LOTRO’s Mordor expansion has been out for just about a month, and I’ve been making my way through it gradually. Frankly, I’m enjoying the new Black Book and landscape quest stories more than anything else. It’s great that we get to see deeper into Mordor, where the movies don’t and the books can’t visualize it enough to paint a picture. To that extent, it’s a pretty satisfying experience for us Tolkien fans to explore and learn more about the region, its inhabitants and the future of the main story.

It’s not all good though, and Standing Stone Games infuriatingly relies on traditional systems for gameplay progression. We’ll go over these in a second.

New Stories Does The Lore Justice

Being only one of the mediums (besides Shadow of Mordor) to explore Sauron’s lands extensively, LOTRO does a good job with its stories here. It’s exciting to see zone quests explore the peoples that live here, forced to serve Sauron and his armies at the height of his power. There’s humans from Nurn who work the forges, and Dwarves as well. Many of the new stories weave a wonderful and tragic tale that players will no doubt enjoy.

They have also given it the respect it deserves, sticking faithfully to the source material wherever possible. More surprisingly, some of these plots are deep and they make you feel something, which even for LOTRO, is rare. The Black Book, which replaces LOTRO’s 10 year-running Epic Story Books, is also decent. It follows you and the successful Host of the West deeper into Mordor, to uncover the remaining loyalists to the Dark Lord and put an end to them. The new stories alone are worth playing for, but with such a huge expansion, it’s hard to recommend considering the buy-in price.

The Light/Shadow Mechanics

The new Mordor zones introduces the Light of Earendil system – a new equip-able stat on new gear to counter the Shadow of Mordor debuff. The debuff is auto granted on players when they enter certain areas, making mobs harder to hit and stronger. While it sounds interesting on paper, it’s a very harsh wake up call for players that have taken gear progression lightly over the last couple of years. An under-geared player will inevitably die a lot on the landscape and it can be annoying – it’s not that they’re bad, it just forces them to take it in the face until they acquire the new gear.

As a result, the difficulty curve increases, but it could have definitely been implement a lot better than this. Solo players that are Light armored classes especially, will be thinking twice about going in alone. However, if you do like the challenge, then Mordor’s first zone of Udun will be just fine. You won’t be able to tackle more than 1 mob at a time, which slows progression down considerably, unless you’re running in a group. To sum it up, the new system adds something new to LOTRO, but whether that’s a good or bad thing remains to be seen. I just hope it’s not another system they made up and abandon down the road (Audacity, Radiance, Mounted Combat).

Quest Designs Belong In The Past

What’s the one thing I’m most critical about in the Mordor expansion? It’s the quest designs. It’s so painfully bad that it hurts. Shame, because the story payoff is good, but it hurts that you have to slog through petty fetch/kill quest chains in large areas densely populated with hard mobs in order to reap the rewards. To make matters worst, you know they’re stalling you. Long travel rides and plenty of back and forth quests will suck the life and motivation out of you sometimes. The designs themselves are just uninspiring. Some Gondor soldier wants treasure? What does that have to with me? Oh so I need to collect and salvage trinkets for him? Sure. Oh what’s that, I need to kill 12 orcs while I’m at it? Ok…It’s 2017, but LOTRO has a way of making sure everyone knows it’s old and intends to stay that way forever.

Where other MMORPGs innovate and explore with new quest designs that help the player progress while enjoying the story, LOTRO instead, slows things down to a slog. It’s predictable, repetitive, and boring. You can re-skin the quest giver and flavor text all you want, but a fetch quest is still a fetch quest, I don’t care if it’s an Elf or Dwarf that’s telling me to go fetch. It’s a mixed experience so far, and hopefully questing becomes a journey and fun again in the remaining zones ahead.

The post The Lord of the Rings Online: What I Think Of Mordor So Far appeared first on Mmos World.

Earlier this week, Standing Stone Games put out information regarding the LOTRO Mordor expansion preorders. Finally, after four long years, it feels great to actually see with my own eyes that an expansion is on the horizon.

I’ve always been a fan of looking at the marketing and promotional output the devs create pre-expansion launch. With Mordor this time around, there’s a different buzz from the community. Perhaps it’s because of the items offered in the bundles, and the asking price for them too. That’s what I’m here to talk about today. Having gone over the three tiers of the preorders, here are my quick thoughts on why the asking price is a little high.

1. Overall Value Of Content And Expansion Size

The first, is pretty obvious. The highest tier, The Ultimate Fan Bundle, goes for a whooping $129.99. That’s very much in the range of a physical collector’s edition for a majority of AAA games. Why is it so expensive? Look at the what’s coming in the bundle. Besides the max level boost, cosmetics, mounts and titles, SSG are also throwing in a month of VIP.

Of course, one of the main attractions of the Mordor expansion is the new race. The High Elves are here, with a brand new starting region to play in. The new race will be playable by a variety of classes, which traditional Elves cannot do. Both the highest and middle tier -which is $79.99 – offers the new race. In addition, the bundle will give players 10 extra shared storage slots, for the new account wide items.

Overall, it’s a beefy offering and while many will feel it isn’t worth it, we have not even talked about the expansion itself! Mordor according to the recent developer streams, will be the biggest expansion since Moria. With that asking price, one can only hope that the quality is significantly increased all round to match the asking price.

2. Chance Thomas

LOTRO’s music and soundtrack has always been a high point, up until the departure of composer Chance Thomas. Most notable for his work early in the game and most recently the Riders of Rohan soundtrack, Chance is back. The announcement was very well received, and it is a signal of intent from SSG that they are stepping up the quality. Not just in terms of content and gameplay, but everywhere else too, including the soundtrack.

Let’s be honest here, Chance is a well known composer within the gaming industry. And with a name like that, it’s going to cost the game money for good music. I think majority of LOTRO players, myself included, will be happy that SSG is coughing up for the soundtrack. More than most MMORPGs, LOTRO is definitely enhanced by the themes to complement the lush environments of the world. Therefore, it is understandable if the high cost and asking price of the expansion is attributed to the rising quality, including in the music department.

3. No More Warner Brothers

Warner Brothers washed their hands clean of LOTRO late last year, and handed over the reigns to Standing Stone Games. SSG is an independent studio, largely consisting of former Turbine devs who already worked on the game.

Some of the challenges of not having a big name publisher to support you can hurt a game. These include injections of funds for production, world wide publishing, access to resources and a lot more. As SSG are indie, they have to do it on their own, with a somewhat smaller publisher, Daybreak. They are not Warner Brothers, but good riddance I say. So if that means that they have to raise the price because of all the work that’s gone into this without previous support, then so be it.

The only thing that matters now is the final product. And if SSG fails to deliver a content-packed Mordor expension that doesn’t satisfy both casuals and end-gamers, then we have a problem.

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