game-mechanic
Latest
LotRO: Riders of Rohan instance cluster coming after expansion launch
Even with all of the information flying around about Lord of the Rings Online: Riders of Rohan expansion this week, players were left wondering about the question of the expansion containing any new instances, skirmishes, or raids. In a forum post, CM Sapience addressed the instance issue directly by saying that it's being worked on, it probably won't arrive in time for the expansion's launch, and the team is waiting until the content is fleshed out some more before giving solid details. "We are working on an instance cluster," Sapience confirms. "Currently it is planned to be part of an update due to release after the Riders of Rohan expansion has shipped." He also mentions that Riders of Rohan will contain "a new type of repeatable content" that Turbine has yet to disclose. Sapience promised that further information on these two topics will arrive later this summer.
"We were wrong": LotRO dev explains radiance's failure
If you had to sum up Lord of the Rings Online's radiance stat in four words, those would probably be: good intentions, horrible execution. As we've known since last year, the much-hated radiance is on its way out of LotRO in the upcoming Echoes of the Dead update, and for many players, it's not a day too soon. "Sometimes it's difficult to shine the interrogation lamp on yourself and find out what exactly went wrong." Developer Allan Maki has the unenviable task of explaining just what went wrong with this feature, but he does it nevertheless in a new LotRO dev diary. Part apology, part history and part transparency, this diary is a fascinating explanation of how a well-intended mechanism can go awry without proper communication and incomplete implementation. After a long period of trying to force radiance to work, the team ultimately decided to yank radiance from the game altogether. Maki insists that it could have worked, had the team gone about it more smartly: "Radiance was not a bad idea. In fact, many of us still feel that if it had been designed correctly it would have been successful. As it turned out, however, we created nothing more than an arbitrary gating mechanic that forced players to get 'keys' in order to enter raids."
The pros and cons of instant leveling
Keen took an interesting look at a strange little MMO game mechanic last weekend: instant leveling. I first encountered this in Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot-- after you get one character to a certain level, the game would let you use the "/level" command to pop any character you created up to a higher level instantly.You might argue that we haven't seen that tactic lately, but we're going to see a big example of it next year-- when Blizzard releases Death Knights in the next WoW expansion, we've already been told that they'll start at a higher level. The official explanation for that is that they don't want Death Knights to ever be level 1 (they want them cool from the start), but considering that the expansion will also bring 10 more levels into the mix, it's a lot to ask players who've already reached level 80 to roll a new character and do it again.
