ESO: “Where am I and What am I Doing?”
The other day, I was undertaking a daily mission for the Undaunted in The Elder Scrolls Online. I do these to level my companion’s associated skills line. The mission required me to go to a particular delve, set some soul traps and defeat the boss. Nothing unusual there, so off I went. Whenever I go into a delve in ESO, I usually do the quest associated with it. It provides a story and some additional experience points. Thus I arrived in the vicinity of the delve in question and found a note not far away. I read it and accepted the quest assuming it to be the one associated with the delve. To cut a long and confusing story short, it turns out it wasn’t. I discovered this about 20 minutes later when I found myself running around, confused with three separate lots of quest markers on my in-game map. Not for the first time I found myself pondering “where am I and what am I doing”.
LOTRO: The Further Adventures of Bilbo Baggins
I was hoping that 2021 would be a good year for the MMORPG, The Lord of the Rings Online. New owners, along with hints at a revised community relations policy and a recent roadmap for future content have all been positively received by the game’s stoic community. Furthermore, the recent demise of the LOTR based MMO by Amazon Game Studios has eliminated any immediate competition. Sadly, two things have occurred recently indicating that developer’s Standing Stone Games are still tone deaf to the player feedback and lacking in any tangible long term vision for the game. The first was a statement made by Executive Producer, Rob “Severlin” Ciccolini, regarding Legendary Items in the game and the subject of grind. The second was the new “Further Adventures” quest arcs, as described in February’s Executive Producer’s Letter, which uses the “missions” system that was added to the game in Update 28.