f13.net

Posted here instead of the MMO section since that's mostly news-related posts, SWG threads and that baseball player shilling his game.

Here's the situation:

Wife and I are on break at the end of this week for 2 weeks, though this week is also reasonably coasty.

1) Stopped playing WoW in Feb. We both have 80's with lots of quests to do, and also some Horde level 29 newbs which were also a lot of fun to play. We have 2 time cards good to go.

2) Never Played LoTRO, but have 2 Moria Boxes good to go. Played briefly in beta, should we wait until the new expansion comes out which will apparently make combat less underwater-feeling?

3) Never Played WAR, but have 2 Boxes good to go. It might not run well on her box, but if we don't play it soon there'll be none servers left.

4) Hold off MMOs till the Christmas/Summer break and play PC/XBox games in the meantime.

Thoughts?
 

Don't do #3. 
Did you get your PS3?
Play that, it's lovely.

PS3 will be around Christmas time. Bills got in the way, so I'm just collecting a few games 'till then.

Co-op stuff with the wife is important in this consideration, though.

Since you both have 80's on WoW it's probably just easier to sub for a month and play that. At least you know you'd have fun with your wife and it saves you the hassle of leveling up characters in another mmo only to stop after your break is done and realize you didn't really like it in the end.

Or play console games!

Despite what everyone says, WAR is good for one (1) month. Roll on a server that has an active tier 1 (like dark crag) and just roll alts from levels 1 - 20. A healer/tank or two kill squishie melee dps characters is a lot of fun when you can co-ordinate strategies.

LOTRO is vastly improved from beta, especially the Bree starter areas, which got recently revamped.

I'll be the guy who suggests Fallen Earth, if you don't want to play LotRO.

The combat change for LotRO is apparently that autoattack is interruptable by skills.  They are not reducing cooldowns or anything, so I'd say whether you wait for Mirkwood or not depends on what about the combat you dislike.

Edit for reeding: I noticed you have never played LotRO.  Fallen Earth is fun and all, but it lacks polish.  LotRO is polished and very well done.  Both starting areas have been redone for the better... very much so, in fact.  I watched my wife roll a new elf and I was impressed with the new Ered Luin; I can only imagine the new Archet/Bree-land is at least as well-done.  If you want PvP, though, try FE instead of LotRO.  Or if you want to pretend you are playing a Fallout MMO.  You can shoot people in the face with zip guns.

If he has already spent the money on boxes, no reason not play your free month.  I'd just forget about going to T3.

You could always try DDO - now it is more F2P there would be little cost involved and it is a game that works around having a team with different capabilities.

Or - and this is just a suggestion - Wizard101 is free up to lvl 13 or so and it gives you a good taste of the game. You could certainly work as a team and it is something different.

Also: Free Realms.

I don't think these MMOs would have any system issues.

Aion head start is this weekend if you preorder, or tuesday if you dont. Also champions is very fun to mess around with power sets for a quick mmog fix.

I'm dittoing Yegolev and Unsub on lotro, ddo, and wizard 101.  Those are all good and reasonable choices, especially since you're already sitting on lotro boxes.

If you or your wife are only comfortable playing MMO's that stay within the EQ1 paradigms then go with LOTRO for pve or WAR for pvp depending on what you guys like, you have the boxes, the games are only going to get more dated looking and right now both should look nice and you get that new shiney feel for a few weeks.  If you are worried about her machine running WAR then LOTRO sounds like the obvious choice.

If you two like to muck about with new systems and have played with the f13 crowd before you've gotta go with Fallen Earth.  That's a lot of if's though, pvp, crafting, sandbox/worldy, kinda ghetto, learning curve, playing w/ f13 people etc.

:facepalm:

Don't forget shooting people in the face with air pistols, then Pistol Whip! :awesome_for_real:

The reason I'd go with WAR/LoTRO or WoW is because we already have the boxes fo rthe former two (30 days included) and 60-day timecards purchased for WoW (bought before we decided to give it a break) - hence all 3 are no cost/already paid for.

WAR's main consideration is the fact that her PC may not play it properly, so might get a new PC around Christmas time. Of course that will allow us to co-op Borderlands, so WAR may slip even further down the backburner. I would like to play it a little before EA shut it down though, just to check it out properly.

I played LotRO in Beta a little and got up to level 13ish, she was mostly busy at the time and didn't make it as far in Beta, but she really loves LotR.

WoW.. well, it's WoW. Known quantity. Fun in the non-catass way we play co-op, as long as I don't slide into casual catass mode again.

DDO might be an option down the track for our 4-player Friday night LAN group once we finish off Titan Quest.


Never heard of Fallen Earth or Wizardry, but I assume they involve some kind of purchase, and since I'm spending my store-box amounts of spare cash on 360 and PS3 games now, I'd rather avoid another MMO investment.

How far away roughly is the next round of Lifetime LotRO subs, based on experience?

Go with LotRO I think. WAR is interesting from a see-how-they-failed standpoint but I really think even what was the fun part of the game, tier 1, is likely to be really suffering for lack of other participants for things like public quests and scenarios.

LotRO is a solid, fun diku, a bit slower paced than WoW. The game is gorgeous and they got the lore down pretty impeccably - it sounds like your wife would appreciate that in particular. Also the revamped starting areas definitely flow much better than they used to.

WAR is a failed and dying game. Play WoW. You know it's at least pretty good. Or if you're tired enough of it, LOTRO.

LotRO duo'ing (dps + heals) is unstoppable.  And it's a purty game.  My vote you both try LotRO.  Way more polish, way more story and care than most.  And very casual.


Edit: and +1 for kicking Shilling in the balls

FE is a box purchase / direct download purchase at this time.

Wizard101 (https://www.wizard101.com/home2/game/page_8ad6a4041aa7b7bd011ac6f9ae9805fe) has a pretty large free starting experience - up to lvl 11 or 14 or something - and it has a range of price options past that. Sub fees are $10 a month ($12 a month for 2) or you can pay as little as $1 to unlock a new area. No box cost at all.

The reason I didn't mention ChampO is that if your wife's PC is iffy, it probably won't run it. Also, if you are waiting to see how LOTRO is changed by some upcoming content, it makes sense not to use those codes until you've worked out if you want to keep playing after the patch.

I might put Wizard101 under the options for Friday night LAN/co-op gaming actually, along with DDO. I reckon we'll have finished off TQ within the next 3 weeks.

Her PC's not shit. It's just far from bleeding edge, and doesn't have 2.0 shaders or whatever as far as I can tell. About 4(?) years old now, so I don't think it'll run WAR, Conan, Borderlands, etc. The card is what stops it running GRAW2 which is 2 years old and would be a great 2-3 player MP game, so I figure most high-spec newer games will have no chance...

AMD 2600, 1.5gb Ram, ATI Radeon 9600/256mb.

Looking like WoW or LotR at the moment. Will discuss further when she gets home.

Fallen Earth is the standard $50 box and $15/month sub.

About the LotRO expansion, I don't think it is necessary to wait.  Few changes for low levels (as far as I know) and those are super-duper things like shared storage, which isn't important if you don't have alts, of course.  You won't care about most of it as a newbie.  You definitely won't be jumping right into the new areas.

About the duoing, it is very possible and lots of fun, in fact I duo with my wife 95% of the time.  My wife and I were doing two Hunters (pure dps) but I leveled up a Runekeeper (DPS/Heals) because of zero defense causing us to die.  Even playing two hunters, we were able to take on quite a few quests that are for groups.  Now that I can heal, we can do even more stuff and I'm not even a pure healer.  So if it's going to be just you and your wife duoing, I will put in a Customer Testimonial that it's doable and fun.

Seconded, as me and my girlfriend duo all the time as well.

War is terrible.  Avoid.  Otherwise, it sounds as if LOTRO might be the best for you.  Both WOW and LOTRO are going to be quest based and I think LOTRO offers a nice world to duo in. 

Bear in mind you cannot duo a lot of group quests in LotRO. There's enough stuff that you can skip the big-group quests without a problem, but it drives me and Ingmar fuckin' crazy whenever we try to get back into LotRO. It's a fun game, and I do think it sounds like the best fit for you, but the DUOING IS UNSTOPPABLE RAAR is a bit of an overstatement.  :oh_i_see:

OK, OK, I can put a more realistic bent to it.  I still remember EQ and other pre-WoW games so I am possibly not in the right mindset for today's kids. :oh_i_see:

We can't do very many group quests without getting some help or by waiting until they are grey/trivial.  We can't do any of the full-group ones at the appropriate level, but personally this doesn't bother me since leveling isn't hard in LotRO and the story is the same even if the rewards are small.  I mean that they are still fun to me even if they are grey since I'm in it for the lore and shit.

The small-group quests are much easier and we can do those pretty regularly unless they are composed of fucking bullshit; those are rather rare and depends on your class set, like if you have a Guardian against swarms or something.  The Epic line, on the other hand, is hard for full groups and is something I have bitched about a lot since they don't scale and highbies don't slum in the West unless they are bringing up an alt.  We got through those via a combo of gross outleveling and a PUG.

For the most part, though, plenty to do without banging your head on an instance full of elites with dread auras.

Actually, the end of Book One is supposed to be much easier these days since a recent revamp.  Book Two is being "fixed" in the next patch, hopefully.

Book 1 is soloable the whole way through now, at least as a champion. The last bit was pretty tough though. Book 2 is D: currently though.

You should play EVE.

Because it doesn't have elves.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15037.0

Aside from that, as others have said, WAR is the most terrible of your choices.

They are bitter.  Just ignore them and know that WAR will be a short-term relationship.

Nobody has to be bitter to see how his time would be better spent playing anything else instead of wasting even one (1) Mythic Second installing WAR.

Well, I am going to play it at some stage - I've already paid the entrance fee, after all. I'm just going to treat it like a game that only lasts for 30 days, so exploration and checking out virtual geography and architecture and generally fucking around will be the order of the day rather than play2win.

As for Eve, I've looked at it, and it doesn't appeal. It would appeal to her even less.

SubSpace.

Info: wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game))
Old review: http://reviews.cnet.com/pc-games/subspace-pc/4505-9696_7-30977300.html
Current client: http://www.getcontinuum.com/

I had fun with War for a solid year.  It has it's flaws but no worse then any other game imo.  I had fun leveling and I had fun at endgame.

Although for what it's worth I'd probably send you to LOTRO.  I've been wishing I stayed playing the game for the last couple months, after I've seen all that it's gone through. 

Right now though, Fallen Earth has got me pretty hooked atm.

LoTRO until you can get the console games coming. By next spring you'll be off MMOs again :-)

WAR is not worth it. You won't play it long enough to care what people were bitching about anyway. Not after coming off of such a big investment in WoW.

If it is a two weeks thing you are looking for, and particularly playing with a partner - you can do worse than City of Heroes.