Emotions in Games, part 2: Sorrow

Sorrow is a profoundly deep and negative emotion, and is not casually experienced.  Sorrow is our natural reaction to the experience of loss; our recognition that something we cared about will not be part of our future.  Sorrow is also brought about in many cases by our own suffering and that of others, particularly when we feel that suffering will continue – that is, when we lose hope and start to feel despair.

Like Fear, we’re dealing here with an emotion that’s experienced by the percipient – the reader/viewer/player of whatever medium is being experienced – and not by the characters in that medium.  How, then, can percipients be made to feel sorrow?  I’ll approach the subject by dealing separately with suffering and loss, and then I’ll briefly address how sorrow can be part of PvP experiences.

Suffering

Suffering is difficult to address, when we talk about media percipients in general.  Books, movies, and games are, after all, activities in which we participate in order to have fun, and suffering generally isn’t much fun, for most of us anyhow.  One can meaningfully argue that a lot of what people do, day to day, is intended to avoid suffering, and so it seems like a losing proposition to introduce it into our recreation.  Nonetheless, it’s deliberately used by game designers from time to time.

A good example is death penalties, which affect the player as much as the character.  Death penalties are intended, of course, as a means to punish failure… and it’s inarguable that they also can often lead to suffering on the part of the player.  Sometimes that suffering is considered acceptable, because the risk of failure and loss can make games more exciting.  Death penalties though can easily lead to frustration and a lessened desire to play a game, especially when death feels unavoidable.  Online games are quite susceptible to this, since lag or computer problems can and do lead to character death sometimes – that’s already frustrating, but to then be punished for something outside one’s control can be extremely aggravating.

Designers sometimes make the mistake of thinking that tedium increases player involvement by causing them to yearn for release.  Tedium is also sometimes used to simulate training, because that’s part of how we learn in real life.  If a designer is e.g. making a Shaolin Temple game, he might be tempted to put in some sections of the game where the character simulates the classic training sequences from “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin”, including such acts as carrying heavy buckets of water and performing extensive strength and flexibility training.  The problem here is simple: tedium really isn’t desirable in any form of entertainment.  If a book or movie is tedious, we’ll walk away from them.  If a game is tedious, we’ll stop playing.  There might be an awesome part coming up right after the tedium, but we’ll never know, because we stop before then.  In real life we put up with tedium sometimes because it leads to good results later on – ask any athlete.  In our entertainment though, people generally won’t tolerate tedium.  If you need to refer in a game to something tedious that happens for plot purposes, put it in a cutscene and keep it short.

When people suffer a great deal, they can often develop the belief that such suffering is unavoidable; this belief can lead to despair, which is a prolonged way of experiencing sorrow.  Despair is a very powerful emotion, and not one to be used lightly.  While readers or viewers might tolerate or even enjoy feeling despair on behalf of the characters in the book or film, they do so only if they’re heavily immersed in the story.  If a player feels despair due to prolonged suffering in a game, there’s a high probability that the player will simply stop playing.  There’s also a thorny ethical issue here: if a player is already prone to depression, causing him or her to feel despair can be dangerous.

In general, suffering isn’t desirable in entertainment.  Readers, viewers, and players just won’t put up with much suffering by and large. While in real life suffering over time can lead to despair, it can also lead to frustration and a desire to quit.  With entertainment this is a serious problem and should be avoided.

Loss

Kierkegaard once wrote, “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly one you can never have.”  This is an excellent description of the principle of loss.

Loss is predicated on involvement; if you lose something you don’t care about, you won’t experience sorrow over it.  Clearly a high level of immersion is useful for any entertainment medium to cause percipients to feel a sense of loss.  In keeping with Kierkegaard’s quote, if a percipient cares enough about the character undergoing the loss and the thing being lost to project outwards what the character’s future will be like without the thing being lost… there’s potential for sorrow.

Books and films excel at this, as media.  Readers and viewers often identify strongly with characters in books and films, and so when those characters undergo loss we weep along with them.  When Old Yeller gets rabies and has to be put down, it’s a powerful moment.  ”Titanic” would not have been as popular a film had Jack not developed hypothermia and died, leaving Rose alone.  ”Bridge to Terabithia” is memorable in large part because of Leslie’s death, and “Of Mice and Men” resonates so strongly because of Lenny’s tragic but necessary end.  All of Shakespeare’s tragedies evoke sorrow by loss through death.

Games, though, tend to be very bad at generating the feeling of loss in players.  I can only think of one game that made me feel like I, the player, had lost something… in Planetfall, the delightful robot companion Floyd sacrifices himself to help the player.  It’s been years now since I played Planetfall but I still remember how devastated I was when that happened.  I was immersed in the story to the point where I cared about the characters, and when Floyd died, I could clearly see how much bleaker the gameworld would be without him – thus I experienced “remembering a future I could not have”, which led to sorrow.

It’s possible to generate the feeling of loss not only through immersion but also through investment of time and effort.  If e.g. you worked for many hours to get the Sword of Allslaying, and felt happy and proud to wield it, you might be pretty sad when it breaks or is stolen later on.  This same involvement through effort can also extend to characters – e.g. if you’ve worked hard in game to develop a relationship with an NPC, that time and effort makes you vulnerable to a sense of loss.

So what’s necessary for a player to be immersed?  Obviously that’s one of the core issues facing designers and game writers – if players care about what happens to the characters, then there’s potential for emotional response. Immersion through effort is in a sense simpler to generate; the more time and effort needed to obtain the items or relationships, the more likely a player will feel invested in the status quo, and thus be open to feelings of loss.

The rules change a bit though when a player is interacting with other players instead of only with fictional constructs.

PvP

In short, PvP is any sort of competition between players.  This is most often taken to mean simple direct conflict through violence, but it can also include social, political, or economic conflicts, as well as any zero-sum game.  Chess, checkers, backgammon, Monopoly, go, and Chutes and Ladders are all forms of PvP.

PvP in online games is often predicated on the idea that losing leads to suffering of some sort.  This isn’t of course always the case, but the idea is strongly reinforced by the way many players act when they defeat opponents.  From taunting to teabagging, the winner in a violent PvP conflict online often tries to increase the suffering of their defeated opponent.  Part of the fun of such activities, for these people, is the schadenfreude they feel – the enjoyment at the suffering of others.  Trust the German language to have a great word to describe this!

Does this kind of suffering lead to sorrow though?  Generally not, unless one suffers enough to feel despair, at which point most players will stop playing the game.

Summary

Overall, the best option to lead players to feel sorrow is through loss.  This can be accomplished by removing a game element that the player has come to care about, either through immersion or through investment of time and effort.  The deeper the attachment the player feels, the greater the loss will be.  A significant loss can lead the player to feel genuine sorrow.

Sorrow isn’t something most people want to experience very often though, and so it’s best used sparingly.  Repeated experiences of sorrow lead to diminishing returns, where a player refuses to commit as much emotion in order to avoid the pain of sorrow.  If I care deeply about several characters who die, the first loss will likely be sadder than the second one, and by the third I’m likely to withdraw emotionally and refuse to care – unless of course I’m extremely immersed in the game.  If I worked hard to get something in game and lose it, I might feel sorrow… but if it happens too often I’m likely to just become annoyed and stop playing.

Namárië Endórë!

The only real way we have to meaningfully communicate our feelings with game developers is generally with our wallets.  After long deliberation, I used that simple economic vote to express my feelings about LotRO by canceling both accounts today.

I like a lot of the ideas presented for SoM, especially the skirmish system, which sounds like it could be a lot of fun.  I just haven’t had an interest in playing for the last month and a half though, and I don’t see that changing.  Fundamentally, I remain unhappy with the concept of gear gating (which remains part of the new plan from all I can see; no word to the contrary has been issued), with the disposable legendary items system (which is changing, but is not apparently going to result in less disposable and frankly non-legendary “legendary” items), and with the shoddy state of high level crafting (which used to be both fun and useful, but with the Moria expansion became neither to me; there are some nice recipes but less so than before and they take a LOT more work to get).  The faction grinds are pretty interminable, and I don’t relish getting the Elves of Mirkwood to love even one of my characters, much less several or all.  And finally, as I noted before, the people I played with have changed their approach to the game because of the way the game itself has changed, and now our playstyles don’t mesh very well.

It’s National Novel Writing Month, which I’m 3 days into now with a lot of work ahead of me still.  Dragon Age: Origins is coming out (which I want to play through, and also build modules for), and I still have a lot of fun left to enjoy in Torchlight from the looks of it.  I have a 6- month Champions Online sub and am watching to see how that game develops… I haven’t played it in a while either but might give it another try once they add some more content.  Between all of that and my social life I have more than enough to keep me busy through the end of the year, and though LotRO still has some appeal, it just isn’t enough to motivate me to log in to LotRO anymore.  Perhaps I’ll come back to Middle-earth yet again, perhaps not, but for now I’m wishing it a fond farewell.

Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,
yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!
Yéni ve lintë yuldar avánier
mi oromardi lissë-miruvóreva
Andúnë pella, Vardo tellumar
nu luini yassen tintilar i eleni
ómaryo airetári-lírinen.

Sí man i yulma nin enquantuva?

An sí Tintallë Varda Oiolossëo
ve fanyar máryat Elentári ortanë
ar ilyë tier undulávë lumbulë
ar sindanóriello caita mornië
i falmalinnar imbë met,
ar hísië untúpa Calaciryo míri oialë.
Sí vanwa ná, Rómello vanwa, Valimar!
Namárië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar!
Nai elyë hiruva! Namárië!

Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind,
long years numberless as the wings of trees!
The long years have passed like swift draughts
of the sweet mead in lofty halls
beyond the West, beneath the blue vaults of Varda
wherein the stars tremble
in the song of her voice, holy and queenly.

Who now shall refill the cup for me?

For now the Kindler, Varda, the Queen of the stars,
from Mount Everwhite has uplifted her hands like clouds
and all paths are drowned deep in shadow;
and out of a grey country darkness lies
on the foaming waves between us,
and mist covers the jewels of Calacirya for ever.
Now lost, lost to those of the East is Valimar!
Farewell! Maybe thou shalt find Valimar!
Maybe even thou shalt find it! Farewell!

Torchlight, torchbright, first torch… no, wait, that’s silly

Well, inspired by the wave of positive reviews buzzing about the blogosphere, I picked up Torchlight last night.  It cost me $20 and I downloaded it directly from the website.  Though others on the forums had complained about very slow download speeds (as I later learned), it went very quickly for me and there was no fuss or bother.

I played for about 2 hours and quite enjoyed it.  I should say that I was quite fond of Nethack and Angband and Rogue back in the day, and later Diablo, Diablo II, and most recently TitanQuest.  The action-RPG is a genre that I find quite enjoyable in a mindless sort of time-filling way.  They aren’t terribly difficult to pick up, but there are always some good tactical choices to be made – easy to learn and hard to master is a fair assessment.

Torchlight is a sterling example of the genre.  It reminded me very VERY heavily of Diablo, for good reason (sharing as it does devs from Diablo and Fate).  The music was excellent and very evocative, and the graphics were colorful and cartoonish but appealing in a WoW sort of way.  The art directors did a fabulous job in establishing a good look and feel for the game that doesn’t require massive video resources.  I happen to have massive video resources (dual Radeon 4870s) but hey, it’s nice that hardware isn’t a barrier.  There are even graphics settings for netbooks – which is kind of funny and sad but awesome at the same time.

The gameplay is, well, Diablo.  It’s easier to mention the few ways it differs than it is to list the many ways it’s (not even based on but identical to) Diablo.

First, you get a pet, which can be a cat or dog.  The pet is quite a scrapper and can take a lot of damage, and dish it out as well.  You can teach your pet to cast up to two spells, which is fairly nifty.  Your pet has an inventory as large as yours, from which it can equip two rings and a necklace (like you) but no armour or weapons.  The pet can even run to town and sell stuff for you, which I found to be damned convenient.  Finally, you can catch fish at fishing holes in the dungeons, and the only purpose fish serve that I’ve yet seen is to feed them to your pet, whereupon said pet will polymorph into whatever creature is written in the fish’s description.  I’ve found fish to turn my kitty into a spider and a gelatinous blob (for a few minutes only)… but I haven’t spent a lot of time fishing yet.  This is amusing and probably has uses I haven’t looked into yet, in terms of customizing one’s pet for specific encounters.

A wealth of randomized items drop like leaves, precisely as one would expect, with tiers of usefulness sorted by color.  I’ve found a few uniques already and one set item, so even at low levels there’s some very nice loot to be found.  Items must be identified with identify scrolls, as usual (and yes, there are town portal scrolls too).  Some items have sockets for gems.  Items can be combined at a Transmuter, which as far as I’ve seen thus far always yields various gems.  I haven’t experimented with transmuting many nice items yet though, so perhaps there’s more to it than that.

Characters belong to one of three classes, and choosing your class, sex, name, pet type, and pet name is all the customizing you get to do initially.  I made an Alchemist (male, mage) and it’s pretty much what I expected.  There are stat points gained on each level up, as well as skill points one can spend on three skill trees per class, allowing for a moderate amount of customization.

Overall, Torchlight is not revolutionary in any way, shape, or form.  It’s however a very solid action-RPG that feels very comfortable, with nice graphics and sound, engaging gameplay, and a lot of polish.  I haven’t seen any bugs yet, and it’s generally played very smoothly for me.  I didn’t go with Hardcore mode (i.e. permadeath) but did start out with Hard difficulty, having heard that Easy was silly and Normal was still too easy.  Frankly, it’s still been pretty easy to me (lvl 8, no deaths, only 3 healing potions and no mana potions consumed), but then I’m playing to my strengths with the build I’ve chosen.  I’ll play on and see if it gets harder; if not I might restart on Very Hard difficulty.

Initial verdict: if you like the genre, you’ll like this game.  The price is right, there’s no barrier to entry, and it’s just good old dungeon-crawling goodness.

Emotions in Games, part 1: Fear

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how well (or rather, how very, very poorly) games create emotional reactions in players, and since I tend to be a verbose bastard I’m going to separate my mind-dumping into posts on separate emotions, talking about how different media approach these emotions, and how games generally fail to do so, with a constructive eye on how this can be improved.

H.P. Lovecraft wasn’t only the past master of gothic horror; he also wrote one of the seminal works on the subject: “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.  His contention therein was that the type of horror that most effectively engages and frightens people is fear of the unknown.  I strongly agree, and one can see Lovecraft’s influence on everything from Stephen King and Dean Koontz to slasher flicks.  But let’s drill down a bit further into the ways horror, and especially the fear of the unknown, can be manifested in the media.

Fundamentally, I see three components to horror: suspense, wrongness, and startlement.  I’ll approach each in turn.

Suspense

Suspense is generated by building tension in the reader/viewer/player.  It’s most effective when it builds slowly, adding onto itself with labyrinthine twists and turns until we beg for release.  Suspense arises from our perception that we don’t know something important, something crucial to the plot or to our own survival.  In order to build it slowly, clues have to be dropped, one at a time, so we have the sense that we can almost but not quite see the whole picture.

A lot of poor writers (usually scriptwriters) try to create suspense by having characters act in miserably stupid ways, e.g. shining a flashlight ahead of themselves as they slowly back down a dark hallway.  This builds tension sophomorically, relying as it does on the idiotic and unrealistic behaviour of the characters in question, but it can be effective; the tension generated comes from our desire to force the characters to act more intelligently.  ”Don’t do that!” we cry, wincing as we feel the danger coming ever closer.  This approach is far more common in film and TV than in books, and is very rare in games.  Typically in games we share the perspective of the character we control, and the designers can’t rely upon us as players to act in such stupid ways, except of course in cutscenes.  This kind of suspense often is hard to distinguish from frustration and can easily bleed into annoyance.  Roger Ebert calls this one of the elements of the “idiot plot” – a plot that only works because the characters involved all have to be idiots.  The suspense generated by this kind of stupid behaviour in films and TV is almost always released through startlement (see below).

A more sophisticated form of suspense is one that doesn’t rely on characters acting in unrealistic ways, but rather sets the stage for the protagonists to slowly uncover the underlying mystery.  I’ve rarely seen this done effectively in games, to be honest, but it seems like a good fit for the medium nonetheless.  The basic requirements are simple: 1) the mystery must be crucially important somehow, often because of a physical or mental threat to the protagonists or to people or things that they love; 2) the mystery must be uncovered slowly through reasonable and realistic means; and finally 3) the mystery must be internally consistent and the clues should lead to the answer.  Red herrings are fine, but the final solution should make sense and should explain all of the clues that were uncovered.  This leaves the reader/viewer/player with the sense that they have a task to perform (i.e. figure out what’s going on) and that they have a reasonable chance of doing so.  A lot of mystery writers (I’m looking at you, Agatha Christie) fail the final test there by “cheating”, that is, they withhold clues that are essential to solving the mystery, and so the experienced reader quickly becomes disengaged from the tension the author tries to generate.

Wrongness

Wrongness is the sense that things are not as they should be; this quite often underlies the building of tension, and thus suspense.  You can however have one without the other, so it deserves its own explanation.

Lovecraft was especially gifted at conveying a sense of wrongness; his protagonists often quite literally went insane as a result of learning too much about the eldritch truths hidden from mankind as a whole.  Often there was no “final reveal”; the reader doesn’t usually have any direct evidence of the underlying problems, but only sees the symptoms.  Wrongness can be generated by something as simple as a bloodstain or torn piece of clothing, a strange sound, an odd smell, or even a premonition.  Like suspense, wrongness is based on small individual clues that lead the reader/viewer/player to the conclusion that Things Are Not As They Should Be.

Wrongness is quite easy to generate in all forms of media, since it merely relies on phenomena that are out of context, and thus are jarring to the percipient.  Video games can convey this readily, from the bizarre reddish skies of Angmar in LotRO to the graffiti left behind by the Joker in Batman: Arkham Asylum.  Some movies and games take this too far, such that the player becomes inured to the weirdness (e.g. American McGee’s Alice… which is initially creepy but then just seems silly after a while).  When gore is everywhere, we become desensitized.  A light touch is often best here; less is more.

Startlement

Startlement is generally a cheap trick, founded on the sudden appearance of a threat (or something initially confused for a threat), or simply a loud noise.  Cheesy movies and TV shows rely overmuch on this approach to horror, and I’d argue that what’s generated isn’t true horror at all, but merely surprise.  Startlement is relatively rare without an initial buildup of tension; if the viewer/player isn’t already tense, then the sudden appearance or loud noise is just a strong stimulus and won’t cause the viewer/player to jump.

Startlement is quite uncommon in books, partly because it generally relies on the speed of the stimulus, and partly because it relies on visual or auditory stimuli.  It’s not very startling to read “and then there was a sudden CRASH! and a dark figure lurched out from behind the swaying door, bloody knife in hand”.  It’s a lot more alarming to see and hear that than it is to read it.

Startlement is quite common in both film/TV and in games.  Good examples of the latter include almost every first-person shooter (at some point) and as far as I know, every single horror-themed game of any sort.

Just as in wrongness, less is more with startlement.  If things jump out at us all the time in video games, we come to expect it… unless there’s a very high level of underlying tension this results in the startling phenomena becoming ordinary.  The ordinary isn’t frightening.  Again, less is more; it’s fine to startle players but do it sparingly for greater effect.

So now what?

OK, so there are three different building blocks that content creators can use to generate horror.  What underlies them and how do we use them?

My belief is that the underlying issue for all three building blocks above is control.  All creatures seek to understand and thus predict their environment, so they can maximize their own survival and success.  When we see things out of place, when we start to think there’s something important that we can’t perceive or understand, and when things surprise us, we view these things as threatening to our wellbeing.  The more immersed we are in the media we consume, the more readily we’ll translate this loss of control to fear.

What this DOESN’T mean is that the best route to scaring players is to overtly take control away from them by having their characters do things the players don’t want.  This generally results in a loss of immersion and by extension a loss of interest.  I’ve seen this in a lot of cutscenes, and I can’t think of a single time when it pleased me as a player.

Instead, horror is perhaps best generated by hinting at, rather than showing what’s wrong.  Allow the clues to build up over time, and make sure the player feels like they’re given a fair shot at understanding the underlying problem.  Note: the player only needs to have the perception that they have a fair chance; they don’t actually need to have a fair chance.  The more powerful a player feels, the harder it is to make them feel threatened; this can be overcome by having more powerful foes, but that’s a crude approach that usually fails in the long run, since most games allow player characters to grow more powerful over time.  A better way to overcome the player’s feeling of power and control is by lateral thinking; don’t give them problems with easy and obvious solutions, but rather suggest that something truly horrible is probably out there right now… and who knows what would be needed to stop it?

We return here to Lovecraft’s underlying argument: true horror rests on the principle that we, the viewer/reader/player don’t know what’s going on.  Fear of the unknown is much more powerful than fear of the known, especially in video games, where “the known” might surprise or even kill us, but will rarely if ever frighten us.

Now, fear of the known does of course exist, but it requires a very high level of immersion (e.g. real life).  Fear of the known is very, very simple: it requires a direct threat to one’s wellbeing or to the wellbeing of something very important to us.  We fear suffering, death, and loss – all of which are “known” quantities.  Since death in video games is usually not very important to us as players, and since most video games don’t create a high level of immersion, fear of death simply doesn’t work well most of the time.  Suffering and loss in video games is a very tricky problem, and one I’ll address at length in part 2 of this series.  Every time we enter into combat in a video game we’re directly facing these fears, and it’s extremely rare for a player to experience actual horror when confronting the known.  The unknown has far greater potential than the known in video games to create real fear in the player.

Mission: Inevitable

Psychochild posted an interesting article about what’s missing in our games these days, and it got me to thinking.

On a very basic level, it’s not possible to fail in the vast majority of content we’re consuming, in the vast majority of games.  Once having accepted a quest, you can feel confident that sooner or later you will complete that quest, unless of course it’s bugged.  The content might be too challenging for you right now, and so occasionally you might need to gain a level or two, or improve your gear a bit, but even this is pretty rare in my experience.

What happens if we don’t succeed?  Well, nothing.  Not succeeding immediately is always possible, though frankly it’s pretty uncommon for me not to succeed the first time I approach PvE content in any game I play.  I don’t intend this to be a paean to my l337 gaming skills, but rather a simple acknowledgement that most PvE games aren’t at their core all that terribly difficult; they’re designed to be accessible to a wide range of players, and so they are.

What we’re missing though is the possibility of actually failing.  If we don’t manage to complete a quest, or to kill a boss, we gird our loins and go back and try again.  Sometimes we might have to try over and over, but eventually the boss falls, the quest is completed, and we return to the immobile NPC who patiently waits for us, serenely unconcerned with how long it’s taken us or how many times we didn’t succeed.  What does not happen though is actual failure… whereby we attempt to do something, and don’t succeed, and that’s it.  Move on and try something else, pal, because you flubbed this.

The reason failure isn’t possible is fairly obvious; it’s a limitation of finite static content.  Given there are only so many quests in game, if players are allowed to fail, there arises the very real possibility that they will run out of content and have no way to proceed except by grinding mobs, which isn’t always even an option.  There are only a set number of instances to try, and so the designers very reasonably won’t lock us out of any of those instances just because we completely screwed up; instead, we can just throw bodies at problems until we swarm them under in the classic zerg maneuver.

This, to me, is a powerful argument in favor of… ok, you knew this was coming… procedurally generated content.  ”Yeah, yeah, thanks foolsage,” you reply, “we already know you like PGC as a concept; you go on about it at the slightest provocation.”  But wait, I say… don’t you see?  If there were NOT a finite number of quests to undertake, then there’s no reason why we couldn’t be allowed to outright fail at them.  If there were NOT a finite number of instances to challenge us, then we could reasonably be excluded from trying again and again and again until we eventually whittle down the bosses or just get lucky.

What would this add to games, really?  I contend that the possibility of failure adds a lot of excitement and unpredictability; we no longer know how the story will end.  Maybe we’ll rescue the farmer’s daughter from the evil cult, and maybe we’ll fail and they’ll sacrifice her.  Maybe some other hero will have to defeat the Cyclops Lord, because we just weren’t able to.  Wouldn’t this make our actual victories far sweeter?  Wouldn’t this provide a sense of adventure that’s all-too-lacking in modern MMOs?

There are few good options for making us invest emotionally in our success.  Oldschool games like EQ approached this by having a punitive and draconian death penalty.  Dying in EQ was painful… it could set you back hours or even days of hard work.  You could lose levels.  You had to seek out your corpse and recover your gear, which could be very time-consuming and sometimes was simply impossible.  That’s certainly one approach that provides a fear of failure, but most players didn’t find that approach very fun, and so modern games have steered sharply away from such measures.  At the same time though, without anything in place to make us care about failing, games lose a lot of their excitement, and consequently it’s hard to feel like you’re having a real adventure in modern games.

It seems to me that procedurally generated content solves this problem nicely, allowing players to fail without punishing them unduly for it.  This would cause us to care about outcomes, to pay close attention, but at the same time, allows for a more gentle and modern approach to failure.  If you didn’t save the farmer’s daughter, well, it sucks for the farmer, but you can always go find something else to attempt.  Maybe you’ll win next time.

All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given us

I’ve not logged into LotRO in a month or so, and I’m seriously considering unsubscribing.  That’s a sad truth and one with several core causes.

Before explaining why though, I must repeat that I feel LotRO is one of the finest, if not the very finest, PvE experiences available.  The world is lovely, the epic quests very well written and immersive, and the crafting is the best I’ve encountered in an MMO.  It’s a fine, fine game, and one I’ve enjoyed a great deal.  I’m excited about a lot of the concepts coming in the Siege of Mirkwood, and yet on the cusp of this new content I’m considering leaving.  What then troubles me so much?

Really, I have two core complaints, one of which is far greater than the other.  The lesser complaint is about how legendary items work, and the greater complaint is about content gating.  I’ll approach each in turn.

The fundamental idea behind legendary items seems excellent – characters gain items that can grow with them over time, which makes those items more a “part” of the character.  Frodo didn’t toss away Sting and upgrade to a better dagger, and Gandalf didn’t replace Glamdring with a slightly sharper and shinier sword… those items were extraordinary and remained with the owners.  The reality of how Turbine has implemented legendary items flies in the face of this basic concept though.  While the items do grow and change over time, they’re also EXTREMELY disposable.  My lvl 60 Champion went through probably hundreds of weapons to get the ones he now uses, breaking down one failure after another until he got the traits he sought.  On a basic level, this makes no sense to me, and it certainly doesn’t fit the lore.  Did Aragorn destroy weapon after weapon, keeping the choice relics to reforge them into Anduril?

The legendary item system is being revamped with the Mirkwood expansion, but the fundamental concept remains; it’s a timesink and nothing more.  The designers decided that players should seek to obtain myriads of weapons, then break them down into components to use in upgrading yet other weapons.  The legendary items drop at a high rate of frequency, meaning they don’t truly feel all that legendary… and considering how we treat them, obviously they aren’t especially notable in-character either.  I can’t sustain any level of immersion here, and don’t really like playing the lottery again and again and again and again until I finally get a weapon that fits my needs… knowing as I do that I’ll just replace it with a new weapon once the expansion hits.

More gravely troubling though is the content gating system introduced with the Moria expansion.  I played the original LotRO, Shadows of Angmar (SoA), into the ground.  I had 4 level 50 characters and 3 more characters lvl 35-49.  That’s out of seven classes available mind you, with a level cap of 50.  One of the very best things about LotRO was how casual-accessible it was.  Even when I wasn’t playing it casually, it wasn’t because I had no choice.  Items could be obtained from crafting, random drops, quests, PvP, and bosses, and by and large each route brought one to the same place.  I felt I had a lot of freedom to play the way I wanted to, and I explored each of those paths happily in my own time and in my own manner.

At its core, SoA was completely open and lacked any sort of gear gating.  If you were high enough level to visit a dungeon, you could go there, and providing you had enough skill, you could defeat the challenges.  There were a handful of dungeons that offered some of the best gear in game, true, but you didn’t NEED to visit those dungeons if you didn’t want to.  You could go to Urugarth and never set foot in Carn Dum.  You could visit Barad Guluran without having first visited Sarnur and Haudh Iarchith.  You could even go to the most difficult two instances in game, Helegrod and the Rift, without ever having been into a single other instance in game, and again, you could do fine there provided you played your class well.

With the Moria expansion though this changed fundamentally, and for the worse.  Now there’s a gear-gating system, whereby one must gather enough Radiance (gained only by killing select bosses in select instances) to be able to fight yet other select bosses in select instances.  It’s no longer possible to pursue one’s own path in game and still experience all the content; raiding is now absolutely required in order to experience the top end instances.

What’s the trouble there, really?  I mean, if you want to go to the most difficult raids, you have to do the easier raids first, right?  Well, the problem is twofold.  On a basic level, I enjoyed the freedom of being able to craft endgame gear, or PvP for it, or seek random world drops, or quest, or kill bosses.  I enjoyed all of those methods and sought them all out whenever the fancy struck me.  Some days I wanted to raid, so I raided.  Some days I wanted to craft, so I crafted.  Some days I wanted to PvP, so I PvPed.  All of these activities had the potential to reward me with items of roughly equivalent value, and so each activity was equal in its own way.  This is by no means true any longer.  Now if I want to fight the Watcher in the Water, I have to have defeated a certain number of bosses in other instances, and moreso must have done so often enough to have obtained the items they drop.

This leads me to my second concern with content gating: I like playing multiple characters.  I generally have a “main char” but I always have several alts, and in a game as fine as LotRO, I loved bringing all my alts to high levels.  I’d intended, when I started playing again, to get all my characters to lvl 60, including my two new ones.  I cannot however stomach the thought of grinding all the same instances over and over again with one alt after another in order to obtain for each the gear I need to move onto the next tier of instances.  I want to be able to work in my own way and on my own time, equip my characters with gear that’s good enough, bring them to appropriate levels, and experience all the challenges in the game.  I don’t however want to be pigeonholed into only having one possible path… and then repeating this exact path for every character.  The thought fills me with Dread… or is that Gloom?  Well, it’s unpleasant anyhow.

This is exacerbated by the shift in my social circles in game.  I belong to a kinship that was quite casual but is growing considerably less so.  I also play (well, played until recently) with a group of people who aren’t in my kin, but belonged to a variety of different kinships.  They were all good people, fun to play with and very skilled.  Some I’d known from before I returned, and some I met more recently, but all are good players and all want to get good endgame equipment.  This circle of friends formed a new kinship with a hardcore focus, and at the same time my own kinship turned hardcore.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a hardcore player.  I however am getting back into dating after my divorce, and I don’t want to commit a ton of my time in advance to being available for raids.  There’s nothing wrong with those who do want to do so, but that’s not really what I want at this point in my life.  I want to be able to play casually, without commitment, to log on and off when I want to, to not show up for several days at a time or to play for hours on end, as my schedule permits and my whims dictate.  Both my kinship and my circle of friends though have instituted a DKP system, which is frankly anathema to the casual gamer.

The problem is essentially this: a DKP system rewards those who play hardcore, those who schedule raids in advance and especially those who make themselves available on preset days regularly (e.g. Monday and Friday evenings my kin has preset raids to kill the giant Turtle).  DKP systems are not really compatible with the way I want to play these days.  I still want to raid, but given the LotRO raids are largely 6-man affairs, I just want to join up with friends who are raiding and hit dungeons for an hour or two, when it’s convenient for me.  That’s not a difficult proposition since the group size is so small and the instances so short; there’s absolutely no reason casual raiding can’t work in LotRO, and I speak from considerable experience here.  This was never a problem with SoA and with my old kinship, wherein I used to raid a LOT but largely on the spur of the moment… but now it’s very much a problem.  My friends are all shifting to a more hardcore approach, and are by extension less casual-friendly, and it’s all directly caused by gear gating.  I correspondingly don’t honestly think this is the game for me anymore, which is saddening.

Yes, I could leave my kinship and join another more casual one.  It’s disheartening though to think of all the friends I enjoy playing with, but not to join them anymore on their raids.  Joining them on their raids is still an option of course, but I’d do so knowing I wouldn’t be eligible for rewards for X amount of time until I had enough DKP stored up, which is frustrating.  It’s fair, surely, but then so is having everyone roll for items.  It’s just a matter of taste and preference, and the direction my friends have taken isn’t one I wish to take.  Given the context of my concerns with the two basic game concepts that trouble me so, I haven’t found myself wanting to play.

… and we’ll keep on fighting, till the end…

Well, I’m back from my business trip to Malaysia, and have had some more time to play Champions Online.  I’ll sort my thoughts into categories today, since otherwise I don’t think they’ll flow all that well.

Of Evil Twins

The Nemesis system in Champions Online is pretty well implemented by and large.  There are however a few areas where it can be improved.  At level 25, I’m told one gets a piece of mail indicating one should head to the police station.  I didn’t receive this mail, but had read about the system, so headed there myself.  The contact there directed me to log into the crime database and tell them about a criminal I’ve recently heard about… in other words, I was to create my Nemesis.

Character creation was similar to that I underwent to create my heroes, at least on the cosmetic side.  Sadly, there aren’t many options for henchmen, either cosmetic or mechanical, meaning your Nemesis’ henchmen won’t be all that unique.  I’d really like to see this changed on both counts, giving us options to fully design their look and also to have more input into their powers.  I understand that players shouldn’t have full control over their nemesis’ powers or those of their henchmen, since we’d end up with Nemeses that were far too powerful or far too weak.  Still, more control here would be greatly desirable.

Having said that, once the Nemesis is designed, the missions I’ve seen are great fun.  My character, Faefire, has a romantic rival named Frostmourne, who’s gradually turned into a lifetime foe.  Her grand entrance was suitably impressive, and I appreciated how she dovetailed into the plot that was already going.  The ongoing presence of my Nemesis has spiced up a lot of missions thus far; I don’t want to spoil the quests here so will just say that a) your Nemesis’ minions will appear from time to time and hassle you while you’re doing other things, and b) if you happen to move around a lot, very fast, it’s easily possible to bail as the Nemesis minions spawn, meaning they instantly despawn.  Several times now I’ve killed something, bailed rapidly (as is my wont), then as I flew away, saw some Nemesis minions running towards where I just was… as I tried to return to fight them (cause, hey, it’s my Nemesis!) I wasn’t fast enough, and they despawned into oblivion.  ”Ha ha”, I cried, “witness the awe-inspiring majesty of my disintegration power!”  But then I stopped, cause that’s really more a supervillain sorta thing.  Heroes aren’t supposed to disintegrate people, it seems… antiheroes can, but they’re a wholly different issue.

Hero Games

I’ve played a fair number of Hero Games matches thus far (maybe 55 or so games) and by and large it’s a lot of fun.  The PvP comes in two flavours, to this point anyhow: team based and free-for-all.  The team based matches are 5v5, and are terribly, horribly susceptible to abuse from pre-formed teams, who use actual *teamwork* to fight opponents, even exploiting by focussing fire.  I know, can you believe it?

OK, all right, clearly there’s nothing wrong with that, in fact I applaud it.  What little teamwork I’ve seen has definitely made a huge difference in game outcome, as it should – one cannot argue that it isn’t all about the skill.

Well, skill, and taser arrows, and teleport, of course.  Cause nothing says “I deeply respect you as a player and want to show my appreciation for your time and effort” like chain-holding a player for 15+ seconds.  Nothing, that is, except for teleporting away, untouchable and unhurtable, whenever disaster looms.  I can honestly say that my character has been defeated around 35 times in all, both PvE and PvP combined.  And easily 20+ of those deaths have been at the hands of players abusing taser arrow.  I don’t use teleport, nor taser arrow, so have to rely on my non-flavour-of-the-month build.

How well does that work?  Heh.  My superhero is HEROIC, all caps most assuredly warranted.  Faefire can wade into a group of 5+ enemies at 3 levels above her and laugh at them while burning them to a collective crisp.  PvE deaths are incredibly rare for me (I think I’ve had about 4 or 5 now, and every single one came from me being cocky and pushing past common sense – e.g. “I wonder if I can solo those 5 villains at once?  They’re close enough for an AE…”).  I’ll talk more about builds in another post, but suffice to say that there seem to be a large number of very viable builds in Champions Online – and just a couple of powers that are unbalanced.  Rather than saying those powers are “necessary” though, what I think a player really needs is skill, plain and simple.  Taking advantage of line of sight, proper blocking, focussing fire, breaking the enemy’s morale… it’s a rare and pleasant experience to find a game wherein the PvP isn’t just a numbers fest, essentially controlled by whomever has the best gear.  In CO, gear makes a pretty small contribution overall to one’s PvP outcomes, and I must say I like that.

We are the Champions, my friends…

I know.  I know.  I said I wouldn’t buy Champions Online until a few months after launch, but I broke down and bought it anyhow.

So… initial thoughts abound.

First, there’s character creation.  I was as impressed with this as I expected to be… Cryptic has really taken the framework for CoH and expanded it severalfold.  I was a little surprised that some seemingly obvious options weren’t available, but then I remembered… more costume pieces can be unlocked in game and through RMT.  What we have to work with initially is pretty staggering.  I’ve made two characters already and have concepts for a handful of others, based solely on various costume pieces that made me think, “Hrm, I could design an interesting character around that”.  That, my friends, is always a good sign.

Next, we enter the game proper.  I think Spinks has caught some glaring omissions here, most notably customized NPCs and a character origin sequence.  Both are absolutely central to the genre and their continued absence is frankly surprising.  Why can’t we create sidekicks, mentors, love interests, and other NPCs who provide our character with context for adventuring?  Why can’t we use dropdown menus or radio button lists to select the flaws each NPC has, which will inevitably lead them to danger?  I mean, Lois Lane was compulsively curious and fearless, and the trouble those two qualities put her in gave Supes fodder for hundreds of quests.

Then there’s the character origin sequence (Spinks refers to it as “gearing up” but it’s really more generic than that – e.g. the Hulk has no gear of note, nor has Superman).  I’ll grant that it’s not feasible to have a protracted cutscene for every possible superhero origin, but even something like a Mad Libs-style minute-long overview would help put us in the shoes of our heroes and be a great way to start off the tutorial.  Select the nature of your powers, select how you attained them, select what you were doing at the time, etc.  This could scroll or be otherwise displayed on screen next to a picture or your hero.  This should come immediately before the tutorial, and help give us as players a better grounding in who our hero is, in a genre-conventional way.

One of the first things I noticed when I started playing was that the interface is a bit different from what I’m used to, and also lacked much explicit explanation, and consequently I had numerous questions that I’ve only slowly answered through trial and error and some degree of inductive reasoning.  It would definitely be helpful to e.g. tell the player that the basic energy-building attack need only be turned on and left on… for a while I was hitting the key really quickly to attack, and consequently (as I learned) I was only turning the power on and off and on and off ad nauseum.  I also didn’t realize that you couldn’t buy powers until out of the tutorial, and spent some frustrating time attempting to figure out how to buy powers.  Now I know that one must travel to a Powerhouse to purchase the various powers and talents that make a hero super.

I quite like the basic flow of combat, which is very fast and engaging.  The player turns on the energy-building quick attack and generates enough energy to hit the energy-expending powers, or which the character initially has one.  Both of my character have felt very powerful, and had no trouble fighting several henchman-class mobs at once.

The PvP minigame is very reminiscent of a WAR scenario, by obvious intent.  At any point a character can queue up for PvP, and upon queuing I’ve never waited more than 30 seconds or so before entering the minigame.  Basically, it’s a 5 vs 5 free-for-all, where the first team to get to 15 kills wins.  Brackets are apparently set up for lvls 1-10, 11-20, etc, and characters entering are automatically upleveled to the appropriate cap level, e.g. my lvl 8 hero was set to lvl 10 for the duration of the PvP minigames.  The action tends to be pretty fast and furious, with the obvious caveat that how things work will vary wildly from one team to the next.  I’ve been in games where we just slaughtered the other side, and games where my team ran all over the place with no coordination at all, and we got slaughtered.  I suspect that I’ve also had teammates remain in the entry area, instead of entering the PvP battleground itself.  Presumably these people are of the same ilk as those who logged into WoW and WAR battlegrounds/scenarios then went AFK.

Travel powers seem pretty fun, as they were in CoH.  I’ve only experimented with Flight to this point, but was duly satisfied there.  I appreciate that the first travel power comes at lvl 5, meaning pretty much anyone who completed the tutorial will qualify.  Both of my characters were lvl 7 or so by the time they finished the tutorial, helped in no small part by the Open Mission they each completed several times.

Open Missions are the CO equivalent of WAR’s Public Quests.  Basically, the concept was ripped off in its entirety, with the same basic structure and concepts.  In brief, upon entering the area for a Publ… erm, an Open Mission (OM), a player sees the goals for the current phase of the OM.  For the tutorial OM, there are 3 phases: 1) defeat 30 Qulaar, 2) grab 10 crates, and 3) defend the cannon for 2 minutes.  You can enter at any phase, and continue from that point.  Generally there are multiple other characters working on the OM so you just show up and carry on from whatever point they’ve gotten things to.  This is a great concept and one I always thought had a lot of promise in WAR… the biggest problem there though was that few PQs could be soloed, and so completion depended on having other players around.  Given CO’s shard-free design though, it’s easy enough to find a zone with lots of people in it if you feel like doing an OM.  I will note that the rewards given at the end seem to have two problems from what little I’ve seen thus far.  First, it’s difficult for a newbie player to know where the reward equipment is found.  This could be better indicated visually so that people can find it from a distance, which is especially valuable when the OM areas are larger, e.g. Canada.  Second, it seems that DPS is king for reward structures in CO, as it was in WAR, which leaves tanks and healers running far behind.  This can be ameliorated to some extent by the build system.

So what is this “build system”?  In short, it allows any character to define several different gameplay approaches and switch between them based on the situation.  Each character has an offensive build, a defensive build, and a versatile build.  Defensive slotted powers like Personal Force Field or Regeneration can only be slotted in the defensive and versatile builds, while some offensive powers can apparently only be slotted in the offensive build (I’ve not yet seen any such that I’m aware of though).  So e.g. a character might be a perfectly viable tank using one build, able to soak a fair amount of damage, and by switching builds, might be less invulnerable but more able to dish out rapid damage.  This is an excellent idea and one I hope to see developed further.

The graphics are quite stylized, not in the same art style but in a manner reminiscent of WoW.  CO looks very much like it’s ripped from the pages of a comic book, and I think the art direction and execution is excellent.  Some people have complained about the heavy black lines that outline characters, but I quite like them, so I didn’t turn that or any other feature off.

As for the game client, it’s run very smoothly indeed on my new system.  I wasn’t checking FPS (in part because I didn’t know the command to do so, which is apparently /showfps 1 to turn it on, and /showfps 0 to turn it off), but I didn’t notice any real issues.  I did experience a fair amount of rubberbanding, which is due to server-side lag (i.e. the server thinks my character is in a different position than my computer thinks, so I’m bounced backwards).  As launch problems go, this is fairly minor and hardly unusual.

I’d say this launch has gone very well by and large, from what I’ve seen.  More news to come as I get to spend more time in game.  I’ll be heading to Malaysia tomorrow night so it’ll likely be a week or so before I can spend much more time playing, but I am looking forward to it.

Disney plagiarizes… itself?

LotRO Fast Travel Options

Lord of the Rings Online has a huge, immersive world, and the designers have chosen to limit travel options there in keeping with the lore, and to increase the players’ perception of the world’s size.  I agree with this concept in theory, but in practice I often find that I really want to be able to get places faster.  Consequently I pay a lot of attention to the various travel options in-game.  The zones of Forochel and Eregion treat travel rather differently from the zones that came before, and I’ll focus largely on these two zones here.

First, how did fast travel work before these zones were introduced?  Basically, there were five options for fast travel.  First, all the lowbie zones can be accessed by any character at any time for the low, low price of 1 silver piece (or 80 copper with the new discount for longtime players) by visiting an NPC stable; said stables offer normal travel to close locations and fast travel to all newbie hubs.  This is a spectacular idea and one I warmly welcomed when it was implemented long ago (I think it was in closed beta, might have been shortly after launch though).  This means e.g. a player in Bree can spend 1s and travel very quickly to Michel Delving in the Shire, which in practice means lowbies can easily and cheaply join up and adventure in any of the lowbie zones.  Second, the larger mid-to-high level quest hubs (e.g. Esteldin, Rivendell) have fast travel options that are gated by level – e.g. any character lvl  40+ can fast travel between a stable in South Bree and a stable in Rivendell.  Third, all races have deeds available from lvl 29 onwards that allow characters to jump to their racial home once per hour (Dwarves to Thorin’s Halls, Hobbits to Michel Delving, Men to Bree, Elves to Rivendell).  Fourth, all characters have a map they can use to jump to their bind-spot once per hour; pretty much every quest hub in game offers a milestone one can bind to, so characters can quickly travel to more or less any place they’ve been before.  Fifth and finally, home-owners and members of kinships with kin halls can jump to their homes or kin halls once per hour as well.

While these options are nice, more options are desirable, and with the advent of Forochel, Turbine experimented a bit with a new process.  Subsequently, they decided they didn’t like this idea and scrapped it in favor of a new one, which is found in Eregion (and Moria as well).  I’ve not spent enough time in Lothlorien to be sure what fast travel options exist there so I’ll leave that out of this discussion.

When visiting Forochel, one is quickly struck by two things: first, the zone is massive, and it takes a loooong time to run around, or even to ride from one quest hub to another using the stable horses (NPC travel options).  Second, the zone is blindingly white and full of snow and fog, which increases the player’s perception that travel takes a long time.  Objectively, it’s not really larger than several other zones, but it feels like it is because the player’s view of distant objects is obscured.  Turbine chose to make the fast travel options in Forochel all bound to reputation – so initially, characters have no fast travel to, from, or within Forochel, and options open up the more reputation a character gains with the Lossoth of Forochel, and with the other factions surrounding them.  That is to say, if you want to travel within Forochel, you’d better befriend the Lossoth.  If you want to travel to Forochel from somewhere else, or from Forochel to somewhere else, then you’d better befriend the people in that said somewhere else.  So e.g. to travel between Forochel and Bree-land requires befriending the Men of Bree; travel to and from Rivendell requires befriending the Elves of Rivendell, etc.

How well does this system work?  In practice, all the characters I took to Forochel (which is incidentally a lvl 42-50 zone) failed to significantly benefit from the fast travel options.  By the time they had enough reputation with the Lossoth to gain fast travel there, they didn’t need it; in the process of gaining that reputation they’d completed all the quests already, or all I cared to do.  Few of my characters had enough reputation with surrounding factions to benefit from the fast travel to and from Forochel, either, and it didn’t generally seem worth my time to grind rep for that purpose.  There is one exception here: completing all the quests at the first two quest hubs in Forochel yields Acquaintance standing, which in turn unlocks fast travel between Ost Forod in Evendim and the second quest hub in Forochel, which is smack in the middle of Forochel’s icy wastes.  That’s convenient if one continues to quest there.  By and large though the fast travel concept in Forochel didn’t work all that well for providing greater convenience to players – it took a lot of time and work to unlock the options and the fast travel rewards came too late.

By contrast, in Eregion, fast travel is unlocked by deeds, which are completed by finishing quests in the zone.  After completing the first 10 quests in Eregion, one unlocks fast travel to the first Eregion quest hub; one can then travel to Gwingris from any connecting stable, be that in Rivendell or one of the other Eregion hubs.  This option becomes available before one’s completed all the quests at the first hub, which means it remains useful in practical terms for the player.  Likewise, completing more quests in Eregion completes successive deeds, unlocking fast travel to the 3 other quest hubs there.  As one quests and spends time there, fast travel options open up organically over time, providing a natural progression that’s rewarding and useful.  By the time one’s completed most of the quests in Eregion, one can fast travel to all 4 quest hubs, or between those hubs and Rivendell.

This concept worked well, and is mirrored in Moria.  Moria is divided into the Central Halls, Upper Halls, and Lower Halls; completing quests in each of these areas unlocks fast travel to various quest hubs in these areas.  This requires a greater time investment than Eregion did, but then there are a lot more quests in Moria than in Eregion.  Moria’s fast travel options require a bit more deliberate effort on the part of the player than Eregion’s do, which I regard as a bit unfortunate; overall, Eregion’s fast travel design is the most enjoyable for me in game.

There’s another type of fast travel that doesn’t involve stables, which is available to certain classes.  Hunters can transport themselves and fellowship members to various places around the world, and Wardens can transport themselves only.  Both Captains and Guardians have abilities related to summoning fellowship members to each other’s locations, but that doesn’t really pertain to the type of travel being discussed here.  I’ll focus here on the Hunter since that’s the only class that can transport both the character and fellowship members from one place to another.

Hunters gain the ability to jump to various locations based on 4 different approaches: trainers, quests, reputation, and deeds.  Trainers will sell Hunters the ability to port to the more common places – that’s simple enough, and becomes available to all Hunters at various levels based on the locations in question.  Some locations, like Tinnudir in Evendim, require completion of a special local quest in order to unlock the Hunter’s port.  Both Forochel and Moria require a Hunter to gain a low amount of reputation with local factions (Acquaintance in both cases) before the Hunter is allowed to buy the skill to port there.  Eregion is however the only zone that has the Hunter port unlocked by completing a deed.  In this case, a Hunter must explore all the major ruins and major animal dens of the zone to complete two local deeds; completion of both deeds unlocks the ability to port to Eregion’s third quest hub, Echad Dunann, which lies at the western entrance of Moria.

Of the options listed above, the one I most enjoyed was Eregion’s.  It felt natural and fitting for a Hunter to simply explore the area and learn it well enough to be able to travel safely and quickly there.  This also encourages exploration, obviously, since one must travel all over the zone to complete the deeds.  One could, in theory, unlock the ability to fast travel to Suri-kyla in Forochel or to Moria’s 21st Hall without ever having been to those places (you can gain enough rep to be Acquaintance pretty easily in both zones, and a friend could buy the skill scrolls for the travel powers – you need only be Acquaintance to use the scroll and learn the skill, not to buy the scroll in the first place).  That’s frankly a little silly.