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The Perfect Ten: Best in-game maps
I love me a good map. Seriously. When I was a boy and we'd go on vacations, I think I spent more time flipping through the detailed atlas in the car than looking out of the windows (and how sad is that?). Even today, I'm fascinated with a good map, as it allows my imagination to roam across lands quickly and imagine what they must be like. In MMOs, maps are one of the most important tools in your user interface. They help orient you, direct you to your next quest objective, allow you to plan a journey in the safest possible manner, and tantalize you with the potentials of unexplored areas. I started to think about how much we rely on a good in-game map when I was reading the Star Wars: The Old Republic dev diary on how that team is implementing their map system. I've found that in-game maps can be a mixed bag, depending on the game you visit. Some may look great but be functionally useless. Some may be uglier than dirt but hit the spot nevertheless. But the best are the ones that marry good aesthetics with practicality, and those are the ones I want to spotlight today. So without further ado, my favorite in-game maps from MMOs!
The Road to Mordor: A haunted tour of Middle-earth
Despite what the brochures may tell you, Lord of the Rings Online's Middle-earth isn't all puppy dogs, sparkly rainbows and ice cream wagons. In fact, when you take a moment to stop screenshotting the living daylights out of the Shire, you'll quickly realize just how dark, cold and brutal this world is. Middle-earth is a realm where good is under siege by evil, and in many places, the evil is winning. You can see this in many places that formerly held beauty, but now are covered with the decor of death: bones, blood, cages, pikes and filth. Evil isn't just Freddy Krueger-style splatter, either -- there are plenty of spots that are haunted by the spectral spirits of the beyond, and if you dare venture into their domain, you should probably have your will made up in advance. So in honor of one of my favorite holidays -- Halloween -- I want to take you on a haunted tour of Middle-earth, covering some of the most notorious spooky, scary and outright creepy places I've found. Grab your torch and let us push back the darkness together!
The Road to Mordor: Old school hobbits
(Screenshot courtesy of Lord of the Rhymes) Over the past couple weeks Lord of the Rings Online players' eyes have turned to the future, and this column with it. After all, with the beta for LotRO F2P edition in full swing and the recent news from E3 about this fall's offerings, it's kind of hard not to be focused on what's ahead. However, I was tickled by a LotRO forum thread this week that looked back, not forward. It's one of those nostalgia threads that tend to pop up in a forum of any game more than a few years old, a place for veterans to reminisce about the olden days (whether good or bad). It's also an excellent chance for newbies to learn a bit more about the history of the game -- and perhaps thank their lucky stars they didn't have to walk uphill through three-foot snow with a Balrog on their tail just to log in to the servers every day. The thread certainly makes for good readin', but I wanted to comment on a few specific examples of how the game's changed, and how it was back when we were in school. Old school, that is. Hit the jump, and we'll travel to the past in our hobbit tub time machine!
