Yes, I am rushing through Lord of the Rings Online. There’s way too much exciting stuff happening in EverQuest 2 to stay away much longer; the release of Neriak and the dark Fae; Kunark coming in the fall; LotRO has to be done and finished by then.
Book 3 deals with the fight of the Dunadain — the Rangers — against the tide of evil creatures coming from the North. They have taken over the ancient city of Fornost and are spread throughout the plains of Dol Dinan.
Chapter 1 is just finding the Ranger stronghold of Esteldin. Chapter 2 sends you to the ruins of Fornost to scout out the place and take down some orcs and wargs while there. Chapter 3, 4 and 5 are calls to the Men, Dwarves and Elves to come to a council in Esteldin; these can be done in any order, but most everyone does Dwarves (Saving Dori), Man (Defending Trestlebridge), and Elf (I’ve forgotten the name of it :P)
Saving Dori goes to the same ruins outside Othrikar filled with elite dwarves who are holding a good dwarf (wait, there are good ones?) who would definitely go to the council if he were, like, free. But the bad dwarves have filled his calendar with progress meetings, working lunches, video conferences and strategy sessions. Our job was to cut all the red tape and free him from his cubicle deep inside the dwarf fortress.
The Men of Trestlebridge would LOVE to come, except orcs just HAD to pick this time to come a-raiding. And maybe if we could take a few minutes and just kill a few hundred of them, well, maybe they could see their way clear to sending a rep to the council. This is an instance taking place entirely in the trestle bridge outside Trestlebridge. Pretty fun, not that hard.
The Elves are eager to attend but they, too, have an orc problem; pretty much the same orcs that need to die for the Black-fire quests. Black-fire. Oh, is that their name for gunpowder? Why does every fantasy work have someone who “discovers” gunpowder but feels the need to give it a silly name? “Boomdust!” “Talcum of Death!” “Black-fire!” “Fire dirt!”… whatever.
Anyway, once all their problems have been taken care of — for the moment — and everyone has run back and forth over North Downs a few dozen times, the Rangers send you to Rivendell to chat with Gandalf.
Forty seven hours later… loooong run…. Gandalf says, “Hi! Here’s Book 4! You’ll notice it’s red to you! Bye! Stablemaster won’t rent you a horse so run, fool, RUUUUUNNNN!”
It’s a short book. Five more to go, I think.
Someone wrote that no matter what armor they got, it all kinda matched and never looked patchwork.
I think I’ve proven that wrong here.
I would have made level 32 tonight but they took the server down, so I went onto EQ2 and finished my Shimmering Citadel access quest.
Huh? What do you mean, you can get in without it???
Heh, what makes you think “gun powder” isn’t a silly word too? Only the fact that you grew up with the word.
Still, I agree, it does grate when you have to hear somebody in a game talk about their “boom stick” and the like.
I hear ya about EQ2. I logged in again the other night after a month or so off and realize how much I have to do before Kunark goes live (my main is still L58 and I just started KoS this week). But LotRO will be great fun until then.
Congrats on finishing another book!
I happily look forward to walking along the pebble river dodging running quadravores until I get to the greengrow squares where the double meter sharpedge-equipped bipeds are preparing to invade giant stone cloud house. I shall use my pointysticker and my small left armwall with great skill and efficacy.
Gene Wolfe in his “New Sun” books decided to switch the language around like that (though maybe not so much), but he did it to remind readers that the Earth of fifty thousand years from now was a vastly different place…
They could have called it black powder.
Hello,
I am thinking about picking up LOTRO. I currently am playing EQ2. After reading your post, I have concerns that LOTRO is not worth me picking up. Will it hold my attention? Do you like the combat system? What is the best thing about the game for you?
Thanks!!!
Best thing about LotRO is the gorgeous graphics. Worst things are the repetitive gameplay and its linearity. Last night I thought about logging into LotRO where my quests included killing wargs and goblins in the North Downs, or killing bears in the Trollshaws — the same quests I’ve had in every zone since I don’t know when.
LotRO is fun, and in a good group can be a lot of fun, but you just do the same damn things over and over and over.
I never expected it to be an EQ2 killer that would drag me away from my favorite game for very long. I think it would be worth trying for anyone. It really is a pretty game.
Well have to wait and see what the expansion brings to Lotro in terms of new content but in a way I don’t mind if I get bored with the game after 6 months. I quite like the idea of “finishing with” a game and feeling free to move on to something else. Doubt if the developers would be so pleased to hear that though.
Would they? I have long said that World of Warcraft’s success is at least partially because you don’t have to devote years of your life to it. You can see every single thing WoW has in six months of fairly constant play; level up two chars from 1-70 and raid with one of them.
I believe the LotRO devs designed the game around a six-month plan. With all these MMOs out or arriving and just so many hours in a day, people WANT games which are casual enough to let you play several.