I had a rather pleasant experience in the game yesterday that I thought I would share. I was in the Lone lands and I stumbled across an instance for VIP players involving a secret cave below the Forsaken Inn. I recruited a friend from my Kinship, and we started down. I'm currently playing as a hunter, and my friend was a burglar, so we're of similar class types. We found traps in the cave that both of us could disable for a short period of time. We also found plaques on the walls that neither of us could read. They required a Lore-Keeper, Rune-Master, or Minstrel to read them, so we pressed on, hoping that the plaques were optional. The first puzzle we had to solve was a riddle door that required a specific /emote in order to open.
LOTRO is the first game I've experienced where the /emotes are actually part of the gameplay. I first noticed it during the recent Harvest Festival where I could play a daily game called Troves and Trickery. After accepting the quest, you are given a limited time to find 4 different NPCs in the area with an info ring over their heads. When you talk to them, they say something to you which is a bit like a riddle. One farmer might tell you how bugs and spiders make his skin crawl. You solve the riddle by targeting the NPC and using an /emote that sounds apropriate based on what the character said, and their race. So in the case of the farmer, you use the /shiver emote and get a message that you solved it. Solve all 4 and you complete the quest.
So there I was in this dungeon, using the same system on a door. It's a clever system that almost brings to mind the old text adventures of the early computer days, and it's a feature I would like to see more often in MMOs. Moving on, we ran into a series of Gauntlet style enemy generators made out of large bone piles. Undeads just keep spawning until you destroy the pile, and ranged attacks are weak against it, forcing me to get up close and personal with them while my friend kept the undeads busy. To make matters worse, the room was also full of spike traps that had to be navigated in order to reach the bone piles. It made for a very exciting encounter.
Then we reached the blade traps; giant pillars with sweeping blades that do massive damage on each hit. In all my years playing WoW, I never encountered anything like it. The first set required slowly navigating a series of pressure plates, stopping to fight enemies along the way. We soon realized that the best strategy was to let them come to you or hit them from range, because once you hit one of those plates, you get sliced to bits. It took us a few tries, and we breathed a short sigh of relief when we finally made it through. Along the way, we picked up pages from a pirate's journal that filled us in a bit on the history of the cave. The second set of blade traps made us pause, because they were on a timer. The only advantage was the fact that we had the ability to disabled the trap for a short period.
In the final room we came to, we found more of those rune plaques, along an ancient letter on the floor and coffins that had levers in them. Problem was, neither the letter or the levers seemed to be working properly when we clicked on them. We read through the journal pages closely, looking for a clue that would help us open the next gate, but we couldn't figure it out. So I called in a Minstrel player from our Kinship to help us read the plaques. That first plaque we had passed back at the beginning told us of a hidden door in the room, so we walked up to it and found that it required a class with more emphasis on strength! So we pressed on again, and back in the last room, we found that the plaques were all names of the deceased, mentioned in the journal pages.
It turns out that the instance was bugged. The Minstrel player had done it before, and realized it when the ancient letter wasn't working. So we gave up, but the experience still lingered in my mind. I loved the idea of an instance that while possible to solo, actually rewards the player for bringing along friends with different latent abilities by opening up extra content within the instance. In all of the other MMOs I've played so far, I don't think I've seen one that requires teamwork to do more than just kill mobs, and I hope to see more games like this in the future.
Earlier this evening, I was playing Champions Online and trying to understand what incentives there were to becoming a subscriber. The biggest answer I got from other players was Free Form, where you can customize your character from scratch rather than using a pre-made Archetype. It seems to me that this idea of playing without classes conflicts with the idea of different classes working together to solve a puzzle. I spent some time mulling over how the two ideas could peacefully coexist and I came up with a solution.
Backstory. Have the player pick from a list what the character did before the events of the game. This is what the character knows, and can be used to interact with specific objects within the game world in order to solve puzzles. If CO actually had something like that, I'd probably enjoy playing it a lot more. Being a superhero isn't just about fighting enemies. Sometimes it's about playing detective, and that's an area that CO is sorely lacking.
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