Thread: I hope Rohan is going to be huge

Originally Posted by zalladi

We have most figures of what to expect from Rohan:

• Around twice as large as the Moria landscape (So the biggest expansion yet in terms of landmass)

Isengard was sold or advertised as twice the size of Moria, at least in teaser talk about it from devs. I have strong doubts this will be the case with Rohan, not holding my breath and not buying until I see some evidence that it's not just a great big lawn to ride around. As to the warbands, I imagine another Mirkwood start instance with groups of mobs that is near improbable for certain classes to take on solo. I hope to be proven wrong.

Misgivings: huge lawn where every mob tries to punt, stun, drag, crush and pull you off your horse every few yards, like some sort of strategy game in MMO clothes.

Hopes: large, interesting place with a rich history, lots of stuff to explore, interesting landscape design that is both lovely to look at and holds a ton of quirky places to explore.

Misgivings: a plain-ful of aurochs type mobs, all signature and elites who apply 172537165 stacking debuffs to keep you busy with one mob for a minute.

Hopes: devs distancing themselves from the idea that the game becomes more interesting because you take twice the time killing a field mob.

With low expectations, I might get a pleasant surprise in september.

When they say that Rohan will have at least 10-11 towns that the epic takes you through, I'm picturing even a few more towns or smaller villages that are possibly visited between epic quests. Also, according to the existing quests in Great River, Stangard is only an outpost, a fort if you will. I would imagine that every other town in Rohan will be bigger than Stangard, and as they've said children will and horses will be more interactive as well. I hope that many of the things in Stangard will also exist in many of the towns. (for example, multiple towns having some crafting facilities as well as some towns having vaults, or Auction Houses. The Shire for example, has half of it's towns sporting crafting facilities, taverns, vendors and the like, but few often use those once they've passed level 20. Another issue is the single skirm camp in the Shire being at the far north end... but I digress)

I'm sure there will be at least one main gathering Hub, and I hope it is more like Galtrev in layout of various facilities, but closer to Stangard in look and feel. (As it should be, being part of Rohan and not Dunland) Having multiple vault NPCs in the craft area and AH are really nice. Having most NPC vendors and LI NPCs in one area is also great. Then one downside I can think of for Galtrev is the fighting arena that is off to one side, and kinda hidden. IMO it's the perfect spot for friends to have a sparring match, but most people just end up sparring right in the shade in front of the LI npcs... at least on my server.

I remember reading on one of the other threads where a Dev was talking about the speed of horses and that the mount combat horses are going to be a lot faster than any of the horsers we currently have. So just because we have more landmass in RoR it probarly going to take the same amount of time to cross from one end to the other due to the faster horses. More landscape doesnt always equal more content. But to have 10 -11 cities to visit is a promising sign. /fingers crossed

Ok, having a huge landscape will be great. But, they should focus on making sure everything is 100% complete, barely any bugs [let's face it, it's hard to release an update without a bug or 2 slipping in].

Quality not QUANTITY.

Judging by the speed of the War-horses, I'd imagine that the landmass will be at least 2x the size of Moria. It takes common sense to work that out.

The 'Exclusive Rohan Content' they speak of, is the horse quests in Combe (Well starting there, it's Horse session play) This is a pre-order bonus.. If it came available to people afterwards then it would be pointless selling it as a pre-order bonus.

In Skyrim, the collectors edition was $150. It came with a huge statue of Alduin.. Once again, if you didn't buy that edition you didn't get the statue. It didn't become available in Bethesda's store later.. That's ok.

Also to compare RoR with Skyrim is a little.. well wrong. Skyrim is a single-player RPG. In Size, LotRO is bigger than Skyrim (LotRO's world put together)

-Tails-

Originally Posted by Varenthor

Stangard was much much better, if Edoras is like a larger, more majestic stangard I will be very pleased.

Stangard definitely *looks* cooler. It would be nice if facilities were marked on the map though. I still do all my stuff in Galtrev due to accessibility and the fact that I can identify the AH is on the map without having to mouse over each doorway lol.

Originally Posted by Tailborn

The 'Exclusive Rohan Content' they speak of, is the horse quests in Combe (Well starting there, it's Horse session play) This is a pre-order bonus.. If it came available to people afterwards then it would be pointless selling it as a pre-order bonus.

-Tails-

Actually, as pre-order bonus you only get the 4 lvl 75 cloaks, the soldier appearance and the outrider token. Only these you lose if you buy the legendary edition after the 5th of September. The exclusive content, the steed, the 6th bag and all other fluff you'll still receive on purchase.

Originally Posted by Gundamyr

Not really tricky

Just throw in miles of contentless blank fields of land

Skyrim should be the standard for all RPGs

They actually filled in the lanscape with mindblowing detail and breathtaking content

So.
1. Skyrim is RPG. Lotro is MMORPG. Different genres = different standards.
2. Skyrim is the full game. RoR is expansion. Let's wait for Dawnguard and then compare it with RoR .
3. Skyrim has 14 sq. miles (half of which sea and mountains). RoR as some people calculated has more than 20 sq. miles.
4. Skyrim has 9 towns (1/3 of them are just plain villages with 5-6 buildings - it's just a shame). RoR has 10 or 11.
5. If RoR costs 70$ then Skyrim costs 150$.
6. RoR has hundreds of quests. I don't think Skyrim has so much.
7. I spent ~40 hours on Skyrim and i'll spend much much more on RoR. I spent much more even on a RoI.

But it's just a numbers. The numbers do not reflect real fun. Soooo let's cease trolling!

Originally Posted by Treize6

Stangard definitely *looks* cooler. It would be nice if facilities were marked on the map though. I still do all my stuff in Galtrev due to accessibility and the fact that I can identify the AH is on the map without having to mouse over each doorway lol.

THIS. I don't do any business in Stangard. The far-flung locations of the important services combined with the anonymous state of the doorways is intolerable to me.

Originally Posted by MadeOfLions

Multiple.

MoL

Eru bless you, sir.

Originally Posted by MadeOfLions

I don't want to steal any thunder from dev diaries and whatnot, so I'll just say that the Epic story takes you through or near ten or eleven different towns. I'm excited about the content, and can't wait for people to get their hands on it. It's Rohan! This is one of the places we on the dev team have been excited about doing for years and years.

MoL

Excellent, If the Devs that brought us the early part of the games is excited about Rohan, I have higher hope for it, looking forward to its release, and on a side note, thanks for including the TP and IC, that alone puts me back on the boat to buy preorder and a higher tier game pack.

This is also the part of the story where the emphasis should be on GROUP content, as in instances etc, i hope the dev team is equally excited about brining us a decent amount of group content as well

Originally Posted by Gundamyr

Not really tricky

Just throw in miles of contentless blank fields of land

Skyrim should be the standard for all RPGs

They actually filled in the lanscape with mindblowing detail and breathtaking content

Skyrim is a singleplayer game.
All singleplayer games will have better detail, nicer graphics and gameplay, as it's - SINGLE Player, there are no servers or players to worry about lags or server loads. Only you and NPC's, not even that many of them, no live interaction between objects/players like in a MMO - which all eats up resources and bandwidth. Thats why these sort of games are not MMO, but rather have a Multiplayer option on dedicated servers or peer 2 peer consisting of 12/24/36 etc players, cuz the servers/clients wouldn't be able to exchange the vast amount of Data between each other (it theoretically would, but requires a monsterous PC+Server+Connection).
Remember that in skyrim (for example) or any other SP game, NPC's work only by ur PC executing pre-written scripts, but a live player - every action, button, skill, window you open is sent to server and databases, processed, reply is sent back to the player and others (even if you don't see it), therefore, 50 people in lotro consume 3 times as many resources as finely crafted and well-polished NPC characters in a singleplayer game, not to mention the load it does to a server.
If you bumped all that detail/graphics etc in a MMO, the game would inevitabely crash in seconds on both server/client side due to it's sheer size and massiveness and lack of people's internet connection quality.
They don't make singleplayer/mmo's so different not because they wouldn't want to, but because there's a reason you obviously fail to see because of your lack of knowledge.
So don't talk about things you don't know of.

My base measurement of wide open terrain would be the Southern Bree-hills or maybe the Northern Bree-hills, that stretch from the Trestlebridge road east to Nen Harn. I measured that out and it's about 1.5K and change.

The Great River zone is 5K from the east end of the Brown Lands to the westernmost tip of the Limlight. And that's terrain filled with hills roads and towns.

The Wold has to be at least 4K wide, as its borders are the same: Anduin on the east, the Misties on the west. Looking at any map would tell you its easily twice that distance north to south. So a conservative estimate of the landmass area of ROR would be 40Km square.

Someone check my math on this. If this is accurate then ROR is a VAST zone. Easily larger than any other zone in the game.

Originally Posted by MadeOfLions

I think you're going to like Rohan. While hooking up the Epic quests, I've been really impressed by how different each town in Rohan feels from each other. It's really pretty astounding. The political landscape is also really interesting, with each main area in the kingdom having its own political situation and loyalties and problems. There's a lot here.

MoL

This is important, and I hope it really does work out as you describe. Rohan is an iconic area for LotR fans, as I'm sure you are acutely aware of, and we really want to be "Wowed" by RoR.

I hear people complaining that if you don't purchase the Legendary Edition of RoR you're somehow missing out on the full expansion experience. If this concern is based on the fact that you don't have access to the horse session play then let me tell you this: you're not missing out on much. Sure the session plays are fun but more so because of novelty than anything else. From what I've personally encountered, you're only given about four sessions where you play as a warsteed, some of which are repeatable. The quests involve either killing birds, cargul (ring wraith wannabes) or orcs and that's it. Oh and you get to meet Shadowfax in one of the session plays but that one only lasts a couple of minutes. You also pick up the "Favour of the Mearas" skill for your future warsteed but, if memory serves, that's on a daily cool down and we have no idea what is does.

For all we know, a lot of this is a preview of what everyone is going to have access to when RoR launches. I mean think about it. There is going to have to be some kind of introduction quest line to school players on the new warsteed. These session plays might be part of that.

I really don't see how the things offered in RoR Legendary Edition are all that different than the collector's edition of others games that give you special mounts, exclusive crew members, exclusive skins or rare armor. Now, if not having any of those things somehow cheapens your enjoyment of an expansion then that's your thing and I'm not going to judge. I just personally don't understand what the big problem is.

Originally Posted by donxavier

For all we know, a lot of this is a preview of what everyone is going to have access to when RoR launches.

I assume this is the case. Having bought the Legendary Package gives me a chance to work on the horse quests now, rather than in September when the new expansion opens, lots of things to do, lots of landscapes to explore. And .... once RoR opens, people who are just starting the horse quests are going to be as thick as swarms of bees around Combe and Hengstacer. I appreciate the opportunity to pick up bundles of hay and buckets of water that I can actually see.

Originally Posted by MadeOfLions

. . . with each main area in the kingdom having its own political situation and loyalties and problems. There's a lot here.

MoL

I bolded his loyalties for focus. That means to me a bit of grind for faction awards. Is that what MoL means, do ya think?

The horse quest "may" be available to all later but from what i recall the deed reward being that horse skill you use once a day is linked to the legendary purchase.

Originally Posted by ETSubmariner

I bolded his loyalties for focus. That means to me a bit of grind for faction awards. Is that what MoL means, do ya think?

You know I can hear you, right?

I wasn't actually talking about reputation. I meant that just about every political leader you encounter throughout East Rohan has his own priorities: some are more loyal to the King, some are looking out for their own people specifically, others have selfish aims - that sort of thing.

MoL

I'm hoping to see some real tensions between those loyal to the king (to a fault) those influenced by Grima and those following Eomer.

Originally Posted by Gundamyr

We understand your excitement , however it does not justify a $70 price tag

That's ok, because the expansion only costs $40.

Originally Posted by Macroscian

Isengard was sold or advertised as twice the size of Moria, at least in teaser talk about it from devs.

No it never was. Where did you see it?

Personally I would be more concerned with the amount and quality of the new content than the size of the new area. It would be a shame if the devs decided that hell rohan is meant to be some great big open plains area, and if we put to many things in there it might not seem big enough. Ok so we need it to be pretty big but if its not so huge that I will spend a whole week walking from one side to the other I don't think I'll lose any sleep as long as the main locations are there and well done, and there is plenty of things to do.

The reason I don't get all twisted about the technical bugs of the game is because if nothing else, the Team *always* makes me feel as if I'm IN Middle-Earth, and they haven't let me down yet. Ever since I first stepped foot into the game I have been impressed with the little things they always get right to make it more Tolkien-esque, and I have no reason to think this expac would be any different. Credit where credit is due!

Originally Posted by Thoronthor

I'm hoping to see some real tensions between those loyal to the king (to a fault) those influenced by Grima and those following Eomer.

Bolded for emphasis.
Remember that Eomer is not banished or anything like that in the books. He's imprisoned around when he comes back to Edoras after meeting the Hunters IIRC, but there's no actual conflict of loyalties for people.

Originally Posted by Firebryt

The reason I don't get all twisted about the technical bugs of the game is because if nothing else, the Team *always* makes me feel as if I'm IN Middle-Earth, and they haven't let me down yet. Ever since I first stepped foot into the game I have been impressed with the little things they always get right to make it more Tolkien-esque, and I have no reason to think this expac would be any different. Credit where credit is due!

This is exactly what I wanted to hear from a player!

I've been playing since August 2011 and the world itself blows my mind. I passed up the RoI expansion last year, but as soon as I saw the RoR expansion advertised, I knew I was going to buy it. Not for the bells and whistles or what you get pre-purchase, which are pretty great to me considering these are things I didn't have before, except for a "special mount", and wasn't willing to spend TP on in the store. What I was excited about was the landscape, the scenery, the music...everything related to this game is visual and being "in world" has a surreal feeling that makes you feel as though you ARE part of this massively epic story! I don't care about the size of the landmass, how many square miles/kms it is. I DO, however, care about the way the images make me feel and whether it keeps me coming back over and over again, just like the f2p areas have time and time again. So, to the OP, Rohan is already huge...at least to me it is! =o)

Originally Posted by Cadd_EU

Bolded for emphasis.
Remember that Eomer is not banished or anything like that in the books. He's imprisoned around when he comes back to Edoras after meeting the Hunters IIRC, but there's no actual conflict of loyalties for people.

Thats not exaclty true.
Éomer is not indeed banished when he meets the 3 hunters BUT, tensions and conflicts with Grima were there for a long time and described in the books. It's not imposible at all that some people, villages, regions -in the eastmarch in particular- were growing impatient with Grima's influence on the King.

In fact, Éomer was told not to chase the Uruks by Grima, yet he did, amongst other things. Being the Marshall of the East-March, it's more than possible that people there actually helped/supported him against Grima.