Concerning Horn, Nona, Corudan, and Gleowine

[Lady_Lethargy]

The following post contains mild spoilers for the Volume III Epic Questline.



The Volume III Epic Questline is enjoyable, but one thing that sort of breaks the immersion is that your companions don't actually travel with you, even though the story says you're all traveling around together.

Solution to this problem: Whenever one of the characters listed in the title joins your 'fellowship,' you receive a whistle that summons that character. This would be like the quests where you wander around some area doing quests for an NPC that follows you around and helps fight... Only these NPCs would be purely cosmetic, non-combat allies, just to follow you around. They would mount and dismount whenever you mount and dismount, and when in combat, they would attack the enemy with non-damaging skills, so that it looks like they are helping you fight, instead of just standing there staring at you.

The whistles would only be usable in Rohan and would be removed from your inventory after the Battle of Helm's Deep.

[Nymphonic]

I don't know about the technical hurdles, but I like this idea. I wonder if it could be done client side so you would not have multiple copies of them following players.

[Lady_Lethargy]

I don't know about the technical hurdles, but I like this idea. I wonder if it could be done client side so you would not have multiple copies of them following players.

Yeah, that should work. It does for cosmetic pets.

[OldMadeOfLions]

...one thing that sort of breaks the immersion is that your companions don't actually travel with you, even though the story says you're all traveling around together.

One of the things that really stood out for me back in the day when I played Phantasy Star 2 on the Genesis was the way your party members would follow around behind you, but there are a few reasons why that wouldn't work so well for Horn and co. in LOTRO. Here are a few of them:

1) The way that pets work means that we can set a displacement for them from the player's position, and they'll try and maintain that distance. When you're dealing with four pets, you'd need to set the displacement for each one separately, which means that maybe Horn is right behind you, and Gleowine is ten feet back or so to give room to the other characters in between. If we want to be more realistic, we'd really need to have multiple versions of each pet composition based on your quest state, so if Gleowine is the only buddy you have tagging along, he'd have the least amount of displacement -- otherwise it would feel like he was stalking you from a safe distance!

2) If you have four of these pet buddies tagging along with you, that's four whistles taking up space in your inventory and they'd need to be indestructible so you couldn't delete them -- deleting them could have adverse effects on the associated quests.

3) Under-the-hood, there isn't just one Horn, and one Nona, so every quest that involves them would need to be reworked so you could interact with the pet buddies for every quest. That would require so much structural work that anyone currently underway these quests on the Live servers would lose their progress on the quest and have to re-acquire it, which isn't ideal. Furthermore, there are many times when we vector you to a location to talk to one of these characters so you'll be near the next spot you need to be, either for gameplay or story reasons. If you can advance the quest by talking to the pet buddies, there's no guarantee that you'll be near the location we expected you to be.

4) EDIT: I thought of another one. If we tried to hide the pet buddies on the client, when you're on a step where you can accept quests from your own pet buddy, you'd likely see everyone else's pet buddy for that quest as well, and could accept quests from their Horn or Nona as well. That's not great!

I think that it's a neat idea, and I like when games do this, but I think in this case it wouldn't improve immersiveness that much.

MoL

[ertr]

One of the things that really stood out for me back in the day when I played Phantasy Star 2 on the Genesis was the way your party members would follow around behind you, but there are a few reasons why that wouldn't work so well for Horn and co. in LOTRO. Here are a few of them:

1) The way that pets work means that we can set a displacement for them from the player's position, and they'll try and maintain that distance. When you're dealing with four pets, you'd need to set the displacement for each one separately, which means that maybe Horn is right behind you, and Gleowine is ten feet back or so to give room to the other characters in between. If we want to be more realistic, we'd really need to have multiple versions of each pet composition based on your quest state, so if Gleowine is the only buddy you have tagging along, he'd have the least amount of displacement -- otherwise it would feel like he was stalking you from a safe distance!

2) If you have four of these pet buddies tagging along with you, that's four whistles taking up space in your inventory and they'd need to be indestructible so you couldn't delete them -- deleting them could have adverse effects on the associated quests.

3) Under-the-hood, there isn't just one Horn, and one Nona, so every quest that involves them would need to be reworked so you could interact with the pet buddies for every quest. That would require so much structural work that anyone currently underway these quests on the Live servers would lose their progress on the quest and have to re-acquire it, which isn't ideal. Furthermore, there are many times when we vector you to a location to talk to one of these characters so you'll be near the next spot you need to be, either for gameplay or story reasons. If you can advance the quest by talking to the pet buddies, there's no guarantee that you'll be near the location we expected you to be.

4) EDIT: I thought of another one. If we tried to hide the pet buddies on the client, when you're on a step where you can accept quests from your own pet buddy, you'd likely see everyone else's pet buddy for that quest as well, and could accept quests from their Horn or Nona as well. That's not great!

I think that it's a neat idea, and I like when games do this, but I think in this case it wouldn't improve immersiveness that much.

MoL

If this were ever implemented it would probably be best if the 'pet buddies' could not be used for accepting or advancing quests. That would only be possible from one of the 'normal' versions of them that already exists in the game.
This should solve most of the problems you describe. Making it possible to accept/advance quests via the pet buddies would of course be nice, but as you indicate that would likely make things far too complicated to be worth it.

The pet buddies should also disappear and not be summonable whenever you are close enough to one of the non-pet versions of them. This to avoid seeing multiple copies of them at once (which REALLY can break immersion and be quite confusing - see for example the place in Enedwaith where it is possible to see two different versions of Halbarad standing a few meters from each other.)

[djheydt]

...4) EDIT: I thought of another one. If we tried to hide the pet buddies on the client, when you're on a step where you can accept quests from your own pet buddy, you'd likely see everyone else's pet buddy for that quest as well, and could accept quests from their Horn or Nona as well. That's not great!

This is already a problem if several people are running
around Entwood with Quickbeam's Huorn. I don't think
we can accept quests from somebody else's Huorn, but
it's easy to get confused between your Huorn and someone
else's.

[Dmira]

My Rune-keeper, Dghor, is current on that quest chain. Not having the fellowship ride along with him does take away from the immersion, especially when he runs into a bunch of mounted half-orcs, but that’s where roleplaying comes into play. I just imagine Dghor thinking, “Great. Horn and Nona are off somewhere making googly eyes and Corudan has stopped to look at some flower he’s never seen before while I’m stuck fighting these bloody riders. If I survive this, I’ll never heal them again!”

[BangoTwinkletoes]

I'd never summon Horn - all he does is whine and not having any backbone is not that conducive for fighting....

[Warmutkan]

This is already a problem if several people are running
around Entwood with Quickbeam's Huorn. I don't think
we can accept quests from somebody else's Huorn, but
it's easy to get confused between your Huorn and someone
else's.

I do a lot of duo play and run into these pet quests quite a bit. It's often easier to take the quest from the other person's pet, especially if yours is busy running into a lamp post 30 yards back.

In addition to the issues already mentioned, having 1-4 NPC pets would also cause combat immersion problems. Why aren't my 3 brave companions helping me slay these orcs? And if they are, why is this content so easy? It's unfortunate that we don't have them with us for the immersion, but bringing them along for the ride also introduces ... difficulties. Plus Bango's right. Horn is annoying. :P

[djheydt]

I do a lot of duo play and run into these pet quests quite a bit. It's often easier to take the quest from the other person's pet, especially if yours is busy running into a lamp post 30 yards back.

Hm. You may have a point there. I'll try your method next time
I have to take a character there.

[BINKLEY1]

Thanks, MadeOfLions. Your explanations make sense. It does, however, come across a bit as "our tech isn't up to it". This sounds entirely the case, but may be disappointing for those who think, "why not fix the tech?". As a programmer and manager I understand that behind-the-scenes issues may be involved, that priorities may impact tech choices. As a player this may not come across as well.

Cheers,
Gloimli @ Windfola

[Lady_Lethargy]

One of the things that really stood out for me back in the day when I played Phantasy Star 2 on the Genesis was the way your party members would follow around behind you, but there are a few reasons why that wouldn't work so well for Horn and co. in LOTRO. Here are a few of them:

1) The way that pets work means that we can set a displacement for them from the player's position, and they'll try and maintain that distance. When you're dealing with four pets, you'd need to set the displacement for each one separately, which means that maybe Horn is right behind you, and Gleowine is ten feet back or so to give room to the other characters in between. If we want to be more realistic, we'd really need to have multiple versions of each pet composition based on your quest state, so if Gleowine is the only buddy you have tagging along, he'd have the least amount of displacement -- otherwise it would feel like he was stalking you from a safe distance!

2) If you have four of these pet buddies tagging along with you, that's four whistles taking up space in your inventory and they'd need to be indestructible so you couldn't delete them -- deleting them could have adverse effects on the associated quests.

3) Under-the-hood, there isn't just one Horn, and one Nona, so every quest that involves them would need to be reworked so you could interact with the pet buddies for every quest. That would require so much structural work that anyone currently underway these quests on the Live servers would lose their progress on the quest and have to re-acquire it, which isn't ideal. Furthermore, there are many times when we vector you to a location to talk to one of these characters so you'll be near the next spot you need to be, either for gameplay or story reasons. If you can advance the quest by talking to the pet buddies, there's no guarantee that you'll be near the location we expected you to be.

4) EDIT: I thought of another one. If we tried to hide the pet buddies on the client, when you're on a step where you can accept quests from your own pet buddy, you'd likely see everyone else's pet buddy for that quest as well, and could accept quests from their Horn or Nona as well. That's not great!

I think that it's a neat idea, and I like when games do this, but I think in this case it wouldn't improve immersiveness that much.

MoL

Thanks for the response MoL.

Yes, it might be rather confusing to see a mob of Nonas.
But as ertr already said:

If this were ever implemented it would probably be best if the 'pet buddies' could not be used for accepting or advancing quests. That would only be possible from one of the 'normal' versions of them that already exists in the game.
This should solve most of the problems you describe. Making it possible to accept/advance quests via the pet buddies would of course be nice, but as you indicate that would likely make things far too complicated to be worth it.

The pet buddies should also disappear and not be summonable whenever you are close enough to one of the non-pet versions of them. This to avoid seeing multiple copies of them at once (which REALLY can break immersion and be quite confusing - see for example the place in Enedwaith where it is possible to see two different versions of Halbarad standing a few meters from each other.)

I personally wouldn't mind having my inventory space taken up, but maybe you could make it one whistle that summons all of them and gets replaced every time you gain (or lose) a person?
Also, about the follow distance thing: There's this one quest in Wildermore where you find a bunch of goats and they all follow you around... Any chance you could space them the same way you did that?