Re: LotRO: So how is the solo content these days?

In article <80a33993-4d7a-423c-9204-
1b5048380c1a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, darin@xxxxxxx says...
On Jun 29, 6:21 am, Gerry Quinn <ger...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
They get better as you get better groups.  At the end of the day they
are part of what a MMO is about and it's silly to expect that to change..

I don't think so. The long dungeon like instances where you had
to plan out 4+ hours of time may be in a lot of MMOs, but this is
not a defining feature. The earliest MMOs didn't even have
instances, and later on many only had these instances for
end-game content (and sometimes end-game was only for a
minority of select players).

Well, most Outland instances should take around 90 minutes to complete.
Of course it depends how well you are doing and if you are wiping
repeatedly you will take longer. 4 hours would be considered an
exceptionally long time, and most groups would give up long before that.

Biggest issue is, of course, getting the group together. If that takes
you 90 minutes too, you have problems.

There were a couple of huge instances in the old world, but these are
really restricted to raids in the expansion. (Shadow Labyrinth is the
biggest, but it doesn't compare to Gnomeregan or Uldaman.)

Many of the raid instances are still large, but that's really catering
for harder-core players who would certainly be expected to have 3 hours
uninterrupted play time at an arranged start time.

Certainly in the context of this thread, there are not very many
long instances like WoW had. There are only 3 before you hit
max level, then 2 others plus 2 raids. The vast majority of group
quests are reasonably short; many take place in an instanced
map but they're not dungeon-crawl types of instances. There
are even some solo-only quests that are in instances.
The idea of instances is great but that doesn't mean they have
to fit one certain stereotypical mold and they're not what an MMO
is all about.

I'd find that number very limiting, to be honest - group dungeon crawls
(5-man or raids) are what I enjoy most in the game, and I like it that
WoW has so many different ones available.

For the expansion they plan to have every raid dungeon available in both
a 25-man and a 10-man mode, which is not what some folks here are
looking for, but will I think be appealing to what might be called "less
hard-core raiders".

But my point about MMOs... they do stand with "Massively Multiplayer"
and it seems to me that that should normally entail players doing things
together. So to make everything solo-able kind of defeats the purpose.

- Gerry Quinn












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