A review of Evendim

With only 4 hours of this run to go it's time to move on from Evendim. This is the first zone of this game that's been entirely new to me since I started this blog, so here's a review of my first time in Everswim Evendim.

Let's start with the good stuff. It's a gorgeous zone, even by LOTRO's high standards. The layout, with the lake in the centre of the zone, means that the grand vistas that in other zones are only visible from certain elevated areas are in view everywhere here. The draw distance also holds up, and it was only when I was in the north of the zone, looking south along the entire length of the lake, that the horizon became hazy.

The architecture is striking and far grander than anything else I've seen so far, and the white stonework looks great against the natural tones of the surrounding hills and the lake itself.

It's also a much bigger zone than it appears from the in-game map, and areas that appear to be mere slivers of land around the edges of the lake turn out to be unexpectedly deep. As is typical of LOTRO there's a lot of content here – unlike many other MMOs in which I can be in and out of a zone in just a few hours.

Coming into Evendim from Fornost in the North Downs means I passed by Oatbarton and the rest of the region below Annuminas. Similarly I've only seen the city itself in passing. The good of that is that after 20 hours I still haven't seen all there is in this area. The bad... I'll get to that in a moment.

There's not much in the way of instanced areas in this zone, but the Tomb of Elendil makes for a suitably grand finale.* It's a straightforward and linear hack 'n slash but sufficiently well laid out that it doesn't feel as linear as it actually is, and there's some good storytelling as the tomb robbers you start off fighting give way to the real dangers of the tomb.

*There are also downsides to this, and I'll get to that in a moment as well.

So that's the best of Evendim. Now for the rest of it.

My initial impression of the zone – that it's essentially one big sidequest – is one I stand by. I feel that Evendim exists in part to fill in a levelling gap between the end of the epic story in the North Downs and the start of the epic story in the Trollshaws. Similarly the profusion of tier 3 crafting materials in this zone – I was tripping over ore everywhere I went – does at least balance out the way that the Lone Lands and North Downs start with tier 2 mats followed by a sliver of tier 3 before rushing to tier 4, so that's another gap filled. It's useful, but I can't really call it a good aspect of the zone as it's really only a fix to a problem with other zones.

The sense of Evendim as filler is underlined by how padded a lot of the questing is. There's an awful lot of Earn My Trust and Prove Your Worth from the quest-givers in this zone, and it does get repetitive. I did most of it, to see where it was going (if it was in fact going anywhere) but did drop one hub's third round of mob killing because it felt like just another delay in moving on to continue the main storyline of the zone – the main side quest, so to speak.

Which comes to a crashing halt when it concludes with the Tomb of Elendil, and as good as that instance is it's still a group instance, and I hate when a storyline that's been entirely soloable up to that point ends in a group quest. Let's be clear about this – it's not like say Neverwinter, where the zone storyline comes to a satisfactory conclusion in the questing and the dungeon is essentially a stand-alone epilogue. It's not even like the other zones of LOTRO, where the conclusion of each chapter of the epic story provides a sense of closure for the story of that area. No, in Evendim the entire point of the zone is to obtain an item for Aragorn – it's literally the reason you're sent there – and it's impossible to do what you were sent to do without completing one group quest which all the solo quests you have done up to that point lead directly into.

This is something I've disliked for literally as long as I've been playing MMOs, ever since I first ran into it in a long time ago in the Hollows in City of Heroes. The Hollows does exactly the same thing as Evendim, with a storyline that starts the moment you enter the zone and runs through the entirety of it, and which ends in a group instance.

The problem isn't that it's a group instance – not in itself. The problem is that no one is doing those instances anymore. I couldn't form a full team for the Caverns of Transcendence back then anymore than I could form one for the Tomb of Elendil now. Oh I daresay I could likely find an idling level 130 to run me through it, but I'm not remotely interested in being carried, and besides that a group is never the best way to experience any story content in an MMO.  In a group the focus is always on the mechanics of the game and on getting it done, not on atmosphere or story.

So I'm done with Evendim. I'm not finished it, and won't be until I come back in 5 or 10 levels time when I can perhaps kill the final boss in the Tomb. I'm also passing up on Annunimas itself in its entirety, which leads me into the last negative thing I have to say about this zone, for now. I entered Evendim at level 33, and now, after 20 hours and at level 39, I still haven't been offered a single quest that actually takes me into what is the single most distinctive location in the entire zone.

Oh I know that there are quests there, around level 39 or 40, but I've no idea how or where they start, and with the zone story having run into a brick wall in the Tomb of Elendil I'm no longer particularly interested in finding out.

In retrospect I'd have been better off working through the questlines in the Trollshaws and leaving Evendim as an alternate levelling route for a future alt, because that's what this zone is – an optional detour that offers a change of scenery. That it doesn't tie in to the epic story actually illustrates how important the epic is in giving LOTRO a sense of pace, as the story the zone does have is too meandering and unnecessarily stretched out. To paraphrase Bilbo Baggins, there's a lot of bread in Evendim, but not much butter.