f13.net

We updated the MEO site with a pretty big announcement today.

http://www.middle-earthonline.com/

The two biggest points are the publishing rights transition from VU to Turbine and pushing the ship date to 2006.

We've been pretty quiet about the development of MEO lately and for the time being that won't change. I'm more than happy to answer questions about the release though.

You guys should sell to EA. They are looking like tools with no modern MMOG and their stock down $9 today. Plus, you would get to move BACK to California.  :-D

How would a MMORPG of The Hobbit differ from a general Middle Earth one? Or is it more being able to use specifics from the novel The Hobbit to incorporate into the overall Middle Earth world?

The latter... It allows us to use stuff from The Hobbit in MEO.

Does this cover any other works, such as The Silmarillion?

Nope. We only own the rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Those books give us more than enough material to make the game though.

Basically you cut out the middle-man so you can directly craft the game to what Turbine and Tolkien Enterprises sees as opposed to what VU would think can sell the game. Can't see any downside there. Middle Earth should sell itself, can't see how VU really could add anything to it.

Oh sure, put up a new FAQ that answered my questions already. Thanks for humoring me instead of telling me to go read the FAQ. To everyone else, go read the FAQ (http://www.middle-earthonline.com/?page_id=51).

Wow.  Turbine must hold some awfully incriminating evidence to have this much pull over such monolithic franchises like D&D and LotR when you consider how AC2 has been received.  Either that or Vivendi doesn't want another fantasy MMO in their lineup since WoW is such a money-tree, but then you'd think they'd just go EA on the game and piss it away.

Sounds good having both access to stuff from the hobbit as well as lord of the rings covers a pretty healthy chunk of time line to place the game in. I am curious to see the time frame they choose to place the game in though. I would think somewhere between the hobbit and before the start of the fellowship of the rings would give them alot of options and have all the major players still around to incorporate as needed.


kaid

That is the best part of the announcement. Not that they will be ready in 2006 (is anyone anymore?), but I like to hear that they are actually taking time instead of releasing some shitty alpha code and starting up with the money hats.

I'm curious how the licensing works; a *LOT* of what was mentioned in LotR makes reference to Silmarillion and other works by Tolkien.  For example, some of the equipment came "from the West", which Sil fans know as Numenor; but details about Numenor are only in Sil and other letters. 

Then there are the game questions that bug me...

When does it occur?  The events of LotR occupy a very narrow time span, so presumably the setting is either a decade or so prior to, or soon after, those events.  For obvious reasons, the two are massively different from a lore perspective.

How are you going to handle magic?  Lore wise, almost nobody had it.  There were only 5 wizards named such, ever.  In the whole history of ME.  Going to magic use there was a bit more, but that's mostly elvish stuff, and that was more crafting than spell casting.  Magic really was just that; magic.  Very few people had any scrap of understanding of it, and those who did almost never used it.  Gandalf himself used his sword more than his staff in LotR (although I guess with Hobbit, you have him setting all sorts of things on fire, including nearly himself).

How are races being handled?  You had species differences (elf, human), but there was also tons of references to subraces (dunedain, dunlending), which for Tolkinen had more meaning than we have toward black/white/asian - witness Aragorn.  Can I be a Haradrim?

Elves... elves were the Jedi of LotR.  Everything they did was better, it's just that they had negative population growth (death + no births at this point).  Not to mention that they're all calling it quits.  At the same time, we have the same problem here as we had with SWG and Jedi; everyone wants to be one but lore-wise, they are godly and rare.

Having been a player/coder/admin for a Tolkien MUD for 5 years, I'm horribly anxious about any kind of Tolkien MMOG.  It's both a terribly popular genre, and just as terribly difficult to use as a MMOG setting, because the players have to be so insignificant.  To have a player ever get to affect anything it has to take place after the books, at which point you're in an even worse bind lore wise; the elves are all but done, the evil is rid of, and magic is even harder to find than it was before.

Oh, and I want to meet the Blue Wizards. :)

What Roac said.

Magic should be non-existent on the player's side, other than some small bits of healing using alchemy (Aragorn using "king's foil" to stem the advance of the Morgail blade on Frodo), and maybe some buffs? Frankly, if you remove the idea of buffs alto-fucking-gether, I'd be happy, as well as in battle healing. Hell, players being an elf shouldn't be allowed, but I'm sure we can't have that.

Because if we have nice things, we have to shit all over them. I expect a bazillion Lagolasses that I cannot PK.

Essentially, this is a worse license than Star Wars, except that with Star Wars, you have Lucas to shit all over good game design ideas. But in this one, all the good shit in the stories, players shouldn't be allowed to have.

I'll echo Roac and Haemish, and add a quip whose source I can't remember:  I remember reading, quite some time ago when UO was in beta, about the difference between the "literary mage" and mages that players want to be.  The literary mage was a plot device:  he had huge powers, but wielded them very seldom and only to advance the plot (thus the term literary).  Player character mages tend to focus solely on the power mages have in those stories, and want to exercise that power often in each and every play session.  It's the equivalent of having Gandalf lob fireballs on every single page of LotR, something that would vastly diminish his appeal.  A similar principle exists with lots of things in LotR.

Maybe a vain hope, but I'd like to see MEO focus more on politics and trade (and perhaps the combat that is sometimes required for each) than on magic.  There are dozens of factions in the Tolkien universe with very complicated agendas.  A game developer could use the interplay of those factions to generate a lot of fun gameplay without turning magic into the mundane.

The license is a bit complicated. But basically we can use stuff to the extent that it is in the books. So it's sort of a case by case basis for stuff that is only eluded to in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.

As far as the design stuff, unfortunately I can't talk about that yet.

Then this will be a short thread.  :evil:

If you let people play as elves, I'm not playing this game.

Maybe Elves will be an unlockable character slot that you can grind out by doing various classes... oh nevermind.

What kind of moronic half-assed design is that? Like anyone would ever design a game like that...

Hah, I predicted the ship date would be pushed back to 2006. :)  DDO is still on schedule, though?

Bruce

DDO is still scheduled to ship in 2005.

SWG could have been a lot better IMO with out the restrictions of the time frame they chose. I see you guys having the exact same problem. People want to play the hero, not the bread baker the hero buys dinner from.

Last I heard this was taking place at the same time as LotR. I have a feeling this is going to really cramp your ability to have any sort of meaningful feel to the game, Ala SWG.

I also cant get past the feeling that its not a good license for a MMOG. Lets look at what the license does for you. No magic (that players could use). Very rare magic items. No impact on the story (or even percieved impact). Elves.

Convince me im wrong. I would love to know how you are going to get around this stuff.

It's great news that Turbine gets to do their own thing. I just spent about 10 minutes thinking about how a Tolkien mmo would work, but I can't figure it out. It's like you're trying to 1up SWG for the worst mmo basis.

Good luck with it though. I really liked the whole 'Let's start our own story and make a game' thing that Asheron's Call had. It's too bad that was lost when AC2 was shoved out of the boat.

I agree. Good luck and all, but....What I really want to say is "Pull out now."

Then again, I'm sure the Tolkien fanbase is large enough to make this game a success, regardless of whether the lore is suitable for mmo's or not. But is that something to aspire to?

/shrug

Maybe. Maybe not.

It's just sad because the time, money, and brainpower invested into such a project could be put to better use. Something that aspires to be great and original. Something that works and makes sense. Something that creates new fans. Not something that caters to a "fanbase".

You already have one license worth having in D&D. And it's worth having because it CAN work within an MMO context. It not only has all the perks of a large fanbase, but D&D already is a game to begin with. Par for the course. You also have less restrictions, and more wiggle room for design decisions here. At least you can still be truly creative with it.

LoTR, on the other hand, is going to feel like "work" (if it doesn't already).

With all that money, I would think a company would be itching to realize some of it's "own ideas" rather than dealing with a game that doesn't make much sense. If Turbine is able to transform the work put into MEO into something else, I'd suggest that they do just that. The sooner the better.

Yeah I see this going about as well as the GamesWorkshop LOTR game, except worse because the movies will be ancient cultural memory by 2006 (love the internet generation's attention span!).

Hardly.  The Hobbit was written in 1936, which was before almost everyone (and likely, everyone in fact) who posts on this messageboard was born.  The Lord of the Rings is also the inspiration behind almost every fantasy RPG, both PnP and electronic.  One of the reasons Peter Jackson got the funding to make the movies is because several notable scholars described Tolkien as the Author of the Century (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/061812764X/102-6257048-3496958).

Internet generation or not, a game based on Middle Earth could come out after we're dead and still garner attention.  Not that the game would be good, just that it would have a receptive audience to start with.

I think an MEO MMORPG can work, but it needs to be very different in feel and mechanics from any other MMO out there.  It needs to be very much unlike DDO, for example.  There was nothing wrong with the Pen & Paper version per se, but it is an extremely difficult license to pull off.

My advice?  I wouldn't set the game contemperanous with the movies -- I don't see how can realistically handle what people will be doing that could interfere with Frodo's journey.  It does provide a natural backdrop to the narrative, but everyone knows how it's going to end, so I suspect they'll feel like what they do doesn't matter.

No, I'd set the game shortly after Sauron has been defeated and Frodo has sailed west.  There's a whole lot of clean-up to do, and who is to say there aren't a thousand ways Sauron could attempt to come back?  Or hundreds of others who will try to fill the power vacuum.  Very little is written in stone about this period so you have plenty to work with.  And Gandalf could always come back...

Bruce

I think you should move to New Zealand for a few years and make four games, plus a special edition expansion pack for each. Then they'll let you remake Donkey Kong as a MMO.

Actually, I think people want to play the bread baker who has a chance of becoming the hero. Bread baking and dinner provision should be rewarding, but there should be a chance for the baker to hit the road and become famous like Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Furor and Sean. The lure of living the endgame keeps people baking happily. SWG didn't have an endgame (jedi is simply baking with a different character).

You could set it at the time after Sauron is defeated but before Frodo sails West as well. That way you can still meet up with some of them, have them give out quests, etc., but you as the player wouldn't be "intersecting" with their stories.

So, in other words, people want to be Don Quixote? Because the idea of the bread bakers ever amounting to anything other than squat would only be in their heads.

In LotR, the bread baker will always be the bread baker. The destiny of that world's inhabitants are already set in stone. The only way the "lure" of the endgame would work would be in a single player game, as one of the main characters.

See: Lord of the Rings : The Third Age  (http://www.ebgames.com/ebx/product/243509.asp)

Playing the bread baker sucks. Even in a single player game. I shudder at the thought of playing one online. Hell, playing a "hero" in your average MMORPG is already bad enough.

The problem is the same with setting it during the books -- the time period is too short, and once they are gone, you're basically eliminating content that you can no longer use.

Bruce

Hmmm, the question I have is, "The Hobbit", or "Lord of the Rings"?  They really are quite different works, and worlds, with the Hobbit being more of a childrens book, lighter in tone and smaller in scope.  Inter-species relations were also much more strained, prior to the death of Smaug and the battle at Lonely Mountain.

I'd also note that the Wood Elves of Legolas' origin are much more rustic than the High Elves that dwell with Elrond or Galadrial.  I could see those elves as a PC class.  Still, the idea of an multi-species party would be very much the exception prior to the war with Sauron.  The fiction and the characters that players will want to play seem to be very conflicted.

I'd be interested in something set in the years before Bilbo's original journey, but the problem there is that the species were so insular before the return of the King Under the Mountain.  Heck, the Battle of Five Armies started out with the Elves and Humans trying to do the Dwarves out of Smaug's Treasure.  If the Goblins hadn't shown up, things could have gone very differently. That would be a smaller world, for the most part, with travel being harder and more dangerous.  On the other hand, you could be a lot more heroic there, since evil is much more common, much less concentrated, and heros hard to find.

The problem with something set at the very end of the Third Age is that the War of the Ring happens very fast, and ends with a huge victory, leaving very little to do.  Great setting for an SP title, but hard to run an ongoing MMO in.  Once Sauron falls, everybody becomes a bit player.

One alternative might be to place the game in Gondor and/or Rohan at around Bilbo's time or a little before.  Mordor then was leaderless and merely horribly blighted, not the fortified camp of the time of the Ring War.  Not until the time of the Hobbit does Sauron return.  PLayers could then be Men of Gondor or Rohan, or perhaps far wandering Dwarves.  There were surely epic struggles in those years, though they would be overshadowed by the deeds of the Fellowship in the climax of the Third Age.

As to magic, it is true that there are few workers of magic in the Third Age, but there are many artefacts of magic, and even more creatures of magic.  Oh well, I'm sure be now you are pretty well settled on this stuff.  If you aren't, 2006 seems like a very optimistic launch.

That's a bit harsh. Sounds like you're saying any story where we know the ending (Star Wars, LotR) can't make a good game unless everyone is a main character? The Fellowship of the 1.5 million WoW Players.

Middle Earth is not linear, and Frodo's quest takes a long time - and nobody knows about it except a few insiders. The rest of the NPC world is dungeons, dragons, orcs, elves, woods and consequences of Middle Earth's history, all playing out their subpolots oblivious to the ring quest. And evil strangers are spreading across the world, gaining influence as Sauron's and Saruman's power grows. Everything changes while the quest is underway, including the Shire to the point where it needs a scouring. What does the baker do when that happens? What's going on up north with the Rangers? What's happening out at the Lonely Mountain and Mirkwood? What dungeons are in distant lands?

I think making a career as a good or bad guy in Middle Earth without being directly involved in the ring quest would be more than tilting at windmills.

My main issue with MEO as a consumer is that, if MEO is really "done right", it's going to be heavy on story and travel, exploration and quest dialog, but not too much combat.  And with magic limited, character diversity is also going to be limited.  And if the stories are really "done right", it will take a real Tolkein officianado to appreciate them, whereas I'm lucky if I can remember the difference between Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul.  So the game just isn't particularly appealing to me when compared to, say, DDO.  But this doesn't mean I don't think MEO shouldn't be made.  It's just important to remember that the market for such a game is not going to be quite as broad as one might expect, because you don't want to turn it into a Middle Earth version of World of Warcraft.  That would be popular, perhaps, but most definitely WRONG.  So Turbine really has to resist the urge to turn the game into a traditional MMORPG.

Bruce

"A" good or bad guy, yes. That could probably be interesting. A "few" good or bad guys, yes. That could work as well. Stories of a few side characters, subplots, and "lesser" hero's can be fun. But hundreds (or rather, thousands) of "bakers" taking a heroic task upon themselves? It deadens the overall plot -- Most bakers, as a rule, have to be Sauron's bitches. Else, Frodo's story and the very reason why the ring must be destroyed means jack.

NPC bakers can be Sauron's bitches en masse. If you can play good or evil, some PC bakers will also be Sauron's bitches. But most of Middle Earth's inhabitants don't know what is unfolding down south, so it doesn't have to involve Sauron at all. LFM for Barrow Downs, baker preferred.

Wow. EQ design school 101. The game doesn't have to be fun, just promise fun at some point in the future.

Someone's been baking something, and it's not bread.

Bruce - why not do it up as WOW 1.1? Make Orcs, goblins and such player races?

It has been years since I have read the books, but isn't middle earth about huge battles between armies and the players who hard large roles? Why not make something called "battlegrounds" where the two sides can face off against each other...

I know plenty of people that can't stand WOW's artwork. Perhaps this could be the game for them?

The idea of Tolkien's worlds being turned into WoW 1.1 makes my fucking stomach turn. Not that it couldn't be fun, or anything, but really.

What end game is there going to be? Dragon raids? In the time between Hobbit and LotR, there is exactly 1 dragon mentioned, unless you count the Nazgul mounts. Not to say that there aren't other dragons, but where are they? Both the Fellowship and Bilbo's party of dwarves traveled a great distance across the width and breadth of Middle-Earth, and nothing was ever mentioned.

Planes raids? No extra-planar entities in Middle-Earth, though you could make a case that the Grey Havens was in another plane. Battlegrounds sounds fun, but again, unless you are allowed to play the evil races, or swear an oath of allengiance such as the Haradrim (?) did to Sauraman, what's the point? There's plenty of factions to play, but the things we think of for typical, traditional, WoW-esque MMOG's are totally fucked if you put them in the Tolkien story.

In short, this is the worst license since Star Wars for making a traditional MMOG.

There was more magic in The Lord of The Rings than most people think.  Not as much as in a standard game of D&D but a pretty fair amount all together.  The Mouth of Sauron, for instance, is described as a powerful sorcerer.  All the ring wraiths were were described as having magical skill before they fell to the rings, all the Numenorean kings had some ability, mostly focused on necromany and probably many of the better educated Numenoreans would too.

All the barrow wights would have been sorcerers in life, you don't become a wight without some magical involvement somewhere.

Tolkien's version of magic is very low key though, it is stuff that would be really powerful in real life but not quite so flashy as what we expect from magic.  Creating the chair that Frodo sits on and Aragorn sits on that allows the person sitting there to see far distances would not be trivial and it would be a VERY powerful artifact in a time where vision is usually limited to well short of the horizon.  Great works of construction, the walls of Gondor were indestructable in the books; the engines of the enemy had to hurl thier destruction at the houses inside the walls, vastly extended life spans (800 to 1000 years for the better Numenorean sorcerers), devices that grant the ability to affect the minds of large groups of people, alter the weather, etc...  There is a lot of magic in the books, most of it is just vastly understated.

The Palantir alone could make an Empire if used correctly.

It will be interesting to see what they can do but frankly I just cannot picture what they can really do for a mmrpg with the LOTR time frame.

There are fantastic creatures in LOTR but they are VERY VERY VERY rare. There is magic but it is something that is talked about alot but rarely if ever seen. Oh well I will deffinatly take a peek at it but I don't hold out much hope that it will turn out any better than SWG.

kaid

I disagree. MMORPG does not need, I'd go as far as to say should not, to follow 'main story' of franchise it built on. SWG was excellent franchise to build on with defined conflict and rich universe, its implementation that is lacking. MEO should not build itself around ring quest – its just one event that happened at one point in that universe, who to say there couldn’t be anything else going on. Dragon or plane raids? Bah you have EQs/WoW for that, why make more of the same? Very few people get to go on raids, most players never get to 'raid' content until it trivialized by many consequent expansions. Build your game around things that average players can participate in - rich and non-liner character building with strong diminishing returns, complex and all encompassing crafting system that works on gathering rather than drop resource system and meaningful PvP revolving around controlling desirable but optional elements of the game.

Ick.  See other people's comments.


Yeah, and Turbine has a game for them, called D&DO.

Bruce

I just don't see how D&D combat can work in mmorpg. Failing save roll in D&D is often mean death, using any ability is often means it spent. D&D system is choke-full instakills and down-time.

I thought DDO was more like planetside?

Ask the pigfuckers who keep churning that shit out, as well as the pigfuckers who invest the money to make another cash mill as subscription service. Why make more of the same? Because businesses like to make money.


Now you know good and goddamn well that these things don't get built around the average player and if any of the things you are talking about get put in there, I'll be very surprised.

Too bad they can't use the time before LotR. There were tons of civil unrest before the kingdoms were established.

I could also see a game right after Frodo and the high elves hit the sea, there's still plenty of orcs and goblins around who want to stake a claim and plenty of "good guys" who want to clear them out. Heck, have one of the kingdoms ally with the orcs for some reason, then we can have the defacto bad humans too.

Of course, what I really want is a more RPish game than the hack-n-slash stuff we have now, but that really only works in smaller community settings. Maybe these guys will do something cool and make a bunch of smaller worlds instead of a few large worlds? As long as I can play with my friends and few other random people, screw the public.  :mrgreen:

The Mouth was able to study under Sauron, who himself was a god.  We're also talking about the mouthpiece of Tolkien's Devil, for Heaven sake, it's not like there were aremies of them.  Aside from that, there is nothing about Black Numenoreans that gave them any particular control over magic - at most long life, since they were similar to the Dunedain.  After the Last Alliance this race (BNs) mostly ceased to exist, and did so completely soon after the War of the Ring.


One was described as magical, the Witch-King, and even that title wasn't taken until AFTER he been a Nazgul for a few millenia.  Otherwise they were simply mentioned as "kings of men".  At most, only a few of them had direct Numenorean descent, but even that doesn't make them magical.


The wights were created by the Witch-King.


They are mostly gone.  At most, three survive into the 4th age (there were only 7 to start with).  One of them is cursed, since the regent burned himself alive while holding it.  The one in Minas Ithil may have survived, and lastly there's Sauruman's stone, which was recovered by Gandalf and also (I think) given to Gondor.

As far as what cannonical references there are to existing magic items to be found, the best bet is that there are mention of "lesser rings".  That is, not one of the nine, seven, or three; but ones much lesser in power made by the Mirdain.  Still, even the weakest of these are incredibly valuable, and not something you loot off mobs to sell to an NPC.  They are all artifacts of a very dead, very ancient, elven kingdom.

And this is the problem with incorporating any sort of magic into the game.  It's all either elvish, or from the gods; and elvish magic was entirely crafting in nature.  Only the gods (Gandalf, Sauruman, Sauron) walked around casting anything approaching a spell, and even there we have only a handful of references.  Gandalf used swords more than spells, and he was a wizard.

Edit: Oh, and then there are the Blue Wizards, which is why I mentioned them in my first post.  Supposedly they went into the far east and weren't heard from again in the west, but Tolkien speculates that they formed magic cults that lasted into the fourth age.  But again the problem; both the Blue Wizards and the Mirdain weren't mentioned /at all/ in the LotR/Hobbit books, so they can't be used.  Nor can the bit about cults, which was in Letters.

Shire Farmer: The pig wars!

Why do we need 'magic' with flashy spells in all games? It isn't magical if it is mundane.

As to designing involved combat system that does not revolves around spell – substitute abilities for spells. If you have in-depth combat system with multiple disciplines that provide access to forms that are in turn provide access to feats and abilities you have you magic and spells, just in more coherent and suspend-your-disbelieve kind of way.

Example:

You have multiple disciplines, one of them is Jiyu (Freedom of Movement) that allows you to train few forms(active) and abilities(passive). One of these forms is Mobility that increases movement speed and makes it harder to hit you but also slows down your attacks. Mobility form also provides access to number of feats (active) but allows only certain abilities (passive) to be used. While using Mobility form you can use Bleeding Strike, Sprint, Retreat and few others feats but only can use some of your abilities like Doge that increases chance to avoid attack and Retaliate that increases attack speed after being hit but not Battle Rage that adds damage to all of your attacks.

So here you have a system with buffs, debuffs, DoTs and DD abilities that does not revolve around spells.

Let's not forget the Ents and the Ent-wives!  None of the books ever explains what happened to the Ent-wives, merely that Sauron was implicated in their disappearance and that the Ents had looked for them for centuries.

Just to underscore the point though:  magic wrought like this was very rare in Tolkien's world.  It might seem more common simply because the main LotR story was (1) set in a snapshot in time that was the climax of a centuries-long struggle between epic beings, and (2) focused on characters who were either epic beings themselves or were in the right place at just the right time.

Using the contents of the main storyarc to argue that magic was common in Middle Earth is a bit like using a photgraph of a basketball star leaping for a slam dunk to claim that all basketball stars fly instead of run.  If you really examine things, Tolkien's world is really a version of our world with just a sprinkle of magic, really fairy tales and legends, thrown in.

How else do you justify the particle effects engine for all those cool sparklies!?! And how else could you claim to allow the player to "adventure in a world of magic and mystery!"?!?!?!

Here's an idea: give the monsters magic and let the players go without. Imagine the howls!

Actually, in the Hobbit, Gandalf did toss about a few spells in a D&D-like manner.  But mostly he was clever.

For Tolkien, particularly in the Ring trilogy, magic was something a creature was, not something it did.  If you can get that right, MEO would take a big step forward, and a big step beyond other MMOs.

Ever play Neverwinter Nights on a 64 player server? Ever play DSO back on TEN?

It works a lot better than you'd think.

Yeah, D&D works perfect for a MMOG.  I mean, it was designed to be a MMOG; the whole world is covered with roaving groups of adventurers looking to fix or screw things up, and the only purpose for everything else in existance is to support them.  I wonder... do any of the world-speciic licenses come into play?  I would love to see a Ravenloft MMOG.

I'm going to put my ass firmly in the "make something original and cool designed for the game instead of f'ing up perfectly good scifi/fantasy settings" camp.

Oh but I would love to see a Deadlands mmog.  They would have to know from the start that it was a pvp game and therefore design a pvp system that didn't suck.  Right?

Definitely.


Shockeye, is that you in the avatar? I can't tell if it's someone I haven't seen before or that guy from "Party of Five".

Die infidel!  Behold the power of the Creek and despair!!!!!!

I had to look it up. Yeah, Joshua Jackson.

Kinda glad I had it wrong.  8-)

Love that fucking movie.

I (re)read several books on a yearly basis, and The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings are three of them.  So yeah, I'm a freaking Tolkien geek.

My wife used to never curse.  But that changed when I showed her the 1998 announcement for the movies and she was confronted with one of my obsessions becoming mainstream, with all the future money I would be spending on DVDs, games, and other merchandise generally deemed unworthy of female attention.  As I was jumping up and down, peeing my pants and pointing at the computer screen, I distinctly heard her mutter under her breath, "Oh shit."  The years since have been a veritable cornucopia of epithets, mostly in response my Tolkien fanboi status.

I do not, however, know anything in Elvish.  Now, the Black Speech is another matter ...

DDO is using the Eberron setting, which is fairly new, and pretty cool, imho.  It was the winner of a setting design contest, the author was just a DM somewhere, and beat out other settings from professional pnp game designers.

Alkiera

Are all of you getting banned, or just sidereal?

Bruce

Having been a Tolkien fan since I was about 10 years old, I'm not really interested in a MMORPG set in that world. I think the story means too much to me to really be able to enjoy partaking in your typical mundane MMO mechanics in Middle Earth. "Oh, I just killed my 10,000th Orc, time to level up!" ... "Oh, here we are outside Minas Tirith, here's a group of naked Elves jumping around emoting repeatedly" ... "General Chat: dOOd Moria suxxors, the leet lewts are in Mordor noob"

I have no desire for that cherished mythology and story to be reduced to that.

Your nostalgia will be ground into a fine powder, spiced with the salt from Tolkien's tears, and consumed wholesale by The Bottom Line.  The resulting fecal material will be pressed into pancakes, dried over the burning rage of literary men, boxed and sold as the Collector's Edition for $69.99 with a $15.99 monthly fee.

Enjoy.

/sniff

It's like I just shit out a son.

Bruce, you cad.  As Shockeye well knows, I was communicating in the Tongue of Men in the Tengwar script, not 'Elvish' (which I took to preclude both Quenya and Sindarin).  Unless 'mangina' is, in fact, an Elvish word, in which case I apologize.

I seems we both enjoy the nerdy loopholes.

So I was chatting up a 'nice girl' on the phone and she asked me what books I had read recently, Well other than a biography of a recent general, CINC SOCOM during gulf I, (Which I didn't think she would want to hear about) I reread LoTR a few months ago.  So I said Lord of the Rings and she responds without missing a beat.

"So you're into witchcraft?"

It's nice to find the whackos early in the relationship.  Funny thing is that I am sure she felt the same way.

That is almost as good as the guy who saw me reading my new shiny 3rd edition players handbook back in the day who asked if I could cast spells in real life. I said yes and stared at him until he backed away.


kaid

LIGHTNING BOLT LIGHTNING BOLT LIGHTNING BOLT!

Looks like the veil of silence on MEO's redesign is partially lifted (http://www.middle-earthonline.com/index.php?page_id=30&pagebuilder%5Bmodule%5D=article&pagebuilder%5Bdisplay_item%5D=93).  Of note:


Never?  No race wars, no GvG, not even consentual dueling.  They mention a caveat about a hole being left in the statement, which I presume to be some sort of indirect PvP.  Maybe by beating down the other side's NPC army?

To follow up on Roac's post - here's a mess more stuff from Teos:

Linkie (http://forums.middle-earthonline.com/showthread.php?&postid=879740#post879740).

The note at the end is...interesting to me.


Perhaps the MMOG Industry actually does realize what a terrible cesspit it's turned out to be.

Popquiz!

In the following picture, I am:

a) Holding a ball.
b) Airborne.

(http://www.sopwithproductions.com/cell_images/sl_11.jpg)

Heh, ok, you win.

No PVP. Consider my interest level pretty goddamn low about this point, and in need of convincing otherwise.

No PvP ?

So no way to slaughter the hundreds of LEEtgolasses that will be crawling all over this game ?

My interest level just dropped from sea level to this spot

(http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/img/environment/plaque.jpg)

 Thank you very much ...

Well I'm sure they'll compensate with "innovative gameplay" in an "exciting, dynamic world" that "dry-rapes you in the eye."

I thought  "exciting, dynamic world"  was what public relations people called PvP  ?

You chose to highlight "exciting, dynamic world" over "dry-rapes you in the eye"? Priorities, sir! I don't even know what a dry-rape is, but it just rolls off the tongue.

It's like regular rape but with more rug burn.

One has to take precautions

(http://media.movieweb.com/news/01.2005/hateyou1_12.jpg)

The game is better off without PvP.

So, your interest level would be greater with high level players ganking newbie hobbits in The Shire?

Because that is all PvP entails, of course. No reason to set the barn on fire to prove there are horses inside.

Yawntastic!

What exactly are players supposed to be doing in this game?

No, but as was said, that's not the only definition of PVP, and that sort of shit isn't even required to have PVP. It just means that either all the characters will have to be "good" alignment characters, or lots of possible roleplaying tension is going to be removed in favor of game mechanics.

See Everquest.

Engaging in epics battles between good and evil for control of Middle Earth, obviously.

But only if they other side signs a waiver and agrees to the battle set forth in the EULA.

But at least those evil fucking pk'ers wont rape me because they are all social degenerates with a hard-on for destroying happiness!!  w00t

I really do not need to get into this stupid debate again.

I am strongly in favor of flushing continuity and roleplaying considerations down the toilet when faced with the decision to flush them or make shitty game mechanics in an attempt to accomodate them.  The latter path leads to a very bad place [SWG].

Yeah, exactly.  EQ did have open, nonconsensual PvP.  It's just that the "PvP flag" preventing nonconsensual combat fooled people into believing that it didn't.  Camping uberspawns and cockblocking trials aren't that much different than ganking newbies in the Shire.  Both negatively impact another player's gameplay and are just as open to abuse.  Both pit players against each other without mutual consent.

I like the idea of PvP in MEO, but I'm not so sure I'd like it in practice.  MEO is taking the cowards way out, though.  They could at least have a PvP server and try the concept out, working through the gameplay issues in beta or even after launch.

1.  Imagine all the faggotry that will come from the names of most pc's alone (XLeggopwnz, Frudo, GrandALF, ect ect ect)

2.  Imagine all the fucktard elves running around (you know they will be a playable race)

3.  Imagine not being able to kill any of them...

Tell me thats NOT griefing.

That concept of PvP was shown to be stupid from UO, and which anyone who has ever MUD'd knew was stupid.  Shadowbane showed that PvP was entirely possible, with a few tweaks to how the system works (problem SB had/has is with zerg NvN city warfare, not solitary PKs).  WoW is doing well with their PvP servers, and even Everquest has hostile servers.  Hell, the only MMOG more carebear than Everquest is Fluffy Bunny Parade.  Puzzle Pirates even has PvP (is really all about PvP, in its own way).

And MEO thinks that taking that feature off the table entirely is a good idea?  Huh?  Making that kind of statement without a real serious explanation why, as well as some other systems they intend to include to replace it, was a big mistake IMO.  Maybe they have some whizbang ideas that they don't want to talk about, but no way should they have made that kind of statement without being ready to talk about them.

I already had my say about MEO Online a while back:

http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/perma32404.html : Middle Earth Online: A Prediction

I see no reason (yet) to change my expectations. Not unless Turbine is vastly more specific at a much earlier date that they're going to do something incredibly innovative with this license. The thing that Star Wars: Galaxies taught us is that a popular license is more of a liability than an aid in developing a more-or-less traditional MMOG, even one that is more a "virtual world" than a whack-a-mole the way SWG is. It's a liability (not even counting a busybody like George Lucas) because it raises expectations about being a part of a beloved fiction that a standard MMOG design not only can't satisfy but actively shits on. In fact, SWG is worse off being a "virtual world" design because its virtual world is nothing like the fiction that it sets out to represent.

In this case, as just about everyone here notes, that's even more likely to be true.

The time frame is wrong. I'd set the game well into the Fourth Age, after the death of Aragorn. Then you can still use the setting--hobbits, various kinds of humans, dwarves. You can introduce new elements without turning everyone's stomach. There's still plenty of stories to tell: the reclaiming of Moria, battles to take back other underground regions like the Misty Mountains or the mountains of the far North; Dol Guldur could still be a scary place; Mordor could still serve as the endgame location--in the books, unlike the movies, the place itself doesn't fall into a chasm, and it's not as if Gondor was going to be able to clean it all out in a week or two. There would still be spiders in Mirkwood. The players could travel to Far Harad--maybe Gondor tries to extend its power there. The players could travel into the East, about which we know little, though Saruman once mentions "Five Wizards', of whom we know only of three--maybe the other two are in the far East, up to something?  In the books, the Mouth of Sauron doesn't get his head cut off--who knows what happens to him? Sauron was somebody's flunky once, too--maybe the Mouth moves up to the big leagues.

If you want to set the game during the LOTR time frame, or between the Hobbit and LOTR, then the design will just have to be flatly very very different than the norm. Like others, I'll puke if I log in and there's a bunch of elves running around, or if everybody's casting fireballs right and left.

Thats a re-definition of the term that makes almost any player interaction potentially "PvP."  When we use the term here, we are talking about combat between players.  Watering the term down will only force us to make up a new term. 

And that would negatively impact me.

I can't play an orc and kill players with mispeeled elf names?

Too bad I can do that in WoW.

Why would I play MEO again? The limitations of the license (seen in SWG) mean the only fun thing would be pvp between factions, since you're not going to be any kind of 'hero'. SWG leads by example in fucking that up, MEO isn't even go to make the attempt.

S. T. U. P. I. D. Your setting is a WAR. If you don't want players fighting each other, why not make your setting a basket weaving class? "I want to fight things, but other players are way too smart. Let me fight a rock, or perhaps a small stream." PvP != ganking != unconsentual (even via zoning or whatnot) != grief play. 2 are player-driven bad behaviour and one is bad coding. So go ahead and remove the whole system.

I'll feel bad when this dev team gets the axe (http://thecan.org/in/me.html), too.

Thusly our predictions of too much magic and everyone being stupidly named hobbits and elves has come to pass...

But fear not!  At least you'll be able to group with orcs and have them tank!

Toss another one on the "dont remind me about it" pile...



Would it make the game worth playing? Definately, I would play just to grief the shit out of those dickheads...

Having no PvP does not mean that there is no conflict, or that the players have to fight rocks and streams.  It means that The Bad Guys are AI.  Which to me is completely consistent with the abject, de-humanized evil of the license.  What role would an orc play in MEO?  Fodder. 

Will there be assholes who name themselves ROFLgolas?  Absolutely.  Would ganking them in PvP stop them from playing?  No.