Thread: Moria Now Entirely Too Bright. . . (yes, I know others will cheer)

Originally Posted by Fred2011

Really don't get the idea of closing off those areas shown in the screenshots... the biggest complaint I've seen about Moria is it's hard to make you way around. Closing off shortcuts between areas does the exact opposite.

Agreed. There's very little point to closing off shortcuts, even if they were more dangerous means of navigation now.

my poor Moria, they went all sunshine lollipop on you, oh well, the times they are a changin

I haven't seen it on Bullroarer yet, but I'm hoping what people are reporting isn't the end result. Atmosphere is one of the things that LOTRO has always done well, and that includes "Holy #### this is dark, I can't see anything!" Moria IMO.

Fix the ambient light slider and make Moria sufficiently dark please!

i rode around a bit to explore and see the changes and the thing that came to my mind during that 30 mins was.....where have all the mobs gone???

i can deal with the lighting, but miss the fact that moria was a high-density area mob-wise....like they took half of the mobs away?????

a new player can ride from chamber of crossroads up the stairs towards zirakigil and only encounter 10-15 mobs, if lucky.
i like how it was a long fight to get somewhere, with every now and then a "save" spot where you had no aggro for a buit standing in a corner regenerating your bars.

but thats just my opinion offcourse, i hope they find a good mix and match in the density on live, to make it a bit easier for new people entering it, but not too easy so you can walk right through without hardly touching mobs

Originally Posted by Chewie-nl

i rode around a bit to explore and see the changes and the thing that came to my mind during that 30 mins was.....where have all the mobs gone???

i can deal with the lighting, but miss the fact that moria was a high-density area mob-wise....like they took half of the mobs away?????

a new player can ride from chamber of crossroads up the stairs towards zirakigil and only encounter 10-15 mobs, if lucky.
i like how it was a long fight to get somewhere, with every now and then a "save" spot where you had no aggro for a buit standing in a corner regenerating your bars.

but thats just my opinion offcourse, i hope they find a good mix and match in the density on live, to make it a bit easier for new people entering it, but not too easy so you can walk right through without hardly touching mobs

Yeah typical Turbine solution.

The old placement with even spacing not only blocking passageways but blocking them in a way that you are in constant hacking mode wasn't good. It's tedious for the player, it is unrealistic and if you don't care whether you die you can just ride through and see whether you can shake them. Bad gameplay all around.

But now instead of doing something more sensible with mob placement (in groups instead of even spacing) and mobs maybe rushing you (like it already is the case in Mirobel) they simply removed mobs.

The new lighting in Durin's Way - the garden area of Tharakh Bazan, which was always bright compared to the rest, seems to have highlighted many of the features and a couple of ramps that make that area VERY attractive. Clearly a tribute to the Dwarven Craftsmen who built it.

Just before Moria came out I imagined that it would be like "the mummy" where you had to carry a torch with you to see anything and if you dropped the torch or it fizzled out then you were stuck in pitch black(much like the movie pitch black).

This would have made Moria very atmospheric and scary to be in as you always would have to carry that torch and a few more in your pack as backups.

It would have been better if they had gone the other way and made it more menacing and dark.

I don't like the shiny Moria....baaaa !

Shame on you Turbine, Shame on you.

Originally Posted by guguzza71

Just before Moria came out I imagined that it would be like "the mummy" where you had to carry a torch with you to see anything and if you dropped the torch or it fizzled out then you were stuck in pitch black(much like the movie pitch black).

This would have made Moria very atmospheric and scary to be in as you always would have to carry that torch and a few more in your pack as backups.

It would have been better if they had gone the other way and made it more menacing and dark.

There has to be some balance, though.
Reading the books and thinking hell yeah, this is awesome, doesn't necessarily mean it would be as awesome if you were to play in such environment for couple days to weeks :P There were several aspects of the game in past which I originally liked, but turned to hate it deeply over time (either after few hours or after going through that on 4th char).
In the end you have to satisfy the majority (these forums are not majority, unfortunately).
The worst cause of these changes we dislike is the trend in noadays MMO market. I don't want to blame WoW yet again, but as far as I know it was the first one that truly aimed at masses. Masses don't want shinies that take hard work. They just want easy stuff.
Of course changing lighting in Moria might have nothing to do with that, but it does looks like a simplifying change to make "wow kids" happy to me.

With that all said, I still think the original state of how Moria looked was ok.
It could even be darker - just set default lighting levels to how a bloody cave should look like, and FIX the stupid lighting options so they actually work, and when someone enters the mines for the first time, put a message in caps in the chat informing them about the possibility to make the place a bit more bearable. Is that too hard to do?

Maybe they'll make an "Ambient Dark" slider...

Originally Posted by Ingaras

Hehe, I could see this thread coming. Tbh, I can see your point of view, but I know I got lost immediately as I walked up the stairs in (my ###### old DX9 non-dynamically lit) Durin's Threshold, spend 15 mins searching the forum how to change lighting settings and I think they're still in 'overbright' mode. And there's been at least a dozen of others whose day got a bit brighter by this knowledge.

The best option probably would be to have default lighting with the Ambient slider in the middle, so you can actually see more than 2m ahead by default, but can turn it pitch black or bright as day if you want to. Because I do think Moria's default brightness was a tad too dark.

I remember bug reporting this in one of the recent updates - in some places, the ambient light slider isn't (wasn't - haven't been back to those areas since the newest 6.x update) working. I agree with Ingaras. They have to take into account people's monitor brightnesses (eg my husband's monitor is skewed very bright and he rarely has a problem seeing in Moria, but in Lothlorien the glowiness is really unpleasant) and so on.

Frankly, I really like what I'm seeing. Silvertine Lodes might be a bit overdone, but... I realize I could be in the minority, but I would trade being-able-to-see-where-I'm-going for actual-physically-possible-lighting. Immersion is nice, but it needs to be balanced with utility.

Originally Posted by Gwenryth

It's a mine, not a museum!

It's not a mine, it's a tomb.

Originally Posted by Miz_Sparrow

Immersion is nice, but it needs to be balanced with utility.

Thank you Turbine for addressing travel/lighting concerns in Moria. The ambient lighting slider and other video options could be very quickly highlighted in a tooltip that appears onscreen upon entering Moria. Maybe even give them a nice screen shot highlighting black levels so they can play with their settings and dial in on something that's going to work at Durin's Treshhold and deeper into the mines. It is a huge loss to do away with the incredible amount of design already done by turning lights on in the Silvertine Lodes. Turbine please listen to the few of us taking the time to comment - we much rather have the option to play with increased visibility OR murky, inky, darkness that has a foul, ancient, abysmal, evil presence. If you can have the slider settings default to maximum for Moria, that'd be great - but let us have that option to preserve the atmosphere of such an integral environment.

Khazad-dûm: Delving of the Dwarves. Delving: Dig; excavate
Moria: Sindarin for "Black Chasm," present before Khaz was lost to Durin's Bane

At the point that a character is passing through Moria, the fellowship has already passed. Gandalf fought Durin's Bane for at least 10 days before slaying him, but let's even assume this has already passed. It still wasn't until "a few centuries into the Fourth Age, [that] Durin VII ... at last led his people back to their longed-for ancient homeland." I know the dwarves want to reclaim their homeland, but that's what the encampments in Moria already represent. I'm not enough of a Tolkien scholar to assess whether the Balrog's death would actually brighten Moria (this would assume a demon of shadow and fire encouraged the inky blackness of Moria, in addition to it being naturally dark).

Even without ingame adjustments - if people favor convenience over atmosphere they're still likely to crank up their brightness. You're only saving those people a minor effort, at the expense of forever annihilating the possibility of maintaining a truly imposing atmosphere. Most of the screen shots I've seen don't show anything that isn't already possible by a couple moments spent tweaking existing options. Silvertine Lodes looks awful and is clearly overstepping. Don't force these changes on your players, find a way to guide them to adjusting it themselves.

Just make a nice tooltip. That's all you need to guide players to the tools to customize their experience. And that saves you the trouble of doing the same thing in other zones to tweak the default visibility - and the players don't have to complain because they already fixed it themselves.

I've now played through all the tweaked content in Moria and will agree with others that Silvertine has been... ruined. My ideas as to why I've posted over here:

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...94#post6164094

Everything else seems ok to me, not saying I prefer it, but if it was my first time through, I don't think I'd be sitting here saying "This makes no sense". That's exactly what I think about the lighting in Silvertine.

Just echoing the sentiments of others here. I, too, wish the lighting had been left alone. It will no longer feel like I have entered "the long dark of Moria." It's not like the expedition has been there long enough to redo the electricity. Rather than forcing these changes upon those of us who liked the lighting the way it was, there should have been some way to adjust it. On point, I know there is a slider in the lighting settings that makes Moria brighter; I just don't recall which one specifically. It wasn't a huge issue.

I make no judgments on the quest changes until I've played through them though (haven't had time for much testing in that regard due to finals), but moving more quickly through Moria is a good thing, in my opinion. I'll wait until the 2nd half of the revamp to quest through Moria again to get the full experience.

I think a Tutorial popup about "Brightness Levels" would have been a fantastic alternative to actually changing the lighting, and it would have saved a ton of work.

Not only did they ruin the Silvertine lodes with the lighting, but they arbitrarily blocked numerous paths for no reason...back path down the tracks from the great delving is blocked now? why? can no longer make circles around the zone, for mining ores, because there is a wall in the goblin camp to the east. why? what purpose did that serve?

Originally Posted by novafires

Not only did they ruin the Silvertine lodes with the lighting, but they arbitrarily blocked numerous paths for no reason...back path down the tracks from the great delving is blocked now? why? can no longer make circles around the zone, for mining ores, because there is a wall in the goblin camp to the east. why? what purpose did that serve?

They fixed the zone you know? Just like they fixed the lighting.

In fact, they also fixed sounds so now I can listen to ingame stuff at ten times as loud level than before. They know how to force the right feel to the game.

The whole U7 is one big fix. Almost makes me want to fix my playing completely.

Originally Posted by novafires

Not only did they ruin the Silvertine lodes with the lighting, but they arbitrarily blocked numerous paths for no reason...back path down the tracks from the great delving is blocked now? why? can no longer make circles around the zone, for mining ores, because there is a wall in the goblin camp to the east. why? what purpose did that serve?

Can you see through these new blocks?

If not it might be a 3D performance thing (limit how much stuff is visible from a given position).

People really like U7 it seems