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The Destiny of Lord of the Rings Online
An anonymous reader writes "Julian Murdoch over at Gamers With Jobs posits that the recently released Lord of the Rings Online, for all it's flaws, is a new kind of game — the Destiny-Locked RPG: 'The reason that Story sets LOTRO apart is because you know how it ends. This is a luxury World of Warcraft simply can never have. There is no logical end to WoW, where the evil WoW faction of the Horde is victorious, and every member of the good-aligned Alliance dies. The viciously PvP nature of EVE Online means that the story can only sit on the sidelines and inform, not take center stage. But in LOTRO, the game is the story. In this, the game has far more in common with Oblivion than it does with WoW.' The argument here is that a game in which the outcome is known is fundamentally a different (and possibly better) form of gameplay than that the current rage of emergent-gameplay sandbox weak storied games. A challenging idea." It's not so much that the game's ending is already known, as that there is an ending.
I'll remember that the next time I'm in SWG, getting a mission from the Emperor... ...who gets thrown down a shaft by Vader... ...who dies just before the second Death Star blows up.
BTW, did you know he was Luke's father? Really!
Unfortunately, the well-defined "end" to LOTR has resulted in the first licensed game I can think of where you can't actually go to most of the cool locations from the book (and movies, though Turbine doesn't have that particular license) because the plot hasn't advanced that far yet. They CAN'T expand into Mordor because once they do, that's Game Over. They can't expand to the White City or Rohan because that would make the game half over. They're not even adding the Mines of Moria during the game's first year of release (according to a recent dev chat), cause that would make the game 1/4 over.
The challenge for Turbine is that, with the "ending" (and so much about locations in the middle) already known, players want to actually get there sometime. That's a problem when your business model is, essentially, stalling the players for time as you continue to collect your monthly fees.
Exactly. When SWG came out, I truely questioned the decision to place the game into a known timeline. KotOR, while a completely different type of game, showed what was possible when given dramatic license in a known universe. Parts of the world SWG, at it's launch, removed the one lone aspect of the SW that would have allowed for a good game. Namelt, the Force. I see similar issues with this LotR game. I tried it, but wasn't captivated. The lack of class variety, due to the game trying to hold onto the ideals of the time and place of the story around it, leaves much to be desired. If I play a LotR game, I want to be Gandalf. I don't want to be background_character_01 which is what the game forces you to be even though it does weave your toon into the tale. When you read LotR it's a tale full of magic and conflict and excitement. When you play this game, it's a game of 1000 dwarves with swords and no magic. Much like SWG removing the force, they've taken magic out of the game to hold true to the story and in the end it ruined the game for me.
To put it another way, and to quote a very fine show -
BOOK: 'Cause how you get there is the worthier part' [Firefly]
SWG set in the KotOR would have been perfect. Everyone could be some form of Jedi/Sith and it would fit the setting perfectly. They were just too hell-bent on using their recognizable charaters to sell the game. "ZOMG u cn tlak 2 VADAR!!1!"
As a preface, I spent some 10 years as an administrator at a LOTR based MUSH. With a time ratio of 3:1 It meant 3 years in Middle Earth (ME) went by in 1 year of real life. For you hobbits, that means that you give a birthday party every 4 months. Having started to play just a few years before the third age yr 3000, there was little real concern about what would happen in the 5 or so years when we had to actually stage the War of the Ring. Original founders had not really considered this an issue as the point was to create an environment for RP in the Tolkien world, not to play out the script of the books. However there was always some pressure from various philosophies of role play and game play in general, on whether we should in some way develop the long term story arc and whether to allow deviations from the general thread of events. This becomes pretty complicated as Tolkien had a sort of longer story arc than most, with events that occurred thousands of years before, in books some of the players had never read, having some impact. In fact, the more a player knew, and cared about Tolkien, the harder it was to play the game, knowing that on the one hand they might realisticly play their characters role, and on the other hand, they might run into situations where quality role play and story making conflicted with the actual plot in ways that only an expert might detect ahead of time.
This meant the typical uses of comic book/soap opera/RP retcon techniques (retroactive continuity...) which, ill used, creates a hostility so fierce that the term retcon in the MUSH gained the status of fighting words, i.e., if you did not intend to cause someone to freak out and begin an anti-fascist march at your home, you said things like 'we might want to adjust the outcome to match the theme a little more closely, and perhaps there is some backstory we could RP out to clarify why your character suddenly had to NOT slay Boromir as a 12 year old for kissing your pig. (That never happened... Or did it! Retcon!)
Anyway, the point is that, there were legitimate arguments to let things play out as if we got to year 3000 and let things diverge. There were others that said, lets get to year 3008 or so and then freeze until we figure things out, allowing the game clock to advance but maintaining the pre LOTR environment. Others wanted to move towards a sort of scripted version of the war, but of course focus also on the places that were not described, to explore how such a big event effected the other populations. (Places mentioned in a sentence have a whole life when you have 2000+ active players trying to play their favorite characters)
As an admin, alot of my effort was aimed towards providing guidance in resolving conflicts both operationally and thematically.
Now LOTR Online is not a MUSH. Players do not drive the content the same way. Most folks just want to see the sights and participate in the battles, and get that Tolkien feel. But the fact is that I won't be playing this game, having spent a decade of my life trying to combine fun, Tolkien, role play, and computers. I will never be real happy watching hordes of hobbits wandering around, making Frodo and Bilbo seem like homebodies, nor will Noldo elves dancing topless on mailboxes make me happy.
I prefer original works of fantasy. I love to read Tolkien. I first read the hobbit when I was 6, and was done with all the books (including Silmarilian which had just recently come out in soft cover) by the time I was 8.
I am glad more people are buying the books, and are excited by what I consider some of the greatest examples of story telling and most graceful uses of the English language. But to claim that knowing what will happen makes a game more playable, or that such an idea is new, is really quite absurd. There have been 100's of games in which we know the story. And if you really expect LOTR online to END for plot purposes, rather than because they are no longer making money, you are in the gardens of Lorien, dreaming away.
The problem with that in the setting is that the Fourth Age is the age of man. The elder elves head across the sea. The wizards are gone (although if you read the Silmarillion, some of the other wizards are still out there somewhere). The rings of power that survived are powerless.
Tolkien's books have the really cool events in the ancient past, the moderately cool events in the distant past, the last little footnotes to the story happen in [i]The Hobbit[/i] and [i]The Lord of the Rings[/i], and everything gets really boring afterwards.
I think anyone writing a Middle Earth MMORPG should toss that out the window - invent lieutenants of Melkior and new species that remained hidden. Invent new rules for regular humans to master the magic of Gandalf or Saruman. Basically Dungeons and Dragons'ify Middle Earth for the sake of making the game interesting. But I bet millions of diehard fans would call it blasphemy.
As far as flaws go, it certainly isn't flawless. Don't get me wrong, the game has great stories and is awesome in a lot of ways. It's obvious that they let DDO flounder in order to devote more resources to making this game as deep and rich as it is. That said, the combat system leaves a lot to be desired and is a step backwards from most other MMORPGs IMHO. It's come a long way since alpha, but it still annoys me too much for me to actually play post release. The crafting stuff obviously still needs work as does the economy, but they are tweaking those and should have them balanced out a lot better pretty quickly.
Overall the game is pretty good, but certainly not anywhere near flawless.
I couldn't disagree more. What is boring are simplistic labels like Good and Evil. Good is never good as seems on the surface and Evil always has its side to the story. I guess there is still room for the superficial battles between Good and Evil, but truely rich, engaging, insightful stories have a depth that is beyond good and evil. Sometimes it is more like "light" and "dark," but I think that is more a matter of personalities and not necessarily based on some religious sense of absolute good and evil. For example, someone might like morbid music and maybe prefer to spend their waking hours at nighttime. This person might have a dark personality. But it doesn't make them evil. Evil is as evil does, and Good is just as likely to do evil... in the real world, at least.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I disagree, the problems facing SWG weren't really about its setting in time as it were, and if you disconnect from the movies to some extent it still is a believable mmo but it suffers so many game-play problems... (keeping in mind i've played it since about 3 months after the release of JTL) for eg:
1) pvp - the pvp in this game was so badly thought out compared to just about ANY mmo out there (DAoC, WoW, EVE, etc)
2) towns and building - great idea but very terribly implemented (take a look at the boundaries around the major cities), they really should have done something alot better when it came to people being able to plonk buildings down everywhere.
3) Jedi - the hologrind sucked... the new system sucked... and in between we couldn't actually become jedi for like 6 months (what the hell were they thinking?!?!?), one of the stupidest moves in a game full of bad moves made by SOE.
4) JTL - something we were promised from the start and was made a paid-for expansion (and i really despise how MMO's can charge for an expansion when you already pay a monthly fee - this is one thing EVE got very right). DAoC is another example of this, sure they have development costs but those dev's are there full time anyway, which means your $15/mon (or whatever) is already paying their incomes. What was really painfull about this was when people didn't buy the expansions... 'nuff said.
5) Nerfing - everytime you turned around something was nerfed, sure you needed balance but you can hardly shoot for balance when SWG just kept changing everything all the time, there was just never any time to see if this balance was finally right.
What they got right:
1) the economy - Bar none THE BEST implementation of a player-owned economy. Eve likes to think its market is played controlled but thats really not true in any sense of the word. Everything in Eve comes back to NPC prices one way or another, sure t2 is mostly player controlled but even the base price of those items is set back towards what the npc related things are going to cost (even if the high-price is sometimes upwards of 100 or 1000 times its actual build cost).
2) the wide variety of professions (well thought out and the inter-dependence was quite well done) until JTL, what JTL did to the profession tree's was really quite painfull.
3) generally speaking, the concepts introduced in the game were fantastic ideas and if it wasn't implemented by SOE it probably would have worked. It was a very big shame SOE got the contract for it because they just had no idea at all... If you went back to the start and got another company to implement swg and made some minor changes to things like pvp and so forth it probably would have been up there with WoW.
Lucas arts were never particularly smart about the way they went about alot of the things they did, but oh well.
And... do you really want to see Gandalf getting his ass kicked by a slimy frog or a big rat when he is only level 1? Gandalf you know and love is probably like level 100 or something.
Actually, you nailed the issue with SWG. The developers thought everyone would be cool with being 'normal' people in the Star Wars universe. Not a very good assumption, as Jedi is the biggest draw to the franchise. To make matters worse, they set the game in a time period where Force user population was at it's lowest. According to canon, there were 3 educated force users in existance. Palpatine, Vader, and (arguably) Luke. No matter how rare you make player character force users, there are still too many to fit with canon. And if you make them really rare, then the playerbase bitches up a storm.
Basically, SWG was in an unwinnable situation. If they gave their playerbase what they wanted, they killed lore. If they stuck to lore, then people didn't like the game.
You seem to think that everyone playing mundane characters made the game good, and everyone being a Jedi/Sith would automatically make it bad. Why? Why can't the originally well done crafting system and economy work in a KOTOR setting? All the things that made the game good are not tied to the character archetypes available.
In a lot of ways, World of Warcraft is a critique of the Tolkienesque ideas of good and evil. Tolkien might be said to combine a Christian metaphysics of good and evil with English cultural imperialism: for the most part, the heroes are the "Men of the West" while the villains are "swarthy," dark-skinned, uncivilized, etc.
Blizzard took this set-up and exposed it as being a reflection of European colonialism and imperialism. The Alliance is trying to "clean up" the land, getting rid of those cultures that don't resemble itself sufficiently. The result reveals just what the historical cultural origins of the traditional heroic fantasy categories of "good" and "evil" races really is - a veiled form of racism.
The Tauren live a peaceful existence in tune with nature. The current orc ruler Thrall was enslaved as a child by humans and forced to fight gladiator-style battles by his captors until freed. The undead are a group that freed themselves from control by the scourge and merely attempt to survive against the "Alliance" that would do them harm. The trolls ruled an empire until the Night Elves delved into destructive magic and destroyed it, luring the Burning Legion to Azeroth in the process. The high elves created a kingdom on the sacred ground of the trolls, and the trolls would have reclaimed it if not for the aid of the humans.
The original orcs that came to Azeroth (with the help of a human named Medivh) were corrupted, but what makes you call the current members of the Horde evil?
But the rings themselves are not magic, or at least not magic as the Elves perceive magic. Saruman and Gandalf have staffs, which are of the Five Rods of Wizards, as Saruman makes clear when he accuses Gandalf of being power hungry in The Two Towers after the Ents lay waste to Isengard. I'd quote that too but don't feel like looking it up as well.
Sauron, like Gandalf and Saruman, originated as a Maiar, and they have some inborn power that can be augmented in various ways, like the rings. Saruman has a Palantir, which allows him to see farther than normal and communicate with other users. Sauron has one, which explains his coordination with Isengard, as well as Denethor's despondency. None of these items are "magic" in the sense Tolkien would imagine the word, as he would see magic as chiefly being used in a Faustian, evil way. As the quote in my post above demonstrates, the Elves are cognizant of the difference, and are careful with their language. Sam only calls their gifts "magic" because he's a bumbling Hobbit who doesn't know any better.
None of this mystery and uncertainty translates well into video games, which by their nature are mathematical and designed to be egalitarian in the sense that time spent = abilities gained. Middle Earth, like the Earth we know, does not work in so linear a fashion.