Monday, September 5, 2011

What I'm Working On: Round-Up

I'll come back to EQ2 after the bonus exp weekend wraps up, so for the moment that leaves me with the games that I haven't done much with recently to round up my MMO update tour.

WoW is simply not a high priority for me at the moment.  I will, in principle, want to clear out all of the level 85 heroic dungeons sometime before the next expansion, and there are some new features, including cosmetic items, to be tried whenever 4.3 happens.  What I'm really not interested in is signing in on a daily basis to earn a few more tokens towards Firelands dailies that could someday award me gear that I'm not even going to use before the next gear reset.  At least in EQ2 (and soon Rift) I can earn AA exp that will stay with the character beyond the next patch if I do spend time on daily quests.

LOTRO has an expansion launching this month, and I have yet to make plans.  It's not entirely clear to me how the thing will work with the business model, which currently includes the level cap, physical access to zones, and the epic questline for all players regardless of payment.  If this is the case for Isengard, I don't see why I'd want to pay $30 for the "expansion pre-order" instead of $5-15 for the content I need a la carte.

(I'm not sure if the world of Middle Earth isn't slightly more atmospheric if I make a point of NOT owning all the generic quests so that the only quest available to me at a new camp is the Epic story, rather than having the wilderness campfire lit up like a Christmas tree with quest icons.  I still have a bit of Mirkwood content that I have yet to finish, along with epic storyline in Enedwaith and scaling skirmishes, so there is, in principle, content I can use to earn exp if I don't buy all of the new stuff.)   

My current plan here is to wait and see how much content I actually end up needing, rather than rushing to pre-order now and ending up with content that I don't bother to use.  DDO has basically fallen off my plate, leaving me with about $30 worth of unspent Turbine points and a fair number of quest packs that I paid to unlock but have yet to play because my characters are not high enough level.  Because it's a free to play game with no real time limits, it's possible that I will still come back one of these days and get good value for that money.  Even so, this situation is what I don't want to have happen in LOTRO - no matter how much of a "better deal" the pre-order is, the money is still wasted if I buy it before I plan to play it, and don't end up using it once I do so. 

2 comments:

  1. Well, to be fair, the wilderness campfire will still be lit up like a Christmas tree - just with Turbine coin icons instead of quest icons. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I too bought a screaming ton of adventure packs, many of which I have never set foot in in DDO. Fortunately my guild has taken off recently, so I'm getting to do more of them.

    On loTRO, I don't see why you'd want to pre-order Isenguard if you won't care about the bonus items. You get some nice looking cosmetics, and a horse with 200 hit points. That's only 50 less than a 5 gold horse from one of the various in game factions. However, if none of those appeal, the pre-order isn't a very good deal.

    Wait until you know if you need the extra content before buying it. If you hit the current level cap in Mirkwood, Enedwaith will take you a decent ways towards the new one once Isenguard goes live.

    ReplyDelete

Comments on posts older than 14 days are moderated and will not appear until manually approved because the overwhelming majority of such comments are spam. Anonymous commenting has unfortunately been disabled due to the sheer volume of comments that are defeating Google's spam filter.