Shamus Plays: LOTRO, Part 12

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Apr 7, 2010

Filed under: Column 36 comments

This is the episode everyone has been telling me I must do, since the start of the series. Here it is, the installment where Lulzy’s crumbling sanity is demolished for your amusement. You heartless jerks.

 


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36 thoughts on “Shamus Plays: LOTRO, Part 12

  1. Deoxy says:

    Those last two pictures…you did that, right? I mean, the game doesn’t actually do that if you consume a bunch of alcohol, does it?

    It would be awesome if it did, though.

    1. Haviland says:

      Oh yes, that’s in the game.

      One of the Shire quests at a festival time is to get a drink from every pub in the shire. Things get more and more blurred as time goes by. Took me several goes to do it – kept falling of my horse walking in to walls.

    2. Mari says:

      Guild Wars does that. The effects can vary depending on the intoxicant you imbibe. Your standard alcoholic drink makes the world fuzzy like that. Absinthe makes it wavy AND GREEN. Grog makes it fuzzy and forces you to say silly pirate things like, “Shiver me timbers, that’s a fine booty you be wearin’, lass!” And so on and so forth. Apparently a favorite pastime of the bored is to get too drunk to see properly and then charge out into battle.

    3. Hal says:

      Oh, WoW does this as well. In fact, Brewfest, the in-game Octoberfest equivalent, is essentially nothing but drinking related shenanigans sponsored by the dwarves. The best quest associated with it is to catch yourself a Wolpertinger. You can’t see them unless you’re drunk, but when you’re drunk you don’t move properly and the screen is fuzzy, so you run around trying to throw nets on creatures that may or may not be there.

      One of the best rewards from that holiday is another vanity pet, a small pink elephant. One time preparing for a raid, everyone in the group put out their elephant, and one of our members asked, “Hey, where’d you guys get the elephants?”

      “What elephants?”

      1. Ian says:

        Attempting to fly an epic flying mount while completely smashed in WoW is always a fun experience. Even regular flying mounts tend to go rogue pretty quickly, especially after Blizzard gave them a healthy speed boost.

        As for my own personal experience, I’m not sure whether which is better: me tanking CoS while smashed or having my entire 10-man ICC raid group get smashed during the ship battle. They were both pretty hilarious.

      2. BaCoN says:

        Everquest used to have a cool system for it, as well, to the point where you had a skill called “Alcohol Tolerance”.

        1. Conlaen says:

          I totally maxed my skill in that! (which was like 275 skill at the time I think)

      3. Athan says:

        Thankfully in WoW you can at least get rid of the visual effect by turning off ‘Fullscreen Glow Effect’ which I never liked anyway (makes it look like someone smeared grease all over my monitor if you ask me).

        Of course you still have the ‘random walk’ to contend with.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Why is that thankfully?Whats the point of getting hammered if youll act normal afterwards?In real life drinks can at least taste good and lower your inhibitions,but in a game,drunk vision is all you can get.

    4. RTBones says:

      I was going to say yes, it actually does. Then I got beaten to the punch. But I’ll say it anyway — yes it actually does.

  2. Haviland says:

    It’s amazing the Ring ever got to Mt. Doom before Frodo swapped it for some beads and an apple.

    1. Ingvar says:

      Something as precious as the One Ring would probably have required mushrooms and beer (with the mushrooms fried in butter, at that).

      1. Mari says:

        I’m thinking pipeweed might also have been necessary in a barter for the One Ring. One wonders how much Southern Star is required to purchase dominion of Middle Earth?

    2. acronix says:

      Middle Earth citizens are glad Frodo wasn´t a postman.

      1. Yonder says:

        What are you talking about? Frodo was a postman! He was supposed to mail that package to Sauron, but he just used it for the speed boost to get to Mount Doom; then he chucked it into the fire when he didn’t need it any more.

  3. Padyndas says:

    I have not read this yet (I’m at work and escapist is disabled, Argh!). Anyway, I assume that in those pictures the screen is all blurry. In fact, the game does do this when you get drunk. It is very funny and there are even quests where you have to drink and go from Inn to Inn within a certain time frame and you get progressively more drunk. Fun quests to do.

    Edit: Meant to make this a reply to the first post above.

  4. GM says:

    Rune Scape does have a BeerQuest i did mine with a pal,i dont remember what i get for competing it.

    1. Dev Null says:

      Like most drinking games, the reward for completing it is to not remember what you got for completing it.

      1. Brian says:

        I want to make an MMO quest that randomly shows up completed if you log in on March 18. You’ll get a message congratulating you for winning the drinking contest and entertaining the whole pub afterward– and of course you have no recollection of doing either.

  5. NotYetMeasured says:

    Another excellent installment, Shamus!

    I think the pie quests (and the mail quests) are not really intended to be completed all at once. I look at them as a way to multitask when I am running from one town to another (or back to Hobbiton) anyway for other quests. I don’t think they will all get done that way, but it probably takes care of 80% of the mail and 60% of the pies. Then you finish the rest if you really want the titles that come with completing the full set.

  6. acronix says:

    Looks like LotRO has a lot of silly writing. Not as much as certain other games, though. I wonder how do you do to keep your sanity meter from depleting.

    1. Mari says:

      Regular psychoanalysis and healthy doses of Success Sanity?

    2. Dr_Zanzabar says:

      It might just be the Shire, Bree and the Dwarf/Elf starting areas are much more serious feeling, it seems to just be the Hobbits who have epic quest chains about escorting pies and counseling chickens.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Kill X wolves is a sensible quest?

        1. Dr_Zanzabar says:

          Well….slightly more sensible, then, within the confines of the traditional MMO quest-story structure.

        2. Heron says:

          A lot of them are, if you read the quest text. It’s often something along the lines of “We need blankets for winter, so can you gather X bear pelts for us?” or “We need food, can you get us X slabs of boar meat?”

          1. acronix says:

            And “Those nasty X are harassing us! Can you get rid of them?”

          2. Daemian Lucifer says:

            Yes,and then you have to kill 3 times as many because every third is edible or warm enough.Or have teeth(a single tooth).

  7. LOLdependent says:

    Then take it through camps that are brimming with robbers.
    (I’ll run through there quick so as not to get clobbered.)

    It doesn’t rhyme.
    And is there a sanity meter in this game, like in COC?Because it seems it badly needs it.

    1. Brian says:

      There is a sanity meter, but it’s hidden, and locked at zero. If you ever manage to regain sanity, you suddenly realize you have actually been playing Eternal Darkness the whole time.

  8. Chiller says:

    100 buckets of water! Oh, the incidental hilarity of the inventory system managed to crack me up this time for some reason.

  9. Joshua says:

    I used to think all of these quests were silly, until one of your other readers here made a post about the new heroism system they had just installed which allows you to do a bunch of main plot instances with much fewer than a full fellowship(even solo!)

    My wife and I, who hadn’t seriously played since September, renewed our subscriptions. To our joy, the system is pretty cool and works fairly well(although might be TOO easy), and we were FINALLY able to complete Volume One after over three years of playing. Unfortunately, although there’s some good plotlines in the Shadows of Angmar storyline, how they implement it in the final few books is absolutely atrocious.

    In addition to way, way, way(I cannot exaggerate enough) too many jaunts across the span of Eregion, you have some absolutely ridiculous “session play” instances. Session play is where you get to relive part of the story by playing the NPC telling the story rather than your own character.

    In the worst example, you read an NPC’s diary who tells of his experiences being a prisoner. However, you don’t see it from his perspective, but rather one of the evil minions at the place he’s being held captive. As that minion, you go around the “jail” killing giant leeches and waking up sleeping guards. You only view the prisoner during one brief moment, and that’s a moment where he’s completely delirious. Remember, this narrative is supposed to be from the prisoner, so I’m not sure why he spent most of his time writing diary entries about how one of the peons at his prison went around doing disgusting and menial tasks. I really felt that the developers were laughing at me by the end of all of this.

    All of this puts the Shire quests in perspective. At least that area is *supposed* to be silly.

    1. Chiller says:

      I thought all session plays were awesome. Well, I guess every feature appeals to (only) some % of players.

      1. Dr_Zanzabar says:

        The chicken session plays are awesome….until it’s got you hoofing (clawing?) across field and dale for miles.

    2. Padyndas says:

      **spoiler alert** I actually liked this session play, although I agree it should have been presented as something other than Laerdan’s diary, perhaps maybe a diary of the Evil minion you are playing instead. The session play itself was rather easy but I thought it was neat in that it shows what happened just prior to something that I did on my regular character a couple of books earlier and reinforces the fact that Laerdan was basically set up so that he would turn the ring Narchuil over to Amarthiel. As for the travel I agree that it is quite ridiculous the amount of travel you have to do, especially in book 13 where you go back and forth across Forochel. If I had not been playing with my Hunter friend I’m not sure I would have the patience to complete it.

      1. Joshua says:

        I was the Hunter in this case, while my wife has a Guardian. If I had not been there, this would have been nigh intolerable. Fortunately, our next highest set of characters is my Captain with my wife’s Hunter, so we’re set for that regard.

        The travel in Book 13 across Forochel was bad, but so was the constant travel across Eregion in Book 14 and 15, especially when you are going back and forth from the same place like Tal Bruinen and Rivendell. IMO, it was also bad writing to have the heroes being constantly one step behind the villains in all of the instances. Nothing like being laughed at for showing up too late when all of the NPCs have been wasting your time sending you hundreds of miles on stupid errands that ended up making you late.

        The session play where you play Laerdan trying to sneak around the enemy forces was pretty cool. However, in addition to the awful one with Laerdan’s prison, there was also the instance where you play some random elven girl escorting what comes across as a blonde elven valley girl. It was supposed to be about the beginning of Narmeleth’s corruption, but seemed rather poorly done to me.

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