Fun is Subjective

Prior warning: This may turn out to be a long and meandering post. Yes, even more longwinded than I usually am.

I find that I must write this. To half-refute a biased post on the City of Heroes forum that our darling Statesman replied to, and hence alerted anyone who checks the Dev Digest. And to work away at a nagging ache in my brain that still can't really understand WHY.

Why what? Why I find myself currently deriving more enjoyment from the much-derided unoriginal and uninnovative LOTRO than the supposedly more "fun" and innovative CoX.

I suppose the short answer would be: Subjectivity. Or perhaps Perspective/Mindset. Novelty/Change. (More on the individual words later.)

Emotionally, I still can't come to terms with it. A part of my mind is screaming, "This is so not-new! This is lowest-common-denominator and a carbon copy clone of WoW and GW and Auto-Assault and CoX and practically every other MMO in the market! How can you be getting kicks out of this?"

The other part just shrugs. I know a portion of this part is the obsessive-compulsive part that can get jollies watching ProgressQuest (no joke), so I'm unsurprised that the addictive timesinky nature of standard MMO tropes has sunk its hook into it. If that was all, I'd be thrusting crucifixes at LOTRO and abjuring it to stay "Back, foul fiend, back whence you came!"

Thing is, this other portion is in the midst of threads of thought that read exactly like this post – wandering uncertainly between the boundary lines of Rationalization and Truth.

The obvious answer to why I am currently enjoying LOTRO more is simple. It's new. It's a change. It's something novel. I've essentially been playing CoX day in day out for more than two years (27 months veteran time and counting...) So for an Explorer, seeing and learning new shtuff always has a magnetic appeal. No surprise there. Since the beginning of time, I've gotten kicks out of visiting other non-SMAUG MUDs just to see how different they were and to learn and appreciate new game systems/rules.

Yet there's a bit more to the story than that. There's something personally enticing about the spice mix of LOTRO that other games didn't have. For example:

Auto-Assault was cute. The setting was pretty innovative and different to look at. The quests were terribly linear though and consisted of just driving from town to town doing errands or killing stuff. There was also a crafting minigame but the difficulty of accessing crafting stations and collecting enough gear to craft was off-putting. Difficulty level for the rest of the game? Pretty darned easy. No death penalty to speak of, mindless go-here-go-there-follow-the-arrows, an occassional tough/unique mission, and a map that zoomed you from place to place as needed. Ultimately impersonal – your avatar was a car, even though you could customize it tons. Greatest part of it was the intro videos of the three different races. Worth $15 subscription? No. I gauged it at $10 at most, for a solo singleplayer game / sidetrek amusement for a few months. Did they offer that? Nope. Sorry, buh-bye AA.

Conversely, DDO was worth the entrance fee and the free month. I think I paid for 3 months more than that, which was a bit over what it was worth to me, but well, I can't really begrudge them that. The setting was so-so. If they had used the Forgotten Realms and threw in some celebrities treated with respect, I might still be there... Dunno. My main turn-off with DDO was that everything was too reliant on a team. I'm one of those weirdos who require solo activities in an MMO. Partially due to timezone (you try putting together a team at 6.30am EST *grumbles*), and partially due to personality (introverts need time alone, dammit. Stop hugging me so closely.) and partially due to a desire for distance and annonymity (DDO players were addicted to voice chatting for some reason, and I felt distinctly uncomfortable with the thought of revealing my -female- -Asian- voice to pickup groups.) If I didn't team, I had nothing to do but run around in town for hours or play one or two beginner's dungeons which were a major struggle for a solo cleric.

I hear they eventually caved in and added a lot more solo-capable dungeons in later updates. Still, the latest updates only went up to lvl 6. At the heart of it, DDO is a game designed for a close-working team like a family or a set of RL friends or an online guild community already familiar with each other. Fair enough. After playing it for a while, I learned more about my own preferences. I had some fairly fun experiences with pickup groups that made it worth the entrance fee, and I sated this compelling desire to play a melee/buff cleric in the vein of a RoD Juliana.

Guild Wars probably lasted the longest. It was soloable (with henchmen) for the greater part of its PvE game. I made it to the level cap and a bit beyond before I got absolutely stuck on a main story chapter that I couldn't complete solo OR teamed. None of the l33t groups wanted a concept ranger/monk missing dozens of "essential" skills like me, you see, and the pickups were generally more clueless than I (having attempted a run through the mission about 50 times alone with henchies.) Before that, the quests were relatively enjoyable, even if failure and the death penalty was frustrating. Map exploration was interesting, but the furthest reaches were difficult for someone not really minded to calculate the last nitty gritty out of one's skill choices. In the end, the endgame wasn't compelling enough. PvP just wasn't my cup of tea, the population were mostly leetspeak pvpers or hardcore farmers that were bound to outcompete any casuals, the game design was tilting towards accomodating this wildly competitive crowd – which would completely screw up any casual play via hyperinflation and ultra-elite equipment and special skills. Altitis wasn't very possible, and item sharing/storage/management was proving to be a pain with the small inventory slots. So I lost interest.

Theoretically, it's still replayable. All I need to do is crank it up and let it update. Graphics-wise, it was pretty, but it didn't personally appeal. Hence why I'm still sitting on Nightfall and Factions and letting the price fall before I invest in it. Just no magical appeal that would make it worth the current cost.

Ditto WoW. Cartoony graphics. Non-personally appealing setting. Quests with soulless writing that failed to disguise the errands for what they were. Click and watch a character autoattack at low levels. As popular with the mainstream as the Diablo phenomenon was. Endgame with absolutely no potential appeal. Disgusting download options for the preview and bad handling of the public. Not exactly the best start for a game, or much hope for the future (balance and nerf-wise) either. And did you say that you have to QUEUE up to for the priviledge to log in to this horrorshow? Sorry, just not for me.

Strangely enough, I have a bit more faith in Turbine (and NCSoft) from past track record than I have in Sony or Blizzard.

I feel that LOTRO has a lot of polish on top of its unoriginal skeleton. With the exception of its highly annoying minimap, many other things are customizable and there's a depth to the game that has an attractive lull after the simplicity and adrenaline-rush of CoX. (And no, I'm not giving up the excitement of CoX – some days you just wanna SMASH, but some days...you long for the nostalgia of a world like RoD.)

And therein lies the answer to the appeal of LOTRO to me. It reminds me a great deal of RoD. But an improved version.

The classes may not be absolutely balanced or original, but all of them can apparently solo. (Up to lvl 15 anyhow. The monster play lvl 50 orc was quite capable of hitting mobs solo too though.) That's a mark in favor.

At first, the spoiled me went "Geesh, why am I running across half the continent and jogging endlessly?" But then, I ask myself, why would I want a clone of CoX when CoX is doing the speedy casual thing perfectly well? There must be a design decision for why the map is limited, the forced jogging and the quests with no waypoint illuminating the direction to run to next.

And I realized that jogging around in LOTRO reminded me a great deal of Morrowind and Oblivion and to a lesser extent of Guild Wars. It celebrates immersion and world exploration. Yes, it's a timesink. But it's only annoying if you want to get to the end and don't enjoy the journey, right? You can stop to enjoy the scenery, hunt a few random mobs, harvest appropriate resources and stumble across cool secret spots. The repetition and sometimes frustrated wandering back and forth wastes time, yes, but also forces you to remember visual directions and construct a mental map of everything in relation to each other. Kinda RoD-like, isn't it? (I actually drew up a map of old RoD once, just sketching in everything according to my mental map.) It's generally satisfactory when you manage to solve a quest by yourself (like a riddle or a puzzle game) but when you're one step shy of commiting suicide, there are thankfully walkthroughs/maps online. In a way, it's even more fair (in that it gives you a chance at it) than the totally random and mostly unclued badge system of CoX wherein you have to rely on external websites to figure out wtf to do in the first place.

LOTRO is also Oblivion-style open in its goals. If you try and faithfully follow every quest as you get them, that's a short recipe to insanity. Eventually you have to prioritize, to choose one thread to follow and close. You could dedicate a day or two to improving your crafting. Or go mob hunting / harvesting resources for money. Or kill mobs in the vein of CoX's badging for deeds and titles.

Does it have its flaws? Of course! The flaws in this sort of game system going multiplayer have long been derided. How do you speak of immersion when you see a dozen players lining up to take turns to kill a mob (though I'm pleasantly surprised that 'tapping' has enforced politeness and limited kill stealing to a mild annoyance instead of something warranting a mud-like 'murder x' command), or see twenty players crowded around one workbench (with a pet BEAR on it too) scattering umpteen seeds around? And let us not speak of the ubiquitous gold farmers and their nuisance tells...

I suppose in the end, it is your mindset and reaction to it that counts. Whether you consider these things mildly funny and dismiss them like fairy mist or homicidally annoying and take personal offence at it.

For my part, as long as I can still see the solo road to progress, I don't care if others are that much ahead of me. Only when I am forced to rely on the vagaries of others, do I start chaffing at the frustration. I oddly enjoy the chatter of OOC. It's like chat and ask of RoD. You can play alone but still 'together' with other people. And amusingly, because the quest solutions are so obscure, there are people asking for help a good deal of the time, and it promotes a certain kind of social interaction / chatter. Which you learn from, even while staying mostly silent and lurking.

I find a lot of the design of LOTRO constructed to promote a certain amount of spontaneous social interaction. Whether it's just meeting in the same places because you're after the same quest, or passing by and stopping to listen to someone playing his musical instrument on the town street, the opportunities are there, just like in RoD. Side benefits of a persistent world with not too much instancing, I suppose. It's pretty RP friendly in design and I'm tempted to go to Landroval and check out the unofficial RP server at some point.

Right now I even find crafting (farming in particular) mildly relaxing. So far, you're still not -forced- to do it like the brewing of heals. So it's entirely voluntary. And I discovered that you can actually set the number of recipes to craft and it will automatically tick down by itself, so you can alt-tab off and go do other things... Like catching up on a lot of reading (online and offline) and -writing-! It's also not impossible to achieve. It took me a day (perhaps 5-6 hours) to master tier 1 and get partway into tier 2 farming. Then another day (of 5 hours) to master tier 3 and start what everyone else is doing (before they go and nerf it) – Sweet Galenas farming. I find it mildly relaxing at the moment, because it's choice.

I generally can't alt-tab out when I play CoX. It's too intense. But stopping everything to just read websites is kinda like stopping everything to stare at the TV. One can occupy hands while watching TV, and in the same way, I can craft while I catch up with everything else that I really ought to be doing on the computer besides just blindly playing CoX and gaining xp. Not much different from farming pvp warburg missions and watching DVDs either, come to think of it. *coughs*

In the end, I think it's about moderation. Balance in all things. Too much CoX ain't good. Neither is too much of any MMO. The moment one starts to think about pleveling, or overdoing farming or herding or any repetitive activity, one should ask oneself what one is getting out of it. It should never become a chore, because that's the death knell of any game. Only do as much of it as remains fun, and switch to something else when it palls.