Find us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter

Opinion

To the Editor:

Poetry & Art

Classified Ads

Back Issues

Blogs

The mines of "more"-ia

Greg Dewar
The Commuter

Monday, May 18, 2009

Giving The Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) a second chance wasn’t easy. I’d been clean and free of MMOs since January and my grades had bumped up because of it. No more World of Warcraft clogging my veins and filling my mind with the duress of trying to keep up in gear and status with other players. Because after all, that’s what MMOs are all about: showing off in the capital city.

But then the folks at Turbine, who developed and continue to develop LotRO, gave us a free week of play for players who had old accounts. And it was magic. I got a couple of my friends to play and they got hooked. Then I decided to get re-hooked because I got them hooked.

And then I bought the expansion pack “The Mines of Moria,” and my mind was blown. I don’t know what happened at Turbine, or who got put in charge of this expansion, but it is absolutely amazing in terms of storytelling and playability. Moria is awesome and truly magnificent to explore and quest in. The new legendary weapon system is a joy in and of itself.

Essentially, you start out with a third-age weapon from the main storyline quest. As you kill monsters and do certain quests, your weapon gains experience (because it’s just that awesome of a weapon). When it gains a level, you can allocate legacy points into beefing it up in various ways, which range from increased DPS (damage per second) to enhancing abilities. You can give it a title which can change its damage type or give it more damage against certain types of monsters. You can add gems, settings, and runes to your weapon to add stat bonuses and various other things. And every 10 levels you can re-forge it, take everything out and start over. Eventually you’ll find a better weapon, from the second or first age. At this point you can liquidate your current weapon and take a portion of its experience to spur along your new weapon. You can choose which weapons gain experience. You can equip up to seven weapons into your legacy slots. Fantastic.

The game, however, restarts out a little awkwardly. You mosey into the Eregion zone and it seems to be for about level 50. It’s only at the very far end of it that you discover Vol. II of the epic storyline. This is where it takes off. For all intents and purposes, Eregion seems to only exist to give people a level or two before they hit Moria. However, I’ve hardly seen anyone taking the time to do that. I see level 45s prancing through Vol. II and speeding off into Moria after their legendary weapons. Vol. II starts you out opening the gates to Moria by running a lot of your usual quests, albeit they seem to be easier and smaller; for instance, “kill three wolves” instead of the usual “kill 15 wolves.” It all comes together with you having to get a legendary weapon to be able to even hurt The Watcher that guards the Black Pool outside of Durin’s Door. It makes the weapons seem important and you get an amazing Watcher cut-scene before you fight him (it makes two more appearances later in the game).

It’s invigoration and new life that’s been breathed into the game, which was pretty good before, but was never terribly compelling. I don’t think people really got into or enjoyed the Angmar thing. But everyone knows what Moria is and wants to get inside it. The weapon system is fantastic in addition to the game being about 25 percent easier to level through. They also added class trait bonuses if you slot certain numbers of certain types (two of the Bowmaster type in Hunter class traits nets you five percent more critical damage).

New deeds, new loot, new instances, new ranks of traits, new legendary class traits… I’m literally giddy with anticipation of all I’ll accomplish while I’m logging on. I also got roughly half of The Commuter to log on to my server and play with me. As far as expansions go, it gets five crusty old Grand Marshals out of five. GG.

Comment

Commenting is closed for this article.