After cruising through well over 6 hours of gameplay in Turbine’s latest creation, I felt it important to write this short guide to assist beginners in making certain they don’t miss the forest for the trees. 1. Hear no evil??? Create some evil.
Have you noticed that this MMO seems to have a whole lot of musical instruments lying around? Did you miss the fact that at level 5 you will find yourself able to learn to play a musical instrument? If you chose to be a minstrel… well… you could play all of the weapons found in the game.
I will be honest: it took me some time to realize that those random notes people were fooling around with could actually turn into real music – not just real music, but actual recognizable songs. In the LOTRO forums, they even have a sticky showing you how to play the various songs found in game, songs ranging from Sweet Child of Mine to the theme from Super Mario Brothers. I am actually curious if anybody could get in trouble recreating copywriter music, but my guess is it’s highly unlikely.
This is certainly an optional thing to play around with inside of the gaming world, but it is something unique, something I myself didn’t realize until many days into my playing. It will not be for everybody, but it is an example of the power of immersion and community in LOTRO.
(Note: As of this writing, we are days away from the Shores of Evendim free content download which will offer new advances in the music making arena.)
2. Finally an MMO for the anti-social.
I have been very public at 2404 about my dislike of the MMORPG genre, for a variety of reasons, one of which has been my extreme hesitance to interact with strangers. Most MMOs have only a shell of a solo experience before forcing you to join a group.
Now, while I will not lie and say that every quest can be a solo adventure in LOTRO, I think there are enough solo and group quests to please everybody. In fact, the way this game is set up, you may find yourself joining a fellowship to pass a few quests before going back to your own solo path.
The structure of LOTRO is that some quests, no matter how easy they may appear, simply cannot be completed by one’s self, especially during the early portions of the game, i.e. before level 20. This is the point where many solo enthusiasts stop playing the game. Typically, grouping equates to less loot and less experience as well as having to share rewards.
I am happy to say to those people that they need to not be so hasty in their judgments of this game. In my experience, to date, I have come across a handful of quests in LOTRO which I have been unable to complete by myself. Often in traveling to the quest, I would see people hanging out outside of the main destination, waiting to team up with like-minded gamers. You see, it really is as easy as joining or forming a fellowship, finishing the quest, and then ending the fellowship. While you will need to split the loot and experience earned while in the fellowship, you won’t have to share the ultimate reward for completion of the quest or the experience that comes with it, (unless you want to share the quest, of course).
I found myself doing this for the larger story related quests and occasionally when I found a signature enemy that simply was too much for my champion to defeat. In one respect, in being forced to occasionally team up in this manner, I have found it to be a convenient and acceptable manner to play in, and it has allowed me to advance my character.
3. The Grind, killing me slowly, one rat at a time….
Ah yes, my old enemy the Grind, destroyer of fun and overall boredom/coma inducer. The Grind, for those not down with the chant, is where you go off and kill monster after monster for hours, gaining enough experience to grind out a new level. cNearly every MMO on the market deals with this nuisance, but LOTRO seems to be on to something. Grinding in LOTRO will certainly gain you experience points, but at such a slow rate that you would spend hours and hours killing hordes of monsters just to start getting close to a new level.
The main way to gain experience in LOTRO is through completing the quests of the game. Quests that you accept are often given a color value to show their difficulty, with impossibly tough quests being one color (purple) or really simple quests being a different color (green). The tougher the quest you complete, the more experience you get, but often you are getting in one quest what may take hours killing hordes to accomplish. This is also a good thing, as you will find that most of the powerful items you find outside of shops will be handed over in quests.
However, if you enjoy combat and persevere, you will be able to earn yourself some nice extras. Often, killing a requisite number of a certain type of creature will earn your character a title. If you keep killing after your title, you may be gifted with a new trait or even a trait specific to your character class which is often a highly desirable thing. Earning these traits will not be easy, and I usually just earn them through normal gameplay, but if you enjoy grinding, you will get somewhat of a reward for it.
4. What is this? No PvP in LOTRO? Say it isn’t so.
It isn’t so… well, after a sort, anyway. Currently, players in LOTRO online are restricted from doing more than dueling each other for fun. You will find no real mechanism for pitting your normal character against someone else’s character.
There is something included in the game known as Monster Play, a very nice feature which adds an entirely new layer to the gameplay experience. With Monster Play, you will find yourself, after reaching level 10 and finding a fell pool, with the ability to take on the role of a soldier in the evil armies. These monsters range from Orcs to Wargs and will set you up with highly powerful monsters with which to wage war against the Free Peoples of Middle Earth.
In these wars, high level PCs and NPCs will wage war for points of power, which, once captured, provide solid staging areas for further raids. You may wonder why even bother doing this; well, this is where serious prestige and street cred will be earned. This portion of the game is not mandatory, but it is accessible early on, at least for playing as a monster. While I was initially put off by this, I do enjoy now being able to become one of the monster races for some serious raiding.
While in monster form, you will find that your destiny points are all that you truly earn. This means that, as a monster, you can actually come to monster play and stockpile these points, which I have found come in handy in all sorts of combat situations, as well as just making my running faster. As a monster, these destiny points are used to make your monster even more powerful, which, when you consider how powerful you will be from the beginning of Monster Play, means that you can seriously cause some damage to other players.
I know this is not the true PvP that many gamers enjoy, but it is the best form of PvP for everybody but the most hardcore, and I personally think this keeps more in line with what Tolkien would have envisioned if he were around today. This Monster play keeps the PvP aspect playable from early on, while giving normal characters something to strive for, as the PvP areas are for only the highest-level characters.
5. Almost $15 a month to make boots?
The ability to craft items in games has been around for some time now and can be found in nearly every major MMO title on the market today. As a perpetual fighter yourself, you may wonder what allure there is to craft items in LOTRO. Well the answer is simple: no reason… and every reason.
From a very early level, regardless of where you start, you will have the opportunity to pick up a trade, from being a prospector, weapons or armor smith, to a scholar who seeks out ruins and scraps of text. For the sake of my guide, I chose to make armor. Now, once you choose your profession, you are given a number of recipes, some basic tools and sent off to learn your trade. While I may make armor, I also gain access to prospecting (mining for ore), as well as tailoring (doing the leather work to attach to your armor) and, of course, the armor-making ability. The interesting thing about crafting armor is that it is a multi-step process, by which you are forced to mine the ore, smelt it into useful bits, and then you need to add the leather bits to the metal to finally craft real armor.
While this may sound easy, it will require you to venture out in search of ore to mine, and some of the ore is not always easy to find. Then again, for the laziest of us, you can always just purchase your resources from the many players ranging throughout the land. Now, the biggest challenge is that although you can prepare and make armor, when it comes to leather, you do not have the skill to boil leather. This task requires a forester, which means you will either have to buy the leather or, I dare say, interact with other players to get the proper materials for your recipes. The best approach is to find a forester who needs ingots or some other metal worked and do a trade, task for task. This is actually the true key to making crafting easy, as the private market for these items or services is often ten times cheaper than the auction house market.
Some gamers may not like the idea of having to interact and sometimes rely on others, but this is what being part of a community is all about. The synergy, or the symbiotic nature of these types of games, should draw you in. Stay tuned for part 2 of my guide to LOTRO, when I will discuss the Shores of Evendim content, as well as give you the final 5 things you may not know or understand about LOTRO.
