Thread: Let's Play: Lord of the Rings Online

For those of you unfamiliar with Let's Play, and are up for a good read, check this out. I've been following a few different Let's Plays, and they're hilarious in the right hands- fortunately, Shamus Young (www.shamusyoung.com) is more than capable of delivering. Anyhow, enjoy!

New Episodes every Wednesday!



The story thus far:

Part One: Shamus Young ventures into the land of Middle Earth with his "heroic" Hobbit.


Part Two: Lulzy meets Amdir the brave, wise and deeply intelligent.


Part Three: Morals? All I see are clothes...


Part Four: Lulzy prepares the townspeople for an incoming bandit raid by verbally assaulting them.


Part Five: It looks like the people of Archet finally get what's coming.


Part Six: The dead of Archet are buried in graves as shallow as their occupants.


Part Seven: The theft of a a handkerchief: Will it, or will it not, end in mass murder?


Part Eight: Getting the hell out of Dod... errr... Archet.


Part Nine: Oh, that's what mail is for...


Part Ten: Those clothes aren't going to buy themselves, you know.


Part Eleven: Hungry Hungry... Hobbits?


Part Twelve: A grand tour of Hobbiton...well, its pies, anyway.


Part Thirteen: Items needed to bust ghosts in the shire: bear pelts, meat, and incendiary devices.


Part Fourteen: Lulzy's adventure really bogs down in Frogmorton.


Part Fifteen: Lulzy gets naked. What, like we have to say anything more than that?


Part Sixteen: Lulzy finds herself in an unbearable situation.


Part Seventeen: Lulzy heads off to fight some spiders, but apparently the spiders don't know that.


Part Eighteen: Someone asks Lulzy to put her hand in a hole.


Part Nineteen: Lulzy learns that skulls can roll uphill.


Part Twenty: Lulzy learns that being a spy is hard.


Part Twenty-One: Lulzy has to deal with an under-prepared herbalist.


Part Twenty-Two: Lulzy battles some unfortunately named bandits.


Part Twenty-Three: Lulzy learns that captivity does little for a ranger's disposition.


Part Twenty-Four: The Bree-Men call him Strider; Lulzy just giggles and races to the auction house.


Part Twenty-Five: All journeys must come to an end. Lulzy's ends with rangers and stabbing.

heeee! I enjoyed reading it. Is he going to do more?

Heheheh...That was very funny. Thanks for sharing it with us!

LOL, that was great stuff!

Originally Posted by Bob

heeee! I enjoyed reading it. Is he going to do more?

Definitely!

Part two is up! I'll start linking them in the top post as well.

LoL! Hillarious stuff but I hope he's enjoying the game even while making fun of it

I love it! As someone that has never read quest blurbs, it's interesting to find there's a storyline behind some of this stuff.

Originally Posted by Bob

I love it! As someone that has never read quest blurbs, it's interesting to find there's a storyline behind some of this stuff.

Rofl! I was thinking the same thing

I can't wait till his little hobit makes it to Staddle!

Bilbo was so kind and gentle that he spared the life of Gollum, even while wearing The One Ring.

However, there are forces of temptation that no Hobbit can withstand.

Part three is posted!

I just thought about this.. March Mayhem is coming up on The Escapist... (Turbine won last year...) Anyone else remember that huge ruckus? I can't wait.

Last week we were left on the brink,
of an invasion of brigands, I think.
What happens next?
Go read the text!
You can do that by clicking this link.

Hooray for part four!

Yay! Awesome stuffz!

Anyway, instead of the standard MMOG exclamation mark this game uses a flaming ring as the symbol for "This bloke has a quest for you, why don't you chat him up?" Not just any ring, but the icon is obviously The One Ring. The single most evil object in the history of the entire world. This is like using a pentagram containing a flaming swastika made of horned skulls as the universal symbol for "help wanted."

For some reason, this just cracked me up

This is great! Very funny.

I've done these quests countless times, but clearly without paying strict attention to the, um, logic behind them. It never occurred to me that there might actually be a good reason why the NPC with the dead bear and other rotting animals in his camp wants me to go kill *flies.*

Never has losing a battle and seeing a village sacked been so much… “fun”.

I'm glad some of you folks are enjoying this as much as I am.

When Boromir got turned into an Orcish pincushion, the rest of the party didn’t really have time to give him a proper burial. In their haste, the best they could do was put him gently into a boat, arrange the weapons of his foes around him, and send him downriver while Legolas and Aragon sang him about four pages worth of poetic tribute.

That’s what a half-assed funeral looks like in Middle-Earth.

Boromir was lucky they didn’t have time to give him a “proper” funeral.

thanks for continuing to post these! I read them every time you do. So funny. I hope turbine is reading them too

Originally Posted by Bob

thanks for continuing to post these! I read them every time you do. So funny. I hope turbine is reading them too

You know, I was thinking of ways to make sure they did....


/mood_devious

Hello, Constant Readers!

Part Seven is hot off the presses. I'm looking forward to part eight... Lulzy is heading back to the Shire! At the moment though, she slaughters bandits for an assortment of trinkets.

This week's wasnt that funny. The songs are always worth it, but it seems to have gained a seriousness that makes it uncomfortable. Hopefully it's better next time!

I've been reading these as soon as you post the next link. Lulzy has a nice perspective on these beginner quests in Archet and Combe. While it is funny, this week the writer warns on some quests which could be challenging but not as rewarding...reminds me of BG.

Originally Posted by Bob

This week's wasnt that funny. The songs are always worth it, but it seems to have gained a seriousness that makes it uncomfortable. Hopefully it's better next time!

I agree... but I did get a little kick out of the screenshot of Dirk Mudbrick at the very top. In any case, I think that's why he's be heading back to the Shire. Plenty of lighter mood comedy gold there.

I'm looking forward to the Great Bee and Bear attack of the Shire.

(Founders Writ, I think.. Teehee.)

I agree though, the songs at the end are great. The fact that he takes time to pen them even moreso.


*sniff* Poor Dirk.

I'm not on twitter, but I stumbled on the author's page. It gave me a grin because of the behind the scenes peek it offers for his story. Then again, he DID just finish the pie quests in the Shire...

And so we return to the Shire.

The problems with the Shire Post are explained.

Never before has greed and misanthropy been so gosh-darn adorable.

Originally Posted by ShamusYoung.com

This week we do some quests in the Shire, and even dabble in crafting a bit.

I will say that I like the farming in LOTRO, even though I can’t figure out why. (My main is a Master Supreme Farmer.) It’s not really a game. There’s no strategy or skill involved. It’s just busywork. This should be something I hate. If a developer had shown me the design document for the farming gameplay I would have rolled it up and swatted them on the nose with it. But in the end it’s probably the most interesting crafting system I’ve tried. I still think there’s lots of room for improvement, but whatever they’re doing here, it’s a step in the right direction.

if you look at the first screenshot on page 4 of Part 10, Lulzy is becoming the Imelda Marcos of LOTRO. How many pairs of shoes are in those inventory bags?

Haha... yeah. In the first part he mentions how she has a fascination with clothes- especially shoes.

More goodness from The Escapist.

Originally Posted by ShamusYoung.com

“Hey Shamus! You should do the hide and seek quest! You should do the pie quest! You should Slam your face in a car door!” You people and your constant demands for me to abuse myself for your amusement.

Originally Posted by ShamusYoung.com

This is the episode everyone has been telling me I must do, since the start of the series. Here it is, the installment where Lulzy’s crumbling sanity is demolished for your amusement. You heartless jerks.

I hope he has the resolve to keep playing the game after this.

Here is an account of Lulzy’s adventures in Tuckborough, which is an excellent lesson in why reading the quest text is a bad idea.

I've been following this, and I always get a great chuckle from them! Thanks for sharing!!!

Are you impressed with my steadfast refusal to use numbers when listing the episodes in the original post?

Nah, me either- but I'm OCD like that.

Be careful where you go, because you cannot un-smell things. For example, you should not, under any circumstances, visit the town of Frogmorton.

This episode of Shamus Plays will have more nudity than any other. And also dog vomit.

You know what's funny? As many times as I've done that Wilmar Bolger "someone shot my door!" quest, I never actually noticed that there was an arrow there. Up until today I thought I was just supposed to take his word for it.

We're getting down to the end of the Shire now. It will be a photo-finish to see if Lulzy runs out of quests or sanity first.

We win, either way.

These are a great read. Thanks a lot for writing them, very funny and thoughtful.

Your running commentary makes me think you should be called the Seinfeld of LOTRO.

Our days in the Shire are coming to an end. Not yet, but soon.

Originally Posted by Shamus

A long time ago I whined about the problem of trying to advance the plot while also telling jokes. That’s even a bit of a challenge here, although with 2,000 words I still have lots of room to work in some jokes here and there. The main problem I’m facing is that the main plot just isn’t quite as silly as the sidequests (which is usually a good thing) and so making fun of the game is no longer shooting fish in a barrel.

After a brief hiatus, I'm back, so here are the chapters we missed. You have two parts to read to catch up! Gogogogo!

Part Eighteen:

Originally Posted by ShamusYoung.com

Click on this link and laugh as I am abused by the gleeful sadists at Turbine. This entry is a record-breaking seven pages long, so there’s a lot of abuse for you to enjoy this week. I notice the entries are getting longer. Five pages used to be the norm. Then I started hitting six. And now we have seven. (For the record, I can’t see the page breakdown until it goes live. I just aim for 1,700 – 2,100 words with as many screenshots as are needed to tell the story.) I’m not sure If I’m just pushing the upper limits of the word count more often, or if I’m using more images.

Anyway, like I said: Click this link to read the entry. Or this one. Or this. Just don’t just this link, because that leads to the last page and you’ll end up reading the entry out of order. Furthermore, clicking on this link is probably a bad idea, because I have no idea where you’ll end up.

Part Nineteen:

Originally Posted by ShamusYoung.com

Part 19? We’re really on part 19 already?

The game is structured so that the epic quests (the “main plot”, if you will) are broken up into books. The first is the prologue. This is made slightly more confusing by the fact that there is more than one prologue. There’s actually one for each stating area. (Dwarf, Elf, Human, Hobbit.) We’ve just finished off the Hobbit prologue. It’s been a bit long because we took a detour to do part of the human section in entries 6 through 8, and in fact we’re going to do a little more of the human stuff in the next few entries.

A bit about the Golfimbul thing:

I can’t really tell if the writers at Turbine actually intended the skull to be Golfimbul’s skull or not. The logic behind it – as I pointed out in this entry – is howling LSD-driven bowl-of-cocoa-puffs brand madness. I want to believe that this is a story of a silly bunch of hobbits who happen to repel an invasion in the process of jumping at shadows and telling each other ghost stories. But I never detected the wink from the writers. Halros is, like most rangers, portrayed as very wise, patient, and circumspect. (And useless.) He takes the invasion seriously, but he never takes an official position on the authenticity of the skull.

One thing I do notice about the writing is that they are far more careful about language than writing. Which is understandable, considering the nature of the source material. There are a lot of different groups in the game, and each has a distinct style of speech which is clearly conveyed in the quest text. This is particularly evident in your dealings with humans, where there are at least four styles or accents: Commoner humans, educated humans, rangers, and ruffians. There may be more and I’ve either overlooked them or I haven’t reached them yet in the game.

But while they’re very careful with language, the writing itself suffers from a lot of the same blandness and Plan 9 logic that is common to all MMO games. I suspect they write the quests normally (“normal” in this case being “while in the midst of a self-destructive heroin bender”) and then hand off the dialog to a writer who will then “Tolkien it up”. It actually does a lot to make the quests seem less silly.

So, we're back on the main quest line. Go, and bask in its epic-ness.