I picked up Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) again after nearly a year of just logging in to pay my housing maintenance. I bought the Mordor expansion and figured I’d better get through it. Plus the buzz on the new Mirkwood/Laketown areas is that they look great (hopefully they’re fun, too). When I took my break, I had done most of the pre-battle Minas Tirith quests and was heading into the hills to help the Riders from Rohan and the Druedain. I picked back up in the middle of the Druedain camp doing fetch quests for them. Go kill 10 things, come all the way back to camp, then go kill 10 more and figure out why they’re there. This kind of tedious fetch quest needs to die. LOTRO is the only game I still play that pulls crap like that. Star Trek Online and Elder Scrolls Online are much more enlightened. Even LOTRO has become a little enlightened, since some quests can be turned in from anywhere, but most of them require tedious travel back to the quest giver.
Since I’m in the mode of bitching about LOTRO, let’s talk lag, stutters, and warsteeds. I have a pretty decent machine (i7 and GTX 970), am running LOTRO from an SSD, and yet it still stutters quite a lot when I’m riding the warsteed. Even worse is the lag and rubber-banding. The responsiveness of even my light warsteed is terrible when travelling (it isn’t as bad in battle, and I mostly enjoy mounted combat). I’ve had cases where I’ve been riding along the clear road, then suddenly the combat music starts playing, even though there are no enemies around me, then a short while later, my warsteed will backtrack to some earlier point then race forward, missing a curve and barreling into a bunch of enemies. So the servers projected where I was going, but the game engine was lagging behind, so I was steering to what I saw, not what the server saw. Pretty frustrating. And all the while, the link meter on the screen shows no packet loss and less than 100ms delay.
Complaints over: I do love the world LOTRO has created from Tolkien’s vision and it is mostly fun, so I’m enjoying playing it.
I’m also enjoying Monster Hunter World quite a lot. While I complained earlier about the lightweight plot, it was pretty good in the end, and the combat is good fun, as is the diversity in monsters and the unique challenge with each. I’ve been grinding away to get great armor and weapons and have fairly good stuff (4 of 5 armor items are rarity 8, plus 2 rarity 8 weapons) now, but need more! I’ve been using the light bowgun, as it seems to me the best way to avoid trouble is to not get too close to it. On the other hand, I’m thinking of trying a sword and shield or other melee weapon just for fun. Or even an insect glaive, just for the challenge.
Finally, I felt obligated to participate the final Destiny 2 Faction Rally of this season. The gunplay and many other aspects of D2 are so great that I enjoyed it, but I still feel like I’m banging my head against a wall. Maybe the new “go fast” patch will make it fun again, but we’ll see.
So my gaming has been all over the place, but I’m having fun, so that’s OK…