What I love most about Wildwood

[FoxFire]

What I most love is just the filling in of the landscape.

I don't even need the (excessive) number of quests and things to do there. Mainly I just enjoy having the landscape to explore and to connect areas that we know are connected but just couldn't traverse before.

In fact some of my favorite times of Lotro are those parts of the landscape that are devoid of some quest, even many mobs or resource nodes, but are just there to explore and experience. Often they are out of the way, but sometimes it's just landscape to travel through as you go to some place else. That FEELS most like Middle-earth, where you imagine wide swaths of landscape. Not like many games (including Lotro for the most part) where every part of the land is related to some quest or something you need to do.

Anyhow, I guess what I'm saying is... I love the landscape, even if (sometimes especially if) it's just... there.

[auximenes]

/signed

The compacted LotRO world is very much a theme park, with as many defined attractions stuffed in the least amount of space. I know this has pros and cons, one pro being that the content they release is easy to find and ensures everybody partakes in that content. However, just being able to explore the landscape can be rewarding. I miss SSG/Turbine's first game, Asheron's Call. It had an enormous world and many sessions of play for me were just picking a spot way out in the boonies on the map and spending hours trekking there and exploring. Along the way there were often little dungeons, enemy camps, and neat unique landscape elements to find.

[phaelan2]

Exploration has been one of my favorite parts of LOTRO from the beginning. When the game first launched (even before in alpha and beta testing), my wife would say something like "let's go explore over there" or "Let's go see those ruins". Occasionally, that led us to complete the infamous "stone circle" quest, but it was lots of fun. We still manage to find adventures poking around the landscape.

[Strider5548]

100% agree, in fact I would much prefer Wildwood not to have those ridiculous kill 400 of x deeds or the rep grind. I would love to see more of the world filled out and properly connected with as few "ports" as possible. It makes the world feel so much more immersive when you can run anywhere openly.

I understand we are locked into certain time periods to follow the story, but the landscape can still transition fluidly without ugly gaps like we have in Rohan or between the Misty Mountains and the Vales of Anduin.

[Scenario]

Having come from developing Asheron's Call in one of my past lives, I loved the open feel of the world. That said, LOTRO - when it was launched - had a very specific focus in telling the narrative and moving players through the world along that narrative. And while that is still very true for us now - we are also excited about doing more things like The Wildwood and Dimrill Dale expansion in the future, and have plans for similar things coming up in the very near future!

[Strider5548]

Having come from developing Asheron's Call in one of my past lives, I loved the open feel of the world. That said, LOTRO - when it was launched - had a very specific focus in telling the narrative and moving players through the world along that narrative. And while that is still very true for us now - we are also excited about doing more things like The Wildwood and Dimrill Dale expansion in the future, and have plans for similar things coming up in the very near future!

Scenario, serious credit to you and the team for building one of the best elements of LOTRO. It is an undisputed fact that one of the greatest strengths of this game is the world itself. For all the issues that exist in LOTRO, one thing has remained consistent over the years, the game world is incredible.

Very excited to see more landscape areas filled in the future.

[FoxFire]

Having come from developing Asheron's Call in one of my past lives, I loved the open feel of the world. That said, LOTRO - when it was launched - had a very specific focus in telling the narrative and moving players through the world along that narrative. And while that is still very true for us now - we are also excited about doing more things like The Wildwood and Dimrill Dale expansion in the future, and have plans for similar things coming up in the very near future!

This is great and exciting to hear!

Especially for those of us (I'm going to guess many) who enjoy exploring and the filling out of the Middle-earth landscape. These off-the-beaten path (basically optional) areas are really nice.

And like I said they don't even necessarily need to have much to do in them (not that I'm opposed to it, just saying it's fun and interesting enough to just explore), and sometimes that's even preferable. Especially when there's some interesting thing(s) to find or just stumble across.

One of my favorite experiences in the game was when I first traveled in to Forochel from Evendim. It seemed (to that point in the game at least) like such a long journey of basically traveling through the increasingly cold and snowy landscape, doing it on foot, before you eventually came upon that first settlement. No real mobs or even resource nodes to speak of... just travel. It really made it feel like a journey to get there.

Glad to hear SSG has more of such things in mind.

[Black_Wizard]

If it wasn't for Asheron's Call I probably wouldn't be in LOTRO now. AC was my first MMORPG, and led me to be an original beta tester here. Fourteen years later and we're BOTH still here!

Kudos to you Scenario!! I never did find that darn TARDIS in AC though. LOL

Having come from developing Asheron's Call in one of my past lives, I loved the open feel of the world. That said, LOTRO - when it was launched - had a very specific focus in telling the narrative and moving players through the world along that narrative. And while that is still very true for us now - we are also excited about doing more things like The Wildwood and Dimrill Dale expansion in the future, and have plans for similar things coming up in the very near future!

[Widmore]

...we are also excited about doing more things like The Wildwood and Dimrill Dale expansion in the future, and have plans for similar things coming up in the very near future!

For what it's worth, I'm extremely thrilled to hear this. While I would never want the more traditional, linear stories to be replaced, I love how these zones work. The idea that, like you said they are more open, but also kinda self-contained. The Wildwood is a nice change of pace while I'm also in more traditional zones, like Forochel or Angmar, etc. And the way the quests were set up were nice. I liked that if I didn't have a ton of time play at a particular point, I could still jump and get a little bit done, rather than trying to rush through longer or more complex quest chains.

[gildhur]

The only thing I don't like about Wildwood is its level. Leveling from scratch on Treebeard has reminded me just how much content there already is in the 40-50 range. On a low-XP server like TB, you have to jump around between at least two zones at a time to have enough XP to actually level. It's great to have to do all those old quests again that you usually skip by zooming through on other servers. But once you get to 40 and especially 45, you have Angmar, Misty Mountains, Tal Bruinen, Forochel, Eregion, and now Wildwood, not to mention the last 9 epic books. It would've made much more sense to make Wildwood level 25 so it could flow from Trestlebridge instead of being something you have to come back to when you already have 5 other zones to choose from at that level.

More options are great! Few options in one range and overwhelming options in another is not great...

[auximenes]

If it wasn't for Asheron's Call I probably wouldn't be in LOTRO now. AC was my first MMORPG, and led me to be an original beta tester here. Fourteen years later and we're BOTH still here!

Same goes for me. I was reluctant to get into MMO's but I saw a friend playing AC1 a few times and got sucked in. I've been playing Turbine/SSG games since.

Having come from developing Asheron's Call in one of my past lives, I loved the open feel of the world.

One of my favourite exploration memories was from an expedition along the southernmost coast of the main landmass of Dereth. The game map system was a bunch of separate landblocks that would load when there was an live player there but if there wasn't anybody on it it would unload, frozen in time. After probably an hour of exploring the coastline I was moving along the beach and I found a player's corpse (you dropped items when you were defeated, old school). I sent him a /tell to inform him I found the corpse and gave him the coordinates and asked him I he wanted me to wait for the corpse to decay so I could recover his items. He was initially unsure about the situation and then finally realised that that corpse was left there about two months prior. It was so far out of the way that nobody had been on the landblock at all for months. That's the kind of vast open world sandbox you got with AC1 and I loved it.