player crafted items without resorting to causing outright frustration… for instance, making armor bind on use. As it is now, my Armorer friend can see a suit he crafted be sold in perpetuity… not exactly good for repeat business.

Monster Play

I had originally intended to write a thorough deconstruction of the PvM system in this half of the review, but, as it’s turning out to be longer than I had expected, I will have to keep it blunt and to the point:

I hope that Turbine has big plans for Monster Play once the rest of the world starts opening up in future expansions and new zones become available for it… but, at the moment it seems like nothing more than a ham-fisted attempt to appease the PvP demographic, tacked on at the eleventh hour almost as an afterthought.

Even as an afterthought, Turbine was forced to dance a fine line, attempting to provide enough incentive for people to participate in it, while at the same time not providing so much incentive that it produced a considerable edge for participants over more pacifist players, who would then whine about it without cease.

In the end, it seems that their solution was to render the system almost completely irrelevant beyond the borders of the small zone which PvM is confined to.

The Final Word

So, having just spent the last ten pages ravaging it, do I still think that LOTRO is a good game? Absolutely… up to and including level 35. After that… You’d be better off waiting for the first expansion, when the rest of the game will hopefully start to arrive.

I’m sure that the rest of LOTRO will be as good as its beginning is in due time—they’re undoubtly going to get rid of the grind two seconds after they feel it no longer needed to buy them time to fully develop the end game—but it certainly isn’t now.

After ten years of playing “release now, patch later” games, and hoping beyond hope that LOTRO would be the light shining in the darkness, now is what matters to this reviewer.

Part Two Rating: 3/5
Recommendation: If you buy it, play casual, and pretend the level cap is 40.