That's what the ad for ingredient packs tells us to do. Crafting some fancy rings for yourself and allies, well that's pretty standard for an MMORPG ...
Then in Rohan we came across an extra powerful Orc that had gathered a little army around him. Kill him and he drops a plain looking tattered old ring. Now, if I learned anything from reading the Lord of the Rings, it's that rings powerful evil guys have are super sweet, and we should totally take them and wear them ourselves because they make us our more powerful, and there are no consequences! Free power just for wearing a little ring that a fearsome evil monster had, there's nothing more to it than that!
What, you think there's some kind of catch to it? Stop being paranoid, no ring has ever caused anyone any harm in Middle Earth!
If you disagree with that, well you probably just want the ring yourself! I need the ring to increase my might and fate to save the Free Peoples! You're probably a spy who wants to stop that, or take the ring for yourself! I will crush you! Any who question me must be imprisoned for the sake of the Free Peoples!
Maybe the little tattered ring having being evil like that would have been too obvious a parallel, but ... I'm starting to wonder if the Turbine story of *playername* is going to have similar themes or anything to the Tolkien story of Frodo. We just sort of seem to be following behind the original story, fighting a lot of bad guys and helping lots of good guys that sometimes have flaws and make mistakes, but we are just sort of commanded to go along with everything they do via super imposed white text. You can choose to obey or choose to sit in the instance forever with nothing happening.
So there's two issues I'm getting at here in a rambling way:
1. The overall theme of the player's story within Middle Earth. I can't think of one other than general "make friends and fight together to beat the bad guys," which applies to most online fantasy games. (Not trashing the story here, it is good, mostly because of the characters we work with, but not great.)
2. The player's role within the story. If someone asked me to summarize the experience, I would say things like "We helped the rangers do this," and "We helped the Elves in this battle and that battle," and "We helped the dwarves do this and do that. They told us what to do and, uh-oh, that turned out to be a big mistake so we followed more instructions to help fix it."
Ideally there would be more parts of the story where telling it one would say "*I*did this, and uh-oh, that turned out to be a big mistake ..."
There is story telling in games and there's story telling with games. At some points in Lotro we get the latter. For example, a Lore Master in Orthanc is left to do what they do, wander off and look for lore. It matches what the player does, exploring and looking for treasure and secrets and quests. Oh, of course it's part of the script and Saruman waits for you to do it, but it's far superior IMO to being commanded "Go to the library over there and pick up the books, 0/3." Sara Oakheart was along similar lines, the character would want to help the poor old lady and the player is accepting and completing quests because that's what we do in games like this. (She was just way too obviously suspicious, but that's another topic.)
People are still raving about the indirect guidance via game design in old games like Super Metroid. With no text the player is taught how to play and learn and explore and teased with their future objectives. When it turns out that the super cool looking objective the player had been working towards for an hour leads to a disaster, that's much more memorable than being hand held or cutscened all the way to the disaster that's someone else's fault.
Asheron's Call did something similar, touching on Tolkienesque themes of greed and power, when the characters attacked crystals that shot fire at them, because being on fire is really unpleasant, and the players attacked the crystals because killing things and taking their loot was what the game had been teaching them to do. When it turned out the crystals were imprisoning a certain Mr. Hopeslayer, the story telling was all the better because the players had some degree of choice when they had smashed all the shiny things and because the fun-seeking decisions of the players in real life matched up with the motivations of the in game characters.
Then in Rohan we came across an extra powerful Orc that had gathered a little army around him. Kill him and he drops a plain looking tattered old ring. Now, if I learned anything from reading the Lord of the Rings, it's that rings powerful evil guys have are super sweet, and we should totally take them and wear them ourselves because they make us our more powerful, and there are no consequences! Free power just for wearing a little ring that a fearsome evil monster had, there's nothing more to it than that!
What, you think there's some kind of catch to it? Stop being paranoid, no ring has ever caused anyone any harm in Middle Earth!
If you disagree with that, well you probably just want the ring yourself! I need the ring to increase my might and fate to save the Free Peoples! You're probably a spy who wants to stop that, or take the ring for yourself! I will crush you! Any who question me must be imprisoned for the sake of the Free Peoples!
Maybe the little tattered ring having being evil like that would have been too obvious a parallel, but ... I'm starting to wonder if the Turbine story of *playername* is going to have similar themes or anything to the Tolkien story of Frodo. We just sort of seem to be following behind the original story, fighting a lot of bad guys and helping lots of good guys that sometimes have flaws and make mistakes, but we are just sort of commanded to go along with everything they do via super imposed white text. You can choose to obey or choose to sit in the instance forever with nothing happening.
So there's two issues I'm getting at here in a rambling way:
1. The overall theme of the player's story within Middle Earth. I can't think of one other than general "make friends and fight together to beat the bad guys," which applies to most online fantasy games. (Not trashing the story here, it is good, mostly because of the characters we work with, but not great.)
2. The player's role within the story. If someone asked me to summarize the experience, I would say things like "We helped the rangers do this," and "We helped the Elves in this battle and that battle," and "We helped the dwarves do this and do that. They told us what to do and, uh-oh, that turned out to be a big mistake so we followed more instructions to help fix it."
Ideally there would be more parts of the story where telling it one would say "*I*did this, and uh-oh, that turned out to be a big mistake ..."
There is story telling in games and there's story telling with games. At some points in Lotro we get the latter. For example, a Lore Master in Orthanc is left to do what they do, wander off and look for lore. It matches what the player does, exploring and looking for treasure and secrets and quests. Oh, of course it's part of the script and Saruman waits for you to do it, but it's far superior IMO to being commanded "Go to the library over there and pick up the books, 0/3." Sara Oakheart was along similar lines, the character would want to help the poor old lady and the player is accepting and completing quests because that's what we do in games like this. (She was just way too obviously suspicious, but that's another topic.)
People are still raving about the indirect guidance via game design in old games like Super Metroid. With no text the player is taught how to play and learn and explore and teased with their future objectives. When it turns out that the super cool looking objective the player had been working towards for an hour leads to a disaster, that's much more memorable than being hand held or cutscened all the way to the disaster that's someone else's fault.
Asheron's Call did something similar, touching on Tolkienesque themes of greed and power, when the characters attacked crystals that shot fire at them, because being on fire is really unpleasant, and the players attacked the crystals because killing things and taking their loot was what the game had been teaching them to do. When it turned out the crystals were imprisoning a certain Mr. Hopeslayer, the story telling was all the better because the players had some degree of choice when they had smashed all the shiny things and because the fun-seeking decisions of the players in real life matched up with the motivations of the in game characters.
