Lord Of The Rings Online Feels Like Home
2004 was a good year for games. Bioware came out with my 2nd all time fav NeverWinter Nights in 2002. That game and that era of gaming was very special to me.
I love the gfx from that era. Sure compared to now its not aged well at all, but i love it. Sure these old games seem to run on an ancient code of honour, refusing to change with the times, but i like that. That's where i come from as a gamer, my happiest moments as a gamer.
LOTRO brings me back to those times where care, love and craftsmanship were poured into games. I like that the old skool games repel modern gamers who only know the triple A gaming industry's constant churning of flashy (but utterly souless) games.
In our corner, we remember the times of slow paced plays. We remember when games required us to use our brains, rather than constantly flashing arrows and shiny markers, spoonfeeding us on HOW to play the game. We remember how game immersion wasn't influenced by shiny graphics. We spent time reading books in game, we spent time listening to music in game, and we loved it.
LOTRO is absolutely wonderful.
The devs have kept to Tolkien's vision and made it a reality in the gaming world. The Devs have stuck to the source material vigorously and that's where the charm comes from.
Sure it's an old game with "archiac" mechanics and graphics, but don't let that deter you, as the magick lies within. This is the beauty of old school MMORPGs, or RPGS in general. As a WoW (hoping you have tried classic or even Turtle WoW) player you will appreciate the spell mechanics/queue system in combat, which follows the traditional tried and tested format.
Each area in the game is expertly hand crafted with precision, tenderness and love. The writing, the voice acting, the narrative and pacing of the story are all very well done.
The music is phenomenal! You may find yourself completely immersed in the beautiful music whilst wandering Middle Earth. I recently made my way to Bree (i'm a new player) and ended up spending about 40mins just chilling there, not doing anything, relaxing to the music in the Tavern, whilst i was smoking a bowl of pipe weed in real life at my computer desk (Peterson's Nightcap being my go to pipe tobacco, in my Savinelli Pipe). I can only ever remember my three all time fav games (Fallout New Vegas, Neverwinter Nights and Kingdom Come Deliverance) giving me this relaxation and vibe.
In speaking about immersion, this game does it VERY WELL. You will feel it as you slowly pace through the game, doing each quest, getting to know the story and the world, which has very little inconsistencies. I find myself caring about the world, even the trivial things. Actually just yesterday I ended up in a small town called Staddle, and found a questgiver by a Hobbit called Himloc. Well...his whole quest line is about how his pipe-weed has been stolen by local brazen fools that must be dealt with. As a pipe tobacco smoker in real life, this quest was important to me as you do not mess with a man's pipe and his pipe weed. These are some of the small pleasures i find.
The community, whether you decide to play on the free servers or legendary VIP servers (I wholesomely recommend you get on the VIP servers, you will NOT regret it), the community is just amazing. It's a mature community of old school adult non toxic players, who care about the world of Middle Earth, who care about Tolkien's legacy, and who want to be part of it. Also we want to find Frodo in game, to give him some lembas if we can.
So that's it. Now stop reading and get on LOTRO!
▶️ 3Speak
It does sound immersive.
Thanks!
Edit: 3Speak seems broken for me today. No one that has posted 3Speak videos has a video that isn't broken, and all of them give me an error message 'This video file cannot be played. Error code 232011' in your case. Another was 233011. No idea what the difference is.
3speak broken again?
Just tried the vid and it's working. But in case you need a back up...here is da backup!!!
How are you man?
Great! This video actually is playing.
I am sleepy. I had to resolve an issue last night with a crowbar that deprived me of sleep. Such are the responsibilities our duty to society demands of us. Today is a better day.
Edit: now that I can see the game, I am reminded of Evercrack back in the day, which I found very immersive despite it's sometimes puerile mechanics and primitive graphics attainable at that time.
Ever Crack indeed.
It's sad how they blurr the lines of reality and a fiction game world. More and more people are incentivised on these online games now to live in these game worlds, via in-game Fashion Wars, known as comsmetics (look at Guild Wars 2 end game), or survivalism (like Valheim, Minecraft type games), or Housing (LOTRO, Second Life).
These are basically precursors to NFTs in the centralized world of video gaming.
I don't spend much time on Online games, in fact these may probably be the last MMORPG videos i will do on LOTRO. Or any other for that matter. The digital video game landscape is filled with people who have no love for real life. They love their smart phones more (i bumped into a few people today walking, eyes clued to the smart phones every second of the way) and more. They walk around with Apple Airpods, blocking out the sounds of the natural world, even if their phone is out of sight.
Soon they will track people and further weaponize meta-data through these games. The loot-box addiction will be propelled by NFT technology...which means a huge gaming blockchain with AAA online MMO game titles built on it perhaps...and then it's game over...
Tell me how the crowbar is?
Did you fck up the crowbar?
Oh no. The 'Gentle Persuader' is fine. I have yet to check the door I applied it to.
To an extent these can be fundamentally a desirable attribute. In Second Life, for example, it is the main draw, in fact. In Valheim and etc, construction is almost a game in itself, and mirrors the draw in games like Sim City and many other games.
However, I remember when I took a look at WOW when it first came out and replaced the RTS earlier WOW games. I found it's more flashy graphics anti-immersive, as you relate, and vastly inferior to Everquest because of it. That also drew an entirely different crowd, which at the time was enormously different from the Everquest role players, or from what yet is found on NWN, and LOTRO. I've never even glanced with interest at any AAA game AFAIK, because of these issues. I, like you, prefer the more immersive, less flashy, games of our past.
NeverWinter Nights for damn sure is my 2nd all time fav game, especially the player made custom modules. I follow a blogger on blogspot called Lilura1, and older gamer lady from the 80s who runs an excellent retro RPG blog.
https://lilura1.blogspot.com/p/baldurs-gate.html
Values are changing. People no longer play video games just to chill for an hour. It's now almost a half-day job. People no longer enjoy the experience of a well crafted game, but rather chasing the incentives and superfluous accolades (Steam achievements, loot-boxes, collectibles, in-game items/fashion/housing).
I saw this video the other day...i feels it in my ❤️ man
Look at how sad that is...this is the gaming landscape. People from my generation (Gen Z is it called? Millennials) managed to escape this trap, being born in a time when digital influence (from technologies) didn't have such a great effect on actual physical daily life...we remember playing football in the courtyard...we remember radios, TVs, technology that was specifically external to our entertainment consumption...meaning you actually had to get up and press a button, or dial a knob to make a phone call etc etc; sometimes you may even need to take a slipper to the TV box and do...
Now...the generation after mines are born co-existing with technlogy and the digital world. They don't know what the 90s, 80s and 70s, even the 60s must have been like. It's unfathomable and that life back then is not considered freedom to these new creatures (wtf is up with your new DNA ehh? Oh you didn't know???). The digital world, with all the flashy AI genearted images, or websites, or blockchains, or tokens, or whatever, that...is freedom to them.
I spoke with some people who played a game called CyberPunk 2077...a lot of these people actually wish for the future to be like that. They like that Fifth Element, BladeRunner type world. It's SAD!
Look at this shyte here...
https://guildjen.com/gw2-fashion/
https://www.valheimians.com/builds/tag/spotlight/
https://cosmeticlotro.com/
WHY????
Consider further back in the past, even before any kind of remote electrical communications, and even before the Pony Express and letters were possible because writing was invented. As you consider each iteration of the world that existed prior to the present, you discover greater freedom as communication of edicts from rulers was less possible.
The advent of recorded speech was a clinal boundary, because our brains are evolved to acculturate us, and can't natively differentiate between fictional speech and natural speech of our neighbors. Hearing speech informs us culturally. Visual presentations of people further created acculturation to fictional society. Such fictional presentations have always been created by Priests and Shamans, but were limited to local iterations prior to mass communication. The Catholic Church and Islam were evolutions of this acculturation that sought to become universal, global phenomena.
The more immersive such representations become, the more we are acculturated to fictional society. We are today trained to live in culture that includes extraordinary powers and strange beings riding flying turtles and laying waste to ancient civilizations to attain to magical boons.
How can trapping rabbits to consume their corpse compare? The extinction of the megafauna and end of the ability to create ~4k meals of ~4kcal each with one kill destroyed a way of life, an ease of production of wealth we can hardly even imagine today, about ~13kya. But even then people walked around imagining the fictional reality their shamans created, that enabled their local society to prosper IRL. The fiction we immerse ourselves in through watching TV or playing games is entrained and our real world cultures reflect our fictional acculturation.