Before The Shadow: Big Skies, Small Horizons

Before The Shadow is turning out to be a very good purchase. I've only managed three sessions so far but they've been lengthy- a couple of hours and more each time. It's mostly been proper, focused gameplay, too. I've been sticking to the main questline, only picking up side-quests as and when I find them. Which is often. There are a lot of quests.

Even so, after as many hours, I'm still less than halfway through level 7, suggesting I could be at this for quite some time. With a reported "expansion cap" somewhere around the low thirties, I can see this becoming my second-longest run in Lord of the Rings Online to date.

I first picked up the game sometime back in the late noughties, when I made it to around Level 40. (The cap was 50 at the time.) If I'm remembering correctly, it took me about three months to get there but it might not have been quite as long as that. Maybe it just felt like it.

I do know that by the end things had gotten very grindy indeed and when some stranger royally pissed me off one Sunday morning, making some entitled roleplaying demands I wasn't interested in meeting,  I grabbed the opportunity to flounce out, taking Mrs Bhagpuss with me. She's never played again. I have, many times.

I'm in there, somewhere. Hobbits are, like, really short, y'know?

I'm even still playing on that same server, mostly because I'm too mean, stubborn and lazy to move. Frankly, it hasn't improved much in the last decade. Last night I had to switch World chat off because I couldn't take the ceaseless bickering over whether housing is or isn't a core part of the game and whether Standing Stone are or are not justified in making housing items the lead attraction in their Black Friday offer.

Without the players, however, Before the Shadow becomes a charming divertissement indeed. The new zones are as huge as these screenshots suggest. I got distracted by the sheer scale of the landscape while out questing last night and found myself climbing to the tops of several crags just to get a better view.

While I was exploring, I ran into some orcs, brigands and footpads, for none of which had I been given quests to hunt or kill. Naturally, this being an mmorpg and I a seasoned mmorpg player, I killed them anyway and I was very glad I did. Several dropped armor and weapons that weren't just far better than anything I had but also much better than anything any questgiver had seen fit to hand out as a reward. 

Yep, these planks all seem fine to me.

This seems like an interesting quirk. The structured gameplay in the new starting zone is clearly defined, with a central narrative and regular breadcrumb quests leading the player to each new quest hub. It would seem sensible, therefore, to stick to the schedule, go where you're sent and do as you're asked, an approach that's become almost compulsory in most modern mmorpgs. 

Despite that, and even though Before The Shadow is entirely composed of newly-written content, it seems the old ways persist. When LotRO launched, back in 2007, World of Warcraft had already begun resetting the parameters for the genre with its quest-based levelling mechanics but the pre-existing practices of older games like EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot, where grinding mobs for both xp and gear had long been the baseline, still exerted a powerful influence on game design.

All this second-person reported speech takes a bit of getting used to. It has a serious distancing effect on the narrative, too.

You might have thought the supposedly good currency of questing would have driven out the bad of random mob-killing by now but evidently not, at least in LotRO. Good for Standing Stone! I love levelling up by wandering about, killing anything that can't kill me, then stealing their stuff and using it for myself. It's a simple but eternally satisfying gameplay loop.

Of course, the nature of the quests I'm being offered might have something to do with my enthusiasm for off-piste slaughter, too. I know the early stages of the game have a reputation for cosiness, particularly when Hobbits are involved, but some of the things I'm being asked to get involved with really stretch the definition of "adventuring" well past breaking point.

I forgot the one about finding
some guy's lost boot...

There was the butcher who wanted me to go round the village, collecting next week's meat orders, tacked to his customers' front doors. Or how about the mother who sent me out to look for her five children, none of whom she had the least clue where they might be, just to tell them their tea was ready?

Things like that make the time when I was tasked with retrieving a single, lost arrow, supposedly stolen by a mysterious beast, only to be asked to wash it when I brought it back because it had monster spit on it, seem almost reasonable. Even something as straightforward as swimming across the river to look behind a waterfall, just in case something might be hiding behind it, as one paranoid Hobbit had me do, felt like reckless risk-taking by local standards.

So determinedly trivial are many of the quests that simply being sent to check out some hill where orcs might be hiding (They aren't.) or to retrieve a book from some bandits seems like high adventure. The civillians are bad enough but the local authorities are even worse. 

The bridge inspector, who didn't feel up to working one day and sent me to check the planks for her, had a better claim on my time than the so-called Mayor, a Hobbit so lazy he couldn't even be bothered to tack his weekly meat order on the door but still expected me, a total stranger, only in town to warn him of the impending orcish threat, to go out and kill animals for him just so he could feed his blasted dog!

And yet, somehow, none of it sends my blood pressure soaring. Rather, it all feels surprisngly relaxing. It's old school mmorpg gameplay with all the sharp edges sanded away to leave nothing more than a gentle nub; the adventuring equivalent of a cosy armchair and a pair of slippers. 

If things carry on like this for another twenty-five levels, I won't be complaining - although that might just be because I'll be fast asleep.

Before The Shadow - Very First Impressions - or - How To Calm An Anxious Chicken

After lunch on a cool, wet Monday, with the rain hammering down outside and little prospect of anything very much different to look at through the window over the next few days, feeling at somewhat of a loose end, I decided to to pull the trigger on Before The Shadow, the latest mini-expansion for Lord of the Rings Online. I've been holding off buying things on impulse, what with Black Friday right around the corner, but any heavy discounting seems improbable for such a new release, so why not?

Buying the thing was  seamless. Log in, press button, get receipt. Less than thirty seconds. There's not even a code to enter. It's all handled automatically. In theory I could have been sampling the new content within a minute or two. In theory...

In reality, there's the infamous LotRO patcher to consider. I'd already fired it up about ten minutes before I decided to buy the expansion and as I write this it's been running for the best part of twenty minutes, which means it's about halfway through downloading over seven and a half thousand files. I hope it's the advertised two new zones although I'd be entirely unsurprised to find those need to be delivered in a separate, follow-up patch.

I've been waiting so long now, in fact, the promised end to the current downpour has arrived. The rain has stopped, the clouds are clearing and the sun is beginning to peer out. Beryl the dog has been waiting patiently all day so I'm going to have to postpone this to take her for her much-delayed walk.

Back in an hour. With luck, the damn thing might even have finished patching by then.

... Aaaaand we're back. In fact, we've been back for a couple of hours. Long enough to make a new character and get them to Level 5. I guess we could do a First Impressions on the new starting zone and tutorial, if we were in the mood. We could also stop talking in the second person plural. It's not like Beryl's co-authoring this post with me.

I ummed and ahhed for a minute or two over whether to make the new character on my usual server, the EU-RP-EN server, Laurelin (That's Europe-Roleplaying-English, btw.) or on the ever-popular US-RE server, Landroval. As I was thinking about it, I realised I didn't really know the difference betweeen "RP" and "RE", so I looked it up . It didn't help much:

 "The servers with the 'RP' sign are servers that have a player base dedicated to role-playing, while 'RE' means that the server in question encourages role-playing but that it's exercised by all of the server's population."

Come again? Is there a negative missing in the second sentence, maybe?

Anyway, I don't plan on talking to anyone so the point is moot. In the end I settled for the familiar and went with Laurelin. I had seven available character slots but only four characters so adding another wasn't a problem. Choosing a race and class was a bit harder.

I ruled out Men, Elves and Dwarves because I already have one of each. I thought about Beornings but they have their own starting area so that didn't make sense. I looked at the Stout-Axe Dwarves but they seemed to have a complicated back-story I didn't want to get into. I actually didn't even notice there was a second kind of elf, High, so that one didn't even get a look-in.

In the end I went with Hobbit for a couple of reasons. First, even though I do have a Hobbit character already, they've never really been played. I can't even remember what class or gender they are. Second, as I understand it, much of the new levelling experience takes place in hobbit-inhabited (I almost said "infested"...) lands so it seemed like a good fit.

For a class, I wanted something I hadn't already played but also something that was going to be as straightforward as possible. I'd heard Captain was easy-mode so I was planning on trying that but it turns out Hobbits can't be Captains. I have no idea why. Maybe the boots are too small?

Instead, after looking at all the options, I went with Champion. It looked pretty similar to EverQuest II's Berserker and I already know how to play one of those; pull everything and spin.

I picked one of my regular placeholder names and hit Randomize until I got a look I thought I could live with. Let's be honest - there are no good-looking Hobbits. Then I clicked on the button and entered the world.

The first thing that happened was my bags filled up with stuff. FFS! That's what I started a new character specifically to avoid! There was enough to put two of my five bags out of action, although for some arcane reason the game distributed the items across three of them. Most of the things were themselves containers of some kind. I didn't dare open any of them in case the contents that spilled out took up the rest of the available space.

Instead, I just took a brief inventory, noting I already had half a dozen Titles and a couple of mounts before I'd even started, then I got on with following the tutorial and doing what I was told. Ninety minutes or so later, allowing for a couple of dog-related interruptions, I was Level 5 with several quests waiting to take me on to the next village over the hill.

I'm not going to review the whole Tutorial as if this was some brand new game no-one's played before. It's LotRO. Everyone who cares to know what it's like has played it already, a few times most likely. The new starting area, at least the first five levels of it, feels pretty much exactly as I remember the old ones...

...except I'm thinking of the really old ones, not the most recent "old" one, because as I found out when I was making my character there are now three Tutorials you can choose from and even the one before the Before The Shadow one is called "the new user tutorial" - although now I come to think about it, maybe the "new" refers to the user, not the tutorial...

Ahem. Anyhoo... 

The BTS tutorial (Just don't, alright?) starts off with what I imagine is supposed to be a bang, when some orcs (Uruk-Hai to be exact.) invade the sleepy country town of... hang on, I've already forgotten what it's called... Mossside? No, Mossward, that's it. (Had to look it up.) 

I say orcs. There are some orcs. Eventually. First of all, though, there are goblins. Okay, a goblin. I realise it's a tutorial but running down the street, sword in hand to find nothing more threatening than one rather small goblin did strike me as a bit of an anti-climax. (You did remember to "equip" your sword, didn't you? I mean, two separate NPCs did take the time and trouble to explain how important that was and how embarassing it would be if you forgot.)

The other thing that struck me as soon as the fighting started was how very elderly the game feels now. Even more so than other mmorpgs of its era. Combat in LotRO was always ponderous but in comparison to what we expect from just about every game these days it barely feels like combat at all. I couldn't really tell by looking what my character was doing. She barely seemed to be moving most of the time. 

She must have been doing something because the goblin died. Then some more goblins died. Then some orcs. There was a ranger who talked about knowing Strider and a Dwarf who repaired my weapons before they'd even been used and a very, very annoying child who made off with the orc leader's sword and had to be cajoled into giving it back and a guard who seemed really keen to give me a personal insight into the super-boring details of the everyday life of a guard and even a farmer who wanted me to calm an anxious chicken, which seemed like a step too far but then turned out to be kind of an in-joke and...

Oh, I don't know. It all trucks along very much like the Shire. I get the distinct impression someone's taken on board all those positive things people have been saying about how cosy the Shire is and how much people like carrying pies and decided to lean into the vibe. Which is fine. I like the Shire, too.

And that's where I left things to come and write this post. I had to drag myself away. This sort of thing is like settling into a deep, warm, comfortable armchair in front of a glowing fire on a winter's day. You're barely awake but you feel revived, somehow. 

I looked at the map and the new area seems pretty large. Supposedly you can level to 32 there. At LotRO's levelling speed that's going to take quite a while. I've only ever levelled one character further than that so there's no guarantee I'll even make it out of the starting zone. 

On the evidence so far it should be fun trying. I'm very happy with my purchase. Now if I can just find a bank so I can get all these anniversary fireworks out of my bags...

Shadow Of Renewal

EG7 or Daybreak if you prefer, since they seem to be pretty much interchangeable at this point, seems to be doing rather well right now. Yesterday, MassivelyOP reported an 11% bump in "monthly active players" over the same period as last year for Lord of the Rings Online, an increase the company rather self-effacingly ascribes to the impact of Amazon’s Rings of Power TV series.

As I think I may have mentioned in a previous post, I watched the first episode of the Amazon show, which I described, unenthusiastically, as "alright". I went on to say that a week had passed since then and I hadn't gotten around to watching episode two. I still haven't.

I haven't even bothered to find out whether the show has been either a commercial or a critical success but I did chat about it, briefly, while I was having a birthday lunch with a friend earlier this week. She'd asked me to get her an expensive boxed set of the books and it turned out part of her reason for doing that now rather than any other time in the last quarter century or so was not unconnected with the show. 

Grey and yellow wouldn't be my choice
for a promo.

As she put it, a lot of fans seem to be reinforcing their interest in the source material as a tangential result of what have been seen as controversial choices made by the makers of the new series. As with the desire to return to the Classic era in World of Warcraft, it's not so much open hostility to the new stuff (Although it can be that.) as a re-ignited affection for the way things used to be.

Put like that, I guess LotRO, fifteen years old and famously stolid in its reverance for the source material, qualifies as a safe haven for anyone looking to rekindle old fires. It would be interesting to know how many of the 11% are brand new to the game and how many are prodigals returning to the fold.

I suspect Standing Stone (And by implication Daybreak Games and by further implication EG7.) are about to add a percentage point or two to that enviable uptick. This morning I received two emails from the EG7 stable, one of which I'll get to later, the other asking me if I'd be interested in the new expansion, Before the Shadow.

I've never bought an expansion for LotRO. Indeed, other than the base game and a few months' subscription, I've never bought anything from Turbine or SSG at all. I hadn't been thinking of starting now, either, until I read Wilhelm's recent post. 

As Wilhelm says, $20, is a pretty reasonable price, even for a mini-expansion. It sounds even better in sterling, where it comes in at just £15.29. Even so, I wouldn't be considering it if it wasn't for one thing; the new levelling experience. 

I do like the low-level game in LotRO. It's solid, entertaining and old-school in the best way. It might be fun to start a new character and play them up through whatever the new zone or zones are - some sort of hobbitty-shire experience I think it is. Not only would it be interesting in its own right, it would also make for a convenient fresh start in a game where my other characters are mired in previous poor decisions and lumbered with bags full of items, the use of which I no longer understand nor care to learn.

I'd have to say this looks a lot more appealing.

As always, the real question is "If I buy it, will I play it?" I'm leaning heavily towards "Yes, I will", on
the fairly solid grounds that LotRO is free-to-play, I always have it installed and I've been back for brief visits many times over the years. Also, playing through something that other people are also playing and talking about is always a bonus for the blog.

Mitigating against the idea is the other email I received, this one directly from Daybreak, wearing their Darkpaw hat. I was somewhat surprised to receive notice this morning that the new EverQuest II expansion, Renewal of Ro, now has a firm launch date and it's less than two weeks away.

As the website has it, "The next expansion for EverQuest II, Renewal of Ro, is set to launch on November 30, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. PST". That is pretty much when you'd expect but I was on the beta forums only a couple of days ago and I had the impression things were lagging a little this year. Then again, when aren't they? I'm sure it'll be fine.

I've already bought this one, of course. The only question is when I start playing. The 30th is a Wednesday, which should give me a couple of days to get started before my working weekend. Then again, based on prior experience, I'll probably be doing myself a favor if I wait a week until everything's working properly.

It's nice to have something to look forward to, anyway. I might not be able to join in with the frenzy when Dragonflight lands (Any date for that, yet? Oh, yeah...) but I should at least have something to talk about.