My Flaming Anors

I swear, playing the Lord of the Rings Online just makes me appreciate what a great Lord of the Rings game the Last Days Mod for Mount & Blade was.

In that game, I started out as a dude from Rohan with a helmet with a Horse-hair Plume, and I rode around the Riddermark making a name for myself with forty of my Rohirrim cousins, and I led huge ass thundering mounted charges into piles of Saruman's Orcs that were truly awesome.

And then, later on, I rode down to Gondor and saved all their Gondorian asses.

Or I could start as a stalwart defender of Gondor and deal with the never-ending punishment of Mordor crossing the river by Osgiliath and the Corsairs and all them, and then march up to the Mark and rescue the Riders of Rohan.

Or a Mirkwood Elf and mess around with that Moria and Dol Guldur crap going on over there or whatever.

They didn't have Lothlorien in that thing but there were some elves that were sorta like that.

Anyways even if you couldn't just steal the way they did their thing and make it into a minimumly multiplayer game (that's what all MMOs really are when it comes down it, how many times do you actually see four hundred players assembled together in one place, y'know?) The Lord of the Rings Online really shoulda stole more of the shit from WoW that WoW stole from EQ.

And less from DDO, what with that f'd up group content shit that I just skip heh.

Did the guy who did the game mechanics really think DDO had pulled one over on WoW's design there?

Goddam man everybody must be too intimidated by him to straighten his ass out or something heh.

The Shire is really good in LOTRO though.

But Bree?

C'mon.

Who the hell wants to be some loser from Crummy Ass Bree?

Bree was a crummy place in the books man heh.

Where are the Rohan Horsehair Helmets already?

Why am I a Wizard-Who-Isn't-A-Wizard wearing a Jester's Hat and Shoulder Pads and why do I have a pet Lynx?

I don't know!

Ah, sorry, I had to get that out of me.

Well I ain't doing any of this for you.

And I don't have to be "fair" or anything either so don't even gimme any of that crud.

There's just this part of my brain saying "dude, I can't imagine any drunk or small child having a hard time coming up with a Lord of the Rings Online Game Design that wouldn't beat the shit out of this thing" heh.

And there's another part of me that says I should rescue the guys that made the Shire from that team of people who gave me the purple tights when I was a newb and didn't do the work they needed to do to get the music from the movies and shit ahaha.

I mean, that really bugs me, when there's shit that's really good and true getting messed up by some other guy's shit AHAHA.

Okay, okay, I'm done.

I just can't help doing what Groo does best sometimes y'know heh.

I suspect they designed LOTRO the way they did so they could add Rohan as a starter area like a "new race" in an expansion.

Same with Gondor and Lothlorien and Mirkwood.

So that's like four expansions right there man heh.

And they wanted to do all the storyline stuff following the hobbits and junk, and the storyline quests in the game are really cool and clever, if you can get some people to help you do 'em, 'cause they're all group shit.

But I still think it would've been better to let people start out all over the place, even if you couldn't finish the whole map and have Mordor and Moria and all that.

'Cause if a game starts good, folks will wait for the rest of it.

Y'know, like, let me level up my Rohan guy to Fifty in the Riddermark, and then sick the Isengard and Mordor and Moria expansions on me or something.

But if they gotta be some jagbag from Bree, and suffer through all this DDO grouping garbage, and wait for you to release some Rohan Expansion that might never happen with some awesome mounted combat that your game doesn't seem designed for (you gotta wait 'till yer level 35 to get a horse, y'know? playing a dude from Rohan without a horse is exactly like playing a game about jedi where you can't jump) then they might not stick around.

Especially if they're like me and they're sorta calculating how long its gonna take to get all the expansions to get to goddam Mordor holy shit man I'll be a mummy in a museum before that happens at this rate heh.

Its kinda like page seven hundred and thirteen of a book that you quit reading 'cause the first few sentences of page one really sucked and took forever to get through ahaha.

Okay, okay, its not that bad.

But the clothes are really terrible man seriously.

And most of the guys I see playing the game are dudes with the gear from a lifetime subscription who are too tired of the game to keep the auction house stocked with more than four items y'know and I don't blame 'em 'cause you made all the shit way too much of a pain in the ass to do more than once heh.

The least you could do to fix stuff is give everybody a couple more character slots so that folks could have one of each kinda guy on a server.

That would jiggle some of the wires that are getting broke, y'know?

If you can't afford to do your own homework, and yer gonna keep making these damn things over and over again, then just copy more shit from WoW and less from all the other games.

That's all I'm saying heh.

Man I need to go listen to some Enya now and cool off or something ahaha.

Seriously, think about how awesome a game would be with this kinda music.

Or this.

Or this.

Or this.

Or this.

To say nothing of how the Lord of the Rings IP is like the grandaddy of everything that ain't been stolen from Conan or Elric, or all three, I mean, there's like almost no point in even pretending that yer making anything else unless yer doing something totally different than D&D and UO and EQ and WoW and Warhammer and all them, like some kinda historical thingie or something with no magic and no elves and no orcs or something heh.

And you ain't gonna do it better than the guys that did the movies or Tolkien did it, man, so just get that stupid idea right out of yer goddam head ahaha.