So, I’ve been playing the LOTR:O open beta today (the pre-order, keep your character after launch thing started).
Anyhow, I got a skill to play a lute, and then bought a lute. I thought it was going to be some sort of health regeneration item or something. It turns out, it’s a fully playable instrument. You can actually jam on a lute in realtime in the game!
There is a bit of lag, but I can pull off some pretty awesome riffs. Best of all, everyone in earshot can hear you playing. I was sitting on the corner of this crossroads in Bree, just jamming away on my lute. I actually attracted a crowd of people who were running by. They stopped to listen, and some of them started dancing.
You use the 1-8 keys to play, and use ctrl and shift to switch octaves. It even recognizes chords. I was playing some pretty fast picking stuff, and the game kept up.
What an awesome addition to the game. It’s so fun to just pass the time by playing a lute.
If i remember correctly, AC2 music system was only for playing predefined stuff (you select instrument a, and play song b). In lotro, you can actually play that instrument.
Right. But different bits played by different players jived together somewhat acceptably. Once Turbine got the LOTR license, it was clear they would do something like this. And pipeweed smoke shaping I would expect.
I hope you can turn it off. Things like that in multiplayer games get old for me very quickly, especially in a game you plan on playing for hundreds (or thousands) of hours.
As fun as that sounds, I’d get pretty aggravated trying to make my way through a lag-laden hell of the most horrid blaring noise I’d ever heard – coming from a gathering of fifty hobbits.
Sounds neat. Last time I remember seeing a playable instrument in a videogame (not counting Guitar Hero etc.) was the harpsichord in Ultima V. Never played AC2 much though.
Sorry but this feature sucks right now. It mostly ends up being a ridiculous cacophony of jumbled notes. Playing sharps and flats is virtually impossible. (You just can’t do it easily enough to make them usable.)
They need to add an interface to this where you can define a melody (like in Animal crossing) and then play it over and over. They also need to make it so you can turn the sheet music into an item that you can hand to people to play so you can have quartets and whatnot. Then they need to be able to synchronize the music start time.
Right now it’s basically a way to annoy passers by.
Yes and no… AC2 had multiple instruments with multiple song portions and intros/outros. So while you weren’t hitting e sharp or anything explicitly, you most definitely could construct music out of small looping parts. If it’s good enough for techno to be considered real music…
