With The Rings of Power currently airing it seems like a good time to return to Lord of the Rings Online. Yeah, look at me being all relevant and trend chasing. For once.
For the record, I like the Peter Jackson movies - The Lord of the Rings is about as good an adaptation as the trilogy is ever likely to get, and there's a lot of good stuff in The Hobbit, even if it becomes increasingly over indulgent as it goes. I'm still amazed that these are from the guy who made his screen debut with Bad Taste.
As for The Rings of Power... well, at the halfway point of the season I'm just not feeling it. I'm reluctant to say so because there's so much bad faith criticism of the show going around, but I can't deny I'm finding it a bit flat. The production team deserve some credit for not trying to Games of Thrones it up with sex and swearing, but that just leaves me wondering what they are trying to do. I feel like they should have either been less faithful to the source material in the interest of making a punchier show, or more faithful to avoid making something that often feels very generic. Maybe that's not an option though, since according to the credits this is based on 'The Lord of the Rings and the appendices', meaning The Silmarillion is still off limits.
But if nothing else it proves that capturing that Tolkien feel isn't that easy, so well done to Standing Stone Games for doing a better job of it than Amazon.
It's been a long time snce I last logged into LOTRO - more than two years, which is the longest gap between runs of any game to date - and I had a moment of brainlock when I first looked at my warden again, standing idly outside the vaults in Bree. What was I doing? Where was I going next? What did all those icons on my hotbar mean?
Indeed, LOTRO is one of the reasons I used to reroll so often, since returning to a higher level character with a couple of dozen skills can be an intimidating experience. I was sorely tempted to reroll this time; partly because I'd finished the last run of the game feeling a bit underwhelmed at how easy everything was on my warden, and partly because as of a couple of days ago there's now a number of new possible race/class combinations, and I've always wanted to try an Elf burglar.
But I do want to make progress in a few games, especially after the long hiatus that's eaten up most of this year, so I found myself a stablemaster and put myself on a nice long ride to the Lone Lands while I reminded myself of what everything does.
After a few fights in the Trollshaws I'd reacquainted myself with this character's primary combat rotation, and I'd switched a few skills around to better fit my preferred keybinds. It's all come back to me faster than I'd expected it to, and there was a stage of the Epic Story open in my log to put me back onto the questing path.
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