What LOTRO can learn from GW2 and vice-versa.
massively.joystiq.com/2012/09/08/the-road-to-...
massively.joystiq.comPosted Sep 10, 2012, 3:27 PM UTC
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massively.joystiq.comInteresting article. I don't play GW2 so I'll refrain from commenting on improvements to that.
None of the things the author listed I really want that badly. I don't find all the systems that complicated, since they are introduced at different levels as you progress through the game and not all at once. Occasional achievements I doubt would change my play behavior, and I'd probably never lower my level.
If only Turbine could do a revamp on housing, more hobbies, cosmetic weapons, and other things that I want :P
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Yeah, the only feature that the article mentioned which would be a killer feature for me is dualspecs (storing multiple sets of traits). I feel this could be done much like outfits with your default spec (which we all already have) initially unlocked and then ~500 TP for each additonal spec. My (first) character is a Rune Keeper so I would benefit massively from the ability to switch between healer and thunder traits depending on if I'm in a raid or soloing. I'm sure other classes would benefit from it too.
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One thing that I think Lotro does far better than GW2 is the organization of the crafting. If I'm leveling up my tailor, I don't really need to see everything that I've ever done in the previous tiers; I just want to focus on my current crafting level.
As they noted, however, Lotro can learn quite a bit from GW2. One point they didn't mention was the individual resource nodes. The fact that everyone can mine from a single node and not have to fight for it is simply amazing.
That and of course the open-tagging system. I'm glad Turbine will implement it in Rohan and hopefully we'll see it in other areas as well.
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I agree on both the resource nodes and the open tagging. There must be multiple concerns in implementing this by developers. Some are likely technical, and some may be game play and balance issues.
The balance issues should be relaxed and the focus put on fun. Its not fun to play an MMO and wish that another player wasn't there so you could have gathered the resource node in question. This makes me wish other players would just fuck off. Plus the tagging issue, diminishing XP from mobs that someone else has hit even when you have it tagged.
I don't have to wait for the beer to respawn at the grocery store after some guy came in and grabbed it before me. Can you imagine the bloodshed?
Take those away and you foster a community that is generally much more happy to see another player come along and help out. You can't help that some people may be dicks, but you can make it less annoying.
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I've been playing GW2 since RoR was delayed. It is fun for rolling Alt, running around and fighting. But not much else, in what I have experienced.
Also I completely disagree that Lotro is too complex. Sounds like the complaining of people who like being spoon fed their gaming experience. I find Lotro's skills, traits and leveling experience to be a smooth transistion and it lends itself to customizations within the confined of the classes. Which is another thing I think Lotro does that GW2 and a lot of other MMOs do wrong; make the classes very specific and have a purpose.
Overall GW2 and Lotro are both great from my experience, Lotro being 6 years experience and GW2 being 6 days... but they are not really the same at all, and cater to very different audiences.
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The one mechanic I did have a hard time wrapping my head around at first was LIs. Once I understood it, I realized it wasn't a big deal, but coming to it fresh was a little intimidating. I had to read a bunch of outside sources (forum posts, ect.) and ask my kinmates a bunch of questions to get it.
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How about the single most compelling reason to play The Lord of the Rings Online, which is, the fact that it's actually possible to give a damn about the setting and plot. The thing that kills me about Guild Wars 2 is that it feels like playing two games that have been incoherently smashed together: the first game is a single-player adventure RPG where you and a small number of (non-player) characters are working together to accomplish some structured goal, and the other is a Korean grind-fest.
I read a rather apt observation from one of the Guild Wars 2 developers a long time ago, that showing the player a window with ~three paragraphs of text before they're sent out to kill ~fifteen orcs isn't storytelling. But then, going to the vicinity of a quest-giver, having some set of objectives displayed in a tracker, and concluding with a short in-game mail message thanking you for finishing the quest it isn't storytelling either. I know that you can talk to the quest-giver, but every time I've done it so far, I'm treated with a descriptive laundry-list of things that need to be done in the area, not a reason to care while doing so.
A text box of justification for killing ten boars isn't storytelling, but damn if I didn't get a huge soft spot for Amarthiel.
(Also, I really hate the combat mechanics in Guild Wars 2.)
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Have you done much of the personal story? I think that's where the story-telling really shines with all the cut-scenes and whatnot.
Also, out of curiosity, what did you find disagreeable with the combat?
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Yeah, the personal quests are what I mean by "a single-player adventure RPG," and if that were the extent of the questing experience, then I'd agree that they have good storytelling, at least for a single-player game. (The ethically unscrupulous gnomes were the only race I could stand, though I didn't play a viking.) However, the world and public quests are just so fucking bad that it tarnishes the overall experience. Like being served a nice steak, topped with a fly and maggot reduction.
I think the other comment I have for the personal story is that it's I think actually bad to have that be the focus of an MMORPG. Think about LotRO: I consider Moria to be about the pinnacle of MMO storytelling (though, I've only ever played to Lothlorien, so I have no idea about Mirkwood or Isengard). The plotting is coherent, the situation is dire, and you feel like an important (but not the singularly important) part of the story. It doesn't clash with your knowledge that other people are there in Moria doing things, because you're a cog in the dwarfish colonization and battle plans, but at least you're an important cog. (Especially since even a cursory play of Dwarf Fortress will teach you a lot about the reliability of dwarves.)
What I played of the personal story, the furthest of which I got was to level 12 on a gnome (in synergetics, if you're curious), and a few things occurred to me. First, the actual story is about my character, but this is an MMORPG. It's not even like it felt like it was my character in a world of other characters, like it does in Moria, I felt like everything I was doing was orthogonal to the world, that I was off in my own little world. And, as an occasional fan of Final Fantasy, I don't have any objections to that, but why am I doing it on the Internet?
The second was that, in an MMORPG, the world has to be as much a character as the characters themselves. The basic reason is that you're expected to inhabit this world for hundreds of hours. The personal story was, true to its name, developing characters, but not developing the world. Maybe it does later on, but any writer of anything will tell you that the hook is one of the most important elements. The overall shitiness of the world quests gave me a foreboding sense that they weren't going to be developing the world, or that the world would be taken largely for granted. This is totally the norm for MMORPGs: what passes for development in Azeroth is just poaching, mostly from Warhammer, and worldbuilding in Telara seems to have not gotten very far past working out what the six planes would be called.
As far as combat goes, weapon switching was a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. All your abilities have independent cooldowns, even across weapons, which makes it appear that the best strategy is to burn all your cooldowns, then toggle weapons. (For at least the normal, shorter-duration cooldowns, there doesn't seem to be an argument against this, except maintenance of sanity.) The UI works heavily against this sort of behavior, though, as all the icons look the same, and there's no other good visual indicator of which weapon set you're using at any particular time. Instead, when I tried doing this, the only indication I had of my weapons was what happened when I activated something.
Given the choices of tedium and frustration or being hamstrung by the mechanics and the UI, I opted to make a thief, because their energy system ("initiative?") makes all that irrelevant. But then I ran into the problem that initiative is the only interesting thing about the thief.
Strange, since all this could've been avoided by not doing their "we're only going to give you ten primary buttons!" thing, because, y'know, as every MMORPG ever teaches us, people are incapable of handling large numbers of buttons.
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"What LotRO needs from GW2: Easy-to-understand character building system"
easy mode skill system are great, arent they? Thats also, why everyone loves the D3 skillsystem
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For all the updates LOTRO releases there have always been quite a few bugs. I'm glad they have pushed back the release of RoR.
Another good thing about GW2 is the developers listen to the players ideas about things. PvP is woeful in LOTRO, has been for quite a while and it6's taken this many years for them to have a look at it.
Mounts would be shiny but in a way I don't mind the teleporting to waypoints and running across the landscape - there could be something going on or about to start and you may not know about it if you leave the area too quickly.
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"What LotRO needs from GW2: Downleveling"
Nah, if I;m going to gear myself out I want to visit earlier regions that were a pain my ass blow shit up. The idea is cool but at the same time It's not for me.
They could make it so you can control it yourself. Say you want to go mine some ore in lower level zones, you could leave yourself at a higher level and pleasantly ignore everything, just as you do today. You can't quite do that in most MMOs. If you walk on top of a low level mob in most other games they will attack you and annoy you. I like the way Lotro handles this, something I think they get right.
But if I want to help out someone leveling and I only have level 75s, its boring to go out there, for both myself and the person I'm helping turn quests in for. If I could set my effective level to 25 or whatever it would be fun. They could give rewards out in the form of marks or medallions or what have you instead of exp if you are at max level. So long as it doesn't become too attractive to farm.
Also, this would make it viable to run old ignored dungeons. They said it takes a lot of time to make dungeons scalable. Maybe it would be faster to scale the characters instead of the dungeons, until the dungeons could be scaled.
And that's what I have to say about that.
Oh yeah, if you could turn it off that would be great because it gives you an option...I dig that.
I play gw and lotro and down levelling is pretty cool and works really well.
Your level scales down but you keep your higher level abilities so you are still 'better' than a player naturally at that level.
The only downside is that rewards don't scale but on the bright side you still get xps for playing in the lower zone