“I'm going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I'm just gonna assume it all went to plan.” - Dr. Evil.
There were a couple of big moments in the Epic Story in the Misty Mountains, including a final confrontation with a recurring adversary, and a showdown with the Ringwraith I'd been chasing around for the last two zones.
This is a very well staged scene. For 40+ levels the Nine have been acting as if I'm below their paygrade – and let's be honest, I am – and leaving their minions to deal with me, Dr. Evil style. This scene is set up like it will play out the same way and there's a clever piece of misdirection during the scripted sequence, because at that point I could only target one of the enemies in the room, and it's not the one I ended up fighting.
I've talked about this before, way
back during my first run of LOTRO In 2019, but it's worth reiterating
that Standing Stone does a good job of dealing with what could be an
insurmountable problem in most other MMOs – the player is not the
focal point of the overall story. This shouldn't be a problem in a
multiplayer game, but the trend in modern MMOs is to combine
multiplayer gameplay with singleplayer storytelling – SWTOR and
Final Fantasy XIV are perhaps the most extreme examples of this.
The Epic Story in LOTRO does a good job of fitting the player character's story in around the margins of the actual story. It's not always entirely plausible – mostly because we can speed from place to place far faster than the Fellowship – but sometimes it works really well. When I realized I was finally going to cross swords with one of the Nazgul it was a memorable moment, so well done, devs; I did not see that coming.
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