A Change of Pace

This week LoTRO released Mordor! Along with that came some character model updates, exciting stuff. Rift released their new endgame patch and has summer activities going on. GW2 has an expansion heading out this summer, with mounts! EQ2 has a summer quest chain out now, if you're a subscriber. Where to start!

I guess I'll start with my thoughts on Rift. Rift not only released the Celestial Storm patch, Summerfest hit the servers a day later. Summerfest took up most of my time the first few days then I moved onto working through some of the questing to unlock daily quests. I was ecstatic about this patch but quickly I just lost interest. And this pains me to say, I just quit logging in besides to collect minion stuff. Mainly because I quickly tired of everything being based on fast movements, it just burnt me out. Dodge this, spam that, click this, faster, faster. In the end I had a lot of wrist pain and just told myself I have better things to spend my time on. Sometimes I don't know who the intended audience is for these games.

GW2 is getting mounts and I play the game here and there, not anything exciting enough to write about on a regular basis. I am not sure how the whole mount deal will be, will they be a grind to unlock? They seem like a page out of EQ2, gliding and leaping.  It looks like a nice expansion, too bad no housing, but maybe in the future. It is a really fun game to hop in and out of easily so I will surely get this xpac. It will be nice to leave HoT for awhile, so tired of the jungle. Looking forward to this a lot.

I was excited to hear about the Days of Summer event in EQ2. Then I saw you needed a subscription, and you have to do it on a level 100, no big deal there I guess. I didn't want to sub for this as I would do the quest and just log out. I'm trying to stick with only ONE sub currently, so I guess I am going to pass on this one because I really can't be bothered to sub. It is a really cool event though. I also checked in on the PQ for Tinkerfest, but logging in late night seemed to be pointless, nobody was there. Again, not feeling the EQ2 vibe lately but good to see them churning out some fun stuff.

The old me.

Last but not least, LoTRO. I am not high enough to head into Mordor. I could use a boost with the xpac, and I may still in the future, when I do pick it up. For now I just want to relax and play though things. I came back about a week ago, puttering around with a new character just because I needed a relaxing game with lots of content to play though. The 1-20 journey is really great here so I made a new Lore-master and just had so much fun. I had such a nice time that I ended up subbing. While I may end up not even liking endgame, I have not ever played up very high in LoTRO so I may as well just keep climbing though the levels, enjoying the zones and then I can find out when I get there. The game play and questing are just so relaxing, it is exactly what I needed.

The new me.

Something that has always turned me off about LoTRO were the models and run animations. This time going in to play I figured I could ignore them as new ones were coming soon. The new models are lovely! While they are not all that different, they look so, so, so much better. They have a natural look instead of a cartoon look,  my characters lips are not puckering up all the time which is a nice change. They fit in the world well I'd say. And now my character no longer runs like a derp! That was the first thing I noticed and even said to Dire, lol. She has a nice run animation, such a huge difference that run animation makes. I am so happy with the changes. I do wish they'd add in some new hairstyles, but they did a good job keeping the styles as close as they could to the old, some still use the old textures, which I think isn't intended. Hopefully that gets polished up in the future. Overall I am really happy to be back. While I wanted to stick with DDO, I may pick that back up later, for now I think I'll try and focus on this to see if it is a good fit for the long run. Some shots of some of the new looks below.