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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.
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.
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.
Which is why World of Warcraft's orcs, trolls, and even Forsaken, to a point, are interesting. They break the mold. You may not see it, because you assume they fit old stereotypes, but they don't. The Orcs, Tauren and Trolls are all generally honorable races. In some ways, they are more "good" than either the humans or the elves.
Humans have enslaved Orcs and humiliated them for years, they kept them in concentration camps. Not to mention that one of their faction leaders is Onyxia.
Night Elves are selfish and desperate, and they even made it possible for the Burning Legion to attack.
Dwarves are nearly as bad as the Venture Co. at destroying the environment they live in, and therefore they clash with the nature-loving Tauren.
Gnomes IRRADIATED their own city to drive out invaders, and now they sponge off the Dwarves.
The Draenei are the opposite of the Blood Elves, in that they are ostensibly the only race in the game that can be called unreservedly "good." (This kind of falls flat when you consider hints that the Naaru aren't exactly the angels they're cracked up to be, and the Draenei become simply "naive" rather than truly "chosen" or anything of the sort.)
Orcs were oppressed, put into concentration camps and simply want their own homeland where people will leave them alone now. Sound familiar?
Tauren are members of the Horde because the orcs saved them from the centaurs that were invading their home. They are extremely honorable.
The Darkspear Trolls have forsaken cannibalism and embraced the Shamanistic culture of the Orcs.
The Forsaken have a faction that wants to kill everyone, yes, but other members are described by humans near Dalaran as "possessing more humanity than my fellow humans."
The Blood Elves are, arguably, the only truly "evil" race in the game. But even they are portrayed as more or less out of control, rather than blatantly malicious.
Everyone in Azeroth is generally far more nuanced than simple "good" or "evil." If you choose to only see the races as Tolkienn portrayed them, you're missing out on a lot of the story of World of Warcraft.
Shinma
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.