After a hiatus of about three months, I spent last Saturday night doing something I haven’t done in a while — playing The Lord of the Rings Online. Now I love that game and if I had all the time that some of my guildmates seem to, I’d have at least half a dozen 60s instead on one along with a level 27 Champion and a few alts all hovering around 20. MMOs are like relationships — you occasionally need to take a break to see other games. (Please don’t tell my wife I wrote that.) I actually made a good bit of progress on my epic quests, finishing the first half of Volume II and finally convincing someone to take a trip to the Mirror-halls, one of the new three-man instances.
Here’s the thing about the Mirror-halls. I love a lot of the stuff that Turbine does with their instancing and dungeon runs. There’d nobody better at telling a story in an MMO through the medium of dungeon design. They’re also really good at making the environment a more interactive and interesting part of a dungeon run. It seems to me that the mirror-halls is one their biggest missteps in the game. The big challenge in the mirror-hall is to reclaim the place from the merrevail (evil female demons) that have taken up residence in the place by adjusting the huge rotating mirrors to once again bring light into the place. That means that players have to run around adjusting these huge mirrors while fighting against wargs and morroval who are trying to keep the place in darkness. The place is a huge puzzle and is incredibly confusing.
The problem is that this is the the one area I’ve seen where Turbine’s creativity really ran away with them. Considering that this is a three-man instance and such instances were created to be challenging as larger content without the need for the huge time investment or a ton of people, why on Earth would you then go create an instance where even if you know the pattern you’re going to spend a huge chunk of time running up and down through confusing corridors turning mirrors just so in order to get just everything right? Then after all that, you follow it up with a boss fight that’s just brutally hard? Come on guys! Pick one or the other. If players are going to invest the time in getting the puzzle completed, would a simple tank n’ spank boss fight be too much to ask? Conversely, if the challenge is the fight, don’t make us fight the landscape getting there as well. This may be just me but having both at the same time smack of the classic World of Warcraft 40-man raids where every step had to be choreographed to within an inch of it’s life.
The Angry Bear (ALPHA) 