The Legendary server kicks off this Thursday. I subbed up, and I spent tonight setting up a reasonable UI to prepare. I’ll be running around on a high elf minstrel, exploding orcs with the power of song. Or something like that :)
It’s a bit grindy, as I recall, but the storylines and writing are excellent. I’m looking forward to this!
What is the legendary server?
It is a progression server. Everyone starts over, and the content is limited to the original, pre-Moria areas (additional areas will be released periodically).
Is the legendary server free to play as well? I want to briefly relive the summer of 2007.
Bugger me, no. If I had to go through the pre-revamp of the Lone-Lands I think I would kill myself.
Woah. People will be able to group on the zombie dragon and the balrog again? I remember trolling through forum posts of people trying to figure out the dragon fight and trying over and over again with different loadouts, finally triumphing with these hour-long epic battles. Then my kin did a 24-toon post-Moria run for shits and giggles and decimated the poor thing in less than 5 minutes without really trying too hard.
I played damn near every MMORPG from Meridian 59 until ESO…and in that entire span I would rank LOTRO as my hands down favorite of all of them. And yes, that includes the original Everquest, which I still have many many fond memories of across years of playing. But with LOTRO you have a unique combination of a well designed MMO saturated in a lore more famous than any other, a lore that practically spawned fantasy literature and CRPGs as we know them, and a development team that took every effort to try to bring that lore to life around the players. The Shire, Bree, Barrow Downs, Evendim, Rivendell, practically every single zone of the original Shadows of Angmar was dripping with atmosphere and detail. Toss on one of the best soundtracks to ever grace a computer game…and it’s easy to see the lasting appeal of LOTRO.
Sadly, it seems that as the game aged, the development teams shrunk and the story became more drawn out, that level of care and detail has also declined, with each successive expansion having less and less of that “OMG I’m literally in Middle Earth” feeling and impact. It’s still a fantastic game though, and still fun to play even today thanks to all the improvements and changes over the years. I do wish they’d update the engine, but I understand how large an undertaking that is versus how little they’re probably making off the game now.
Yep, that is why I am excited. I played years ago, but I was still two expansions behind. On a mature server, I almost never saw anyone. They would all be packed into the endgame zones, while I was still in Eriador.
I have never seen this game the way it’s meant to be played, and I look forward to it!
They are working on a 64-bit version of the engine.
They’ve been claiming that for going on 3 years. At this point, I’ll believe it when I see it.
I’m expecting we’ll be using 128-bit cpu’s by the time LOTROs engine is 64-bit.
If they just opensourced it I am betting someone would’ve ported it to 64-bit by now, its not as if they’ll be using that engine for anything else I am guessing.
It is a shame, but one of the major reasons I do not play the game as much as I should have is because of the god damn awful engine and the rubber-banding bullshit when riding warsteeds. (and yea, I miss the old skills system before the rewamp…)
Agree on earlier posts about the soundtrack, some of it is fantastic, up there with the Lineage 2 soundtrack.
Don’t sell all of the post-Moria/Lothlorien stuff short. That’s where I’ve spent most of my time in-game at this point, mainly because of your point about how it does become much more drawn out. There’s simply far more content past Moria/Lothorien, and much more so in the game than in the books. Some is good … Enedwaith and Dunland IMO flesh out parts of the peripheral ME map that I hadn’t even noticed before, in a way that I thought was consistent with the LOTR vibe. Rohan is out-of-scale for its size in the lore and the content does drag on more than it should, but you do end up at Edoras and Helm’s Deep. And they did a great job with Isengard.
Gondor is where I think they really start to draw things out too much, and it’s where the push toward the store just begins. Minas Tirith area is great (although you have to neuter your graphics to avoid constant crashes). After that, the story is still good, but it’s something one has to search for past the push for grinding or buying necessary items from the store. I’m only nearing the Mordor gate, but am becoming disillusioned with the game’s store focus. I suppose I can make it through with one character, but not with more than that due to the grind/store. And I had enjoyed taking alts behind me 20 or so levels behind.
Legendary server is up as of yesterday, and the response was large enough to apparently choke up the queue and tick many folks off. They opened a second one.
I’ll be interested in seeing how many participants are already current VIPs who will drop off fast vs. any new VIP subs they got for this, and how long THEY last.
Oh, and there’s apparently a problem with some low-level MOB poison DoTs killing low-level characters in seconds.
I love the look of Rohan but the questing is excretable. There are so many quests that are pure filler that are not interesting at all,. Even some of the book quests are like that. I was working on Book 10 and got annoyed when I had to run from one cave to another to talk with various participants. Why they did not put them all in the same spot boggles the mind. But the final straw was going to some horribly designed woods in the far NW of the map of Wildermore. Just terrible design of a zone where there is a narrow channel through 15 million mobs to get to the Ent you have to talk to. Once there, the objective is to wake him up. They send you out to kill mobs in the woods to make noise. So I did so. You turn that quest in and they ask you to go out to do the exact same thing. Bugger me but that is a crock of shite. Asking a player to go out and kill the exact same mobs for the exact same reason is the very definition of filler. There seems to be very little consideration to locations, zones or even keeping things interesting. Finally the player does not even get the joy of fighting the huge monster of the zone. The whole series is quite literally some of the worst questing I have ever seen in a MMO. There is absolutely no payoff for the player which is a cardinal sin.
Then I did Book 11 which was a nice change of pace, all if it taking place in Edoras. Neat. But after Theoden leaves I am sent to help the locals. I get to the first city and they want me to do 7 terribly designed quests.
I feel like my character has been stuck in Rohan forever with no end in sight so I uninstalled the game. It just is not worth doing a bunch of shite quests in city after city with no payoff whatsoever. Almost all of Rohan is an exercise of quantity over quality which is a massive shame given the source material. I could be taking part in an epic war. I could be scouting the enemy. I could be tracking the flying nazgul, getting provisions stored at Helm’s Deep, rescuing civilians from marauding hordes, laying the groundwork for friction between the Mordor and White Hand orcs, etc. Instead I have been working on Generic Quest #783, boarding someone’s windows in Generic Town #18.
Had a queue wait of over 700 Sunday afternoon trying to log onto one of the new Legendary servers. Craziness.
I am getting tempted to try it
I have no idea what my suggestion actually entails but I wish they would revisit a lot of the later game stuff. Tighten it up dramatically, maybe kill mounted combat or redo it with 87% less sucking or whatever. But that original game was so good, it would be nice if they brought the rest up to that quality.
Given my post about 3 above this one of course I wholeheartedly agree. When it comes to Rohan:
Truthfully, the terrain is gorgeous but I truly believe that the writers just threw in the towel trying to create so much content for leveling that it became an exercise in shoveling shite.
They use to have a guy going through the zones and tweaking them to be more player friendly. Pretty sure that stopped after Mordor, but I would have liked to see that general overhaul hit Rohan.
I think it is crazy that anyone wants to go back to ye olden times and play original Lone Lands and North Downs. Ugh.
Not sure what the old versions are like but I did like when Instances were whole areas instead of segmented separately.
That’s what I’m about with the whole rollback server: do people forget just how grindy LOTRO was before the various revamps? It was awful. And the current zones aren’t exactly grind-free, either, especially once you get to your mid-20s.