It's odd, but travel in LOTRO irritates me. Technically speaking, it's not even the slowest travel speed game I've ever played. I think it is the aimless lack of purpose that puts me off, plus the constant interruptions should you try and ride through any land filled with the regular scattering of creatures within your broad level range, whose only purpose in life is to chuck stones and arrows at you until you fall off your horse.
A Tale in the Desert has pretty slow travel speed. But a) there's not that much call for wandering from faraway point A to faraway point Z and back again carrying a message, and b) there's usually a player-chosen reason to motivate you if you really wanted to run all about in the boondocks of nothingness.
Contrast this with LOTRO, whose quests at the level range I'm at seem to be all about wandering to notable NPCs standing in the furthest reaches possible and taking them messages from other notable NPCs - "Dear Gloin, are you doing well? Luv and hugs, your dear friend Bilbo."
There's no sense of progression for soloists, because most of these letter carrying errands culminate in group and raid instances, which promptly makes you feel a little shortchanged.
And since there is a pathetic reward for killing mobs as compared to doing these time-killing errand running quests, I fritter away an hour taking letters to all areas of Middle-Earth consuming lots of silver along the way for horses. The scenery looks great, but I'm not sure that what I did was particularly enjoyable "journey" play.
Areas of LOTRO don't have this problem. Rivendell is a set of very small closely packed zones with big scenery change, so it seems exciting to move from place to place, versus seeing the same distant mountain from a bunch of different angles.
The zoom out feature of LOTRO also minimizes the visceral aspect. Age of Conan had lots of riding around, but things were closer in, the zones were smaller (some felt too small) and you could do combat mounted, which put more sense of control in a players' hands. Meanwhile, I'm riding around on a lil horse tour bus in LOTRO.
I think the real problem is agency. As in, player control, motivation and ability to interact.
I have to keep dismounting every time I want to talk to an NPC. This is just a 3 second timesink. Opening doors to zone to other areas too require dismounting.
If my quest chain is going to be interrupted by group-required quests in the middle of it, I'm not going to stop whatever I'm doing and find a group - I'm going to scowl and either leave the quest taking up space in my log or delete the quest, having gotten as much xp as I could get. So the sum total of my quest experience has been the beginning of quest chains and no culmination or climax.
I need to get the hell out of the old level 50 areas and go on to Moria where apparently they've made more solo friendly stuff. *sighs*
No comments:
Post a Comment