LOTRO player here, and you summed it up nicely. It is a beautiful game with a great community. The story is surprisingly well done, and the immersion is fantastic. I’ve done all of the endgame content and won all of the big fights, and all of it is well worth repeating.
EVE has absolutely no appeal for me whatsoever because it is simply too close to what I actually do for a living. I don’t need to pay anyone for the privilege of doing financial analysis or making trades. People pay me for that sort of thing. I also do not need to pay for the privilege of spending my leisure time with overcompetitive, single-minded jerks, because once again, I am compensated well for that too. As it turns out, real global capital markets are much more interesting and complicated than a simulated effort by a few thousand people. It makes more sense for me to spend time in that space and make real money instead of isk or whatever.
I haven’t yet been jeered at for being a PvE LOTRO carebear. I would just ask what kinds of bets my heckler is making in the real world, and how much scratch he has riding on them.
I’ve played WoW, LOTRO, and for the last two days, EVE Online. I like them all in their own right (I’m still holding off final verdict on EVE until I get more time in, but it’s consuming my thoughts quite a bit). LOTRO does have similarities to WoW, enough that when I first started playing, I would do something expecting it to work the way I was used to, and it usually did*. That’s not to say LOTRO isn’t different, of course, and it has a much more coherent world and storyline (for obvious reasons). It lacks quite a bit of the humor of WoW, but again, that’s simply the nature of the pre-defined world.
And LOTRO has an overall more mature customer base and smaller population servers. It’s pretty rare to fight over mines or named quest creatures. Conversely, it’s harder to find other players who can help you complete a group quest. My only real complaint was mentioned earlier: that the storyline requires a full party to complete. That’s annoying, because I much prefer playing with just my husband.
*I never completely got out of calling the stables “flight paths” or using the phrase “take a gryphon.” I played WoW for quite a long time.
There is a bit of an issue that most everybody is in Moria now, and Lowbie and Midbie areas are sparsely populated, but it is starting to fill up again. They have some sweet instance quests too. A device where they can play book or historical events, without breaking character line. Basically you do a quest ‘reliving’ something that happened from the aspect of the person there. There is a rumour that they will instance Gandalf’s fight against the Balrog, but it isn’t there yet.
I don’t think that anyone has mentioned Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) yet. It has an active combat system where you can physically dodge and for many classes it is not a button puncher.
The downside is that a powergamer can be capped within a couple of weeks (course, that skips the vast majority of the content and requires playing the game like a full time job).
A couple of up or downsides, depending on how you look at it:
-the game is 99% PvE. All PvP is done for fun in tavern brawl pits or arenas.
-all the quests are instanced so you don’t have to worry about spawn campers/stealers but you can’t spawn camp/steal yourself if you’re into that.
A great upside is that your character/toon stats and skills can be highly customized and you don’t need to be a cookie-cutter.
Heh, I don’t see why people think Eve is stressful. Playing PVP isn’t stressful at all. You win or you lose, so what? I’ve been running around in a five day old character and beating people who have months more SP. There’s no stress at all, it’s just fun.
Maeglin I definitely understand what you are saying about your job, but for the rest of us we don’t want to get the training you have and if it DOES get stressful we can just turn it off and go to the park without worrying about losing our house. Also, I make much riskier investments in Eve than I do with real money. It’s also far easier to make lots of money in Eve, so the idea that it’s similarly stressful isn’t very accurate. That being said I wish I could get out and be working, I’d prefer to do that, but my career path is in limbo right now. Then again I chose a career where I won’t even be touching a computer while I’m working. My work when I get it is incredibly relaxing. Giving someone a massage can be tiring but it’s quite relaxing.
No, but people apparently have some success doing this or using something called bootcamp. I know jack and shit about Macs, so that’s all I can really tell you.
Yep, That was the one in particular I was thinking of. I am a total geek and wierdo, but when the quest got into the true reality of it and the quest objective changed into simply “Make a final stand worthy of Dwarven epic song”(Or something close) I had goosebumps and andreniline pumping like I was fighting a Troll for real. That is what makes a game great for me
Oh yeah. That was pretty much everyone’s experience. I turned the lights off and the sound way up. My wife even let me play her session later that night. There has been a lot of feedback to put that one in the reflecting pool, and I certainly hope they do. Playing Ori never gets old.
I am sure a lot of Champions were rolled shortly afterwards.
Yeah, I’m not that into the PvE. In Eve PvE is like a job you do to pay for the new ship you want. Some people do lots of PvE, but I find it incredibly boring. You just roll up in three battleships on basically any L4 and it’s only a matter of time until you win.
