With the MMO talk I also poked my head at FF14 some but it looks like I need to buy the game and an expansion and pay a monthly fee?
Also one of the classes that I thought seemed cool you can’t start the game as?
I’m a bit confused how to approach
as someone who has heard it sales pitched as “a good single player story to play through”
If you've ever bought the game, you need to pay the monthly fee, but if you're on the trial account you can play until like level 60 for free.
You may have gotten a free month subscription from a random bundle, which they count as buying the game and move you off the free trial.
That happened to me, but since I'd barely played then, I was able to just start up a new trial account with another email address.
Then for the classes, a bunch of them start off called one thing before changing their name at level 30, like rangers turn into bards and lancers become dragoons. And some of them don't unlock until levels 50 and 60, and some require actually buying the game.
I'm sure I'll get the full game at some point, but the trial account has been plenty for me for the last few months.
I acknowledge that some people don't enjoy the original launch part of the main story of FF14, for what it's worth I did enjoy it though. It's not the best but it was much better than I was expecting for an MMO.
I think I was very much in the right state of mind to enjoy something like that when I happened to try it though, if I had approached it at a different time and without the promise of tons more content following it that was only an improvement, I might have bounced off it very hard, but as it was I really enjoyed the stroll through the old content, stopping to smell the roses as much as possible.
If you've ever bought the game, you need to pay the monthly fee, but if you're on the trial account you can play until like level 60 for free.
Specifically you can play through all the content in the base game and first expansion for free, and it caps you at level 60, which was the cap for the first expansion. No time limit or anything.
The story in ARR is good but it's diluted by the game design of the time where you have 3 quests to collect 12 snake scrotums for every one interesting quest
that never COMPLETELY goes away but they rely on it to fill time less as they go
0
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
I did not give a single fuck about anything that happened in the story of ARR until after the end of the launch story, personally, and some of it was egregiously bad like spending hours upon hours preparing a banquet
yeah I thought the banquet bit was very funny, I think most people find it annoying though
+2
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
edited May 2022
the main thing about LOTRO for me is that after a couple months of Elden Ring, a difficult, somewhat opaque, and frequently anxiety-inducing game where you really need to be "on" the entire time you're playing, head on a swivel, or you won't really get anywhere, it's been a fantastic change of pace: a very easy, unhurried, and most of all pleasant game that I can just exist and vibe in
it's still extremely an MMO with plenty of dumb MMO barnacles (too many systems added in expansions 10+ years ago, too many currencies to navigate) but it addresses my absolute biggest turnoffs, which are the prevalence and difficulty of combat. the landscapes aren't absolutely drenched in enemies, you can walk for five or ten minutes (particularly on roads) without getting into a fight, and the fights aren't stupidly dumb, enemies don't have infinite aggro, and you don't need to slavishly look up build guides to be able to not die constantly.
it's not my new Forever Game (tbh I hate the quest for forever games) and it's not something I feel like, a burning addiction to, but it's a new tool in my toolbox where when I sit down at the PC and I'm not really feeling alert or energetic enough for some difficult FPS or platformer, or I don't have the emotional fortitude for a searing new visual novel about what it's like to be a firefighter with no arms in small-town 1920s magical realism Georgia, I can pop into this and spend a few chill, pleasant hours doing straightforward quests or digging up iron to forge armor for my friends or whatever
oh also your characters can learn instruments that you play yourself on your keyboard and the other night my friends and I witnessed a Battle of the Bands at the Inn of the Prancing Pony where competing groups of player dwarves, elves, hobbits, humans etc, wearing matching uniforms, played Def Leppard, Simon & Garfunkel, Rammstein, Enya, and some TV show themes and stuff, it ruled
anyway, for those installing, a few pro tips I have figured out after my first 15-20 hours in the game:
- the UI is still rocking the circa 2007 resolution and desperately needs a modernization, but in the meantime, you can scale it up in Options > User Interface, and can customize the scale of individual elements (health bars vs minimap vs toolbar etc). You can do the same for the chat window in Options > Chat (or similar, I don't remember the exact path).
- embiggening the UI will make some HUD elements overlap annoyingly (suddenly your minimap is covering your quest tracker, or whatever). thankfully HUD elements can be moved around; just press ctrl-\ to unlock the UI, move shit around where you want it, and press ctrl-\ again to lock it back down.
- the map is also circa 2007 and the icons are faint and hard to see. However, you can change the colors of tracked quests in the map legend to make them stand out more.
- regarding the Riding skill (ability to use horses & other mounts): subscribers get a quest to unlock Riding at level 20, but why wait that long? What most people do is either buy the Riding Trait (an item that unlocks the skill) from the ingame Mithril vendors - there's one in your starting area and you'll almost certainly start with enough mithril coins to do the trade - or you can buy the trait from the LOTRO microtransaction store. It costs 95 LOTRO points, which are the mtx currency, and you'll get those 95 points pretty quickly just from doing quests.
- fast travel is done by going to stable-masters and renting a horse. You can only travel to stable-masters you've already unlocked by visiting and talking to them, and you can only travel from one stable to the next adjacent stable on the route - so for long trips you gotta Pony Express it, riding from stop to stop, though for very long trips you can pay extra to teleport ("swift travel"). Therefore, as you adventure, definitely make a beeline for any yellow horse-head icons you see on the map. You'll be glad you did this because the world is BIG.
- your character will start with a lot of gift items as they've made the first eight or ten years of expansion packs free to all. Don't open those gifts yet because they're packed with items and will quickly overrun your inventory. Wait until you get somewhere with vault access (for most people this will be the bank in Bree). Bree and its environs are roughly level 12-20 but you can get there quickly and relatively safely even at much lower levels if you stick to the main roads.
- like a lot of f2p games, life becomes significantly easier if you throw the game even a few bucks instead of playing it totally freemo. if you like the game, consider subbing for at least a month ($15, or you can do $30 for 3 months), which gets you 500 LOTRO points and a bunch of extra inventory space and character slots that you get to keep even after your sub expires. Alternatively, drop 5 bucks for 500 points and your account will be upgraded from free to premium, which has a few quality of life perks (ability to use global chat channels, other small but helpful things).
- One purchase I seriously recommend for anyone who has points is the Universal Toolkit for 150 (or the Enduring Universal Toolkit for 450); it's a single tool you equip in your tool slot that does the job of the giant mess of pickaxes, smithing hammers, forestry axes, skinning knives etc that the various crafting jobs require - and it works faster, too.
Jacobkosh on
+8
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
I really miss the days when I could play a new game without having to log in to another bloody account
+5
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
the past few evenings a friend and I worked our way through the co-op campaign of Portal 2, a game I had never played before (I've played 1 many times, but never took a stab at the sequel for some reason), and we finished it last night
my searing hot take: it is a very fun puzzle game that manages to be mostly challenging without veering into absolute frustration most of the time, with cute writing and great co-op
apologies for any minds blown by this extremely up to date and contrarian verdict
Did you play the single-player campaign?
I haven't touched the single player yet, but I'm definitely going to now that I've got some Joementum going
I really enjoyed the single-player Portal 2. Did a better job than I expected following up such a solid and straightforward first game both in terms of fun puzzling and comedy writing.
the main thing about LOTRO for me is that after a couple months of Elden Ring, a difficult, somewhat opaque, and frequently anxiety-inducing game where you really need to be "on" the entire time you're playing, head on a swivel, or you won't really get anywhere, it's been a fantastic change of pace: a very easy, unhurried, and most of all pleasant game that I can just exist and vibe in
it's still extremely an MMO with plenty of dumb MMO barnacles (too many systems added in expansions 10+ years ago, too many currencies to navigate) but it addresses my absolute biggest turnoffs, which are the prevalence and difficulty of combat. the landscapes aren't absolutely drenched in enemies, you can walk for five or ten minutes (particularly on roads) without getting into a fight, and the fights aren't stupidly dumb, enemies don't have infinite aggro, and you don't need to slavishly look up build guides to be able to not die constantly.
it's not my new Forever Game (tbh I hate the quest for forever games) and it's not something I feel like, a burning addiction to, but it's a new tool in my toolbox where when I sit down at the PC and I'm not really feeling alert or energetic enough for some difficult FPS or platformer, or I don't have the emotional fortitude for a searing new visual novel about what it's like to be a firefighter with no arms in small-town 1920s magical realism Georgia, I can pop into this and spend a few chill, pleasant hours doing straightforward quests or digging up iron to forge armor for my friends or whatever
oh also your characters can learn instruments that you play yourself on your keyboard and the other night my friends and I witnessed a Battle of the Bands at the Inn of the Prancing Pony where competing groups of player dwarves, elves, hobbits, humans etc, wearing matching uniforms, played Def Leppard, Simon & Garfunkel, Rammstein, Enya, and some TV show themes and stuff, it ruled
anyway, for those installing, a few pro tips I have figured out after my first 15-20 hours in the game:
- the UI is still rocking the circa 2007 resolution and desperately needs a modernization, but in the meantime, you can scale it up in Options > User Interface, and can customize the scale of individual elements (health bars vs minimap vs toolbar etc). You can do the same for the chat window in Options > Chat (or similar, I don't remember the exact path).
- embiggening the UI will make some HUD elements overlap annoyingly (suddenly your minimap is covering your quest tracker, or whatever). thankfully HUD elements can be moved around; just press ctrl-\ to unlock the UI, move shit around where you want it, and press ctrl-\ again to lock it back down.
- the map is also circa 2007 and the icons are faint and hard to see. However, you can change the colors of tracked quests in the map legend to make them stand out more.
- regarding the Riding skill (ability to use horses & other mounts): subscribers get a quest to unlock Riding at level 20, but why wait that long? What most people do is either buy the Riding Trait (an item that unlocks the skill) from the ingame Mithril vendors - there's one in your starting area and you'll almost certainly start with enough mithril coins to do the trade - or you can buy the trait from the LOTRO microtransaction store. It costs 95 LOTRO points, which are the mtx currency, and you'll get those 95 points pretty quickly just from doing quests.
- fast travel is done by going to stable-masters and renting a horse. You can only travel to stable-masters you've already unlocked by visiting and talking to them, and you can only travel from one stable to the next adjacent stable on the route - so for long trips you gotta Pony Express it, riding from stop to stop, though for very long trips you can pay extra to teleport ("swift travel"). Therefore, as you adventure, definitely make a beeline for any yellow horse-head icons you see on the map. You'll be glad you did this because the world is BIG.
- your character will start with a lot of gift items as they've made the first eight or ten years of expansion packs free to all. Don't open those gifts yet because they're packed with items and will quickly overrun your inventory. Wait until you get somewhere with vault access (for most people this will be the bank in Bree). Bree and its environs are roughly level 12-20 but you can get there quickly and relatively safely even at much lower levels if you stick to the main roads.
- like a lot of f2p games, life becomes significantly easier if you throw the game even a few bucks instead of playing it totally freemo. if you like the game, consider subbing for at least a month ($15, or you can do $30 for 3 months), which gets you 500 LOTRO points and a bunch of extra inventory space and character slots that you get to keep even after your sub expires. Alternatively, drop 5 bucks for 500 points and your account will be upgraded from free to premium, which has a few quality of life perks (ability to use global chat channels, other small but helpful things).
- One purchase I seriously recommend for anyone who has points is the Universal Toolkit for 150 (or the Enduring Universal Toolkit for 450); it's a single tool you equip in your tool slot that does the job of the giant mess of pickaxes, smithing hammers, forestry axes, skinning knives etc that the various crafting jobs require - and it works faster, too.
I'll add that if you don't want to spend money on the universal toolkit, an apprentice metalsmith (very beginner) can make multitools for each vocation that will do the job of all three of it's professions (a vocation is made of 3 crafting professions). It's not as versatile, but it won't cost you mtx cash. If the metalsmith is higher tier they can make better quality multitools but they require more expensive materials.
I just so happen to have a character that's a beginner metalsmith, and I'm willing to make and mail multitools to anyone on the Arkenstone server for free.
+7
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Zxerolfor the smaller pieces, my shovel wouldn't doso i took off my boot and used my shoeRegistered Userregular
They released one of the best games in 2020. 🤷‍♀️
+1
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
Content: mass murder
Tragedy struck New York on May 14 as an 18-year-old white male shot and killed at least 10 people in the city of Buffalo, police said. The shooter, whose online username is reportedly “jimboboiii”, has been taken into custody after livestreaming the whole thing on gaming platform Twitch, the company confirmed on Saturday evening. The shooter released a 180-page manifesto detailing his racist and anti-Semitic views, which he partially attributes to controversial online forum 4chan. The document also mentions what appears to be a private Discord chat server, where he allegedly detailed his plans in advance.
The long manifesto, which dives deep into the shooter’s supposed mindset and aims, cites 4chan as the source of his radicalization, noting “There I learned through infographics, shitposts, and memes that the White race is dying out, that blacks are disproportionately killing Whites, that the average black takes $700,000 from tax-payers in their lifetime, and that the Jews and the elite were behind this.” The manifesto also included not only step-by-step instructions for the mass shooting he intended to carry out, but diagrams as well. Screenshots of Discord shared on social media, while not confirmed to be legitimate, also purport to show someone with the same username going into deep specifics regarding the planned action, apparently well ahead of the shooting.
.
4chan has that classic social media angle, where it has so many users, there MUST be a way to make it profitable, right? We can keep it in the red until we crack this egg and rake in the money. But the only way to rake in the money is to sell it like a slurped ape.
I have this memory from my first playthrough of being really excited to craft this weapon at the fabricator called the “boltcaster”, thinking it was either some kind of badass sci-fi laser gun, or a badass crossbow.
And then this fucking dork-ass nerf gun plops out.
Okay, it turned out to be awesome, but it felt like an amazingly cruel joke at the time. “Here, enjoy fighting off murderous aliens with this children’s toy!”
minor incident on
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
I have this memory from my first playthrough of being really excited to craft this weapon at the fabricator called the “boltcaster”, thinking it was either some kind of badass sci-fi laser gun, or a badass crossbow.
And then this fucking dork-ass nerf gun plops out.
Okay, it turned out to be awesome, but it felt like an amazingly cruel joke at the time. “Here, enjoy fighting off murderous aliens with this children’s toy!”
I didn't craft it, I found one first. I thought it was hilarious, then I noticed the name and realized that they were just being giant nerds.
+4
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Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
Small Zomboid Update:
Haven't played much in the last couple says because of a bug in one mod. I'd be fine until I got a gun and holstered it. Once it was holstered, besides getting near constant error codes in the bottom right, I also would not be able to remove the gun from the holster. I'd disable some mods, start a new person, play until I holstered a gun and see the error then sadly quit and try again later. This took time because I have so many mods that it takes a minute to even disable a single mod and several to start a new game.
None of the more recent mods could have been the culprit because none of them touched holsters, clothing, or guns.
Just now I figured it out. One mod that adds in attachments for backpacks updated. The previous version became obsolete with a new one named slightly differently. I somehow had both mods on at once. Turned off the old version and everything seems to work again.
Annoyed that it took me so long to figure out. Lost several promising starts due to it and several days. You can theoretically turn off mods mid save, but sometimes it breaks a ton of stuff so I don't bother and just roll new people.
make a character on Arkenstone and we can make a fellowship!
I would be fuckin down for a PA fellowship! I'll go look at what it takes to start one
edit: huh, you just gotta be level 5 to start a kinship and it only costs 5 silver and 12 copper
I've got a Hobbit Guardian named Bodungo
friend me up
Yeah, like.. Gandalf is not an elf, and elves aren't supposed to be able to do that kind of magic and my brain catches fire and I pass out whenever I try playing it and I wake up with in a pool of blood with my fancy, three volume set of the History of Middle Earth series strewn all over the floor with "Why am I helping the Fellowship, the whole point was secrecy and stealth!?!?!!" written in crayon all over my walls.
Posts
If you've ever bought the game, you need to pay the monthly fee, but if you're on the trial account you can play until like level 60 for free.
You may have gotten a free month subscription from a random bundle, which they count as buying the game and move you off the free trial.
That happened to me, but since I'd barely played then, I was able to just start up a new trial account with another email address.
Then for the classes, a bunch of them start off called one thing before changing their name at level 30, like rangers turn into bards and lancers become dragoons. And some of them don't unlock until levels 50 and 60, and some require actually buying the game.
I'm sure I'll get the full game at some point, but the trial account has been plenty for me for the last few months.
Nobody knows!
Samurai seemed neat but seeing as I cannot start as that, Lancer to Dragoon it is
Do you like jumping into death pits? Because boy oh boy is Dragoon the job for you
I've seen that face before, Sam
Was it someone's avatar on here?
And you get to punch Estinien! Because he's a bit of a wank in ARR
I think I was very much in the right state of mind to enjoy something like that when I happened to try it though, if I had approached it at a different time and without the promise of tons more content following it that was only an improvement, I might have bounced off it very hard, but as it was I really enjoyed the stroll through the old content, stopping to smell the roses as much as possible.
Specifically you can play through all the content in the base game and first expansion for free, and it caps you at level 60, which was the cap for the first expansion. No time limit or anything.
it's still extremely an MMO with plenty of dumb MMO barnacles (too many systems added in expansions 10+ years ago, too many currencies to navigate) but it addresses my absolute biggest turnoffs, which are the prevalence and difficulty of combat. the landscapes aren't absolutely drenched in enemies, you can walk for five or ten minutes (particularly on roads) without getting into a fight, and the fights aren't stupidly dumb, enemies don't have infinite aggro, and you don't need to slavishly look up build guides to be able to not die constantly.
it's not my new Forever Game (tbh I hate the quest for forever games) and it's not something I feel like, a burning addiction to, but it's a new tool in my toolbox where when I sit down at the PC and I'm not really feeling alert or energetic enough for some difficult FPS or platformer, or I don't have the emotional fortitude for a searing new visual novel about what it's like to be a firefighter with no arms in small-town 1920s magical realism Georgia, I can pop into this and spend a few chill, pleasant hours doing straightforward quests or digging up iron to forge armor for my friends or whatever
oh also your characters can learn instruments that you play yourself on your keyboard and the other night my friends and I witnessed a Battle of the Bands at the Inn of the Prancing Pony where competing groups of player dwarves, elves, hobbits, humans etc, wearing matching uniforms, played Def Leppard, Simon & Garfunkel, Rammstein, Enya, and some TV show themes and stuff, it ruled
anyway, for those installing, a few pro tips I have figured out after my first 15-20 hours in the game:
- embiggening the UI will make some HUD elements overlap annoyingly (suddenly your minimap is covering your quest tracker, or whatever). thankfully HUD elements can be moved around; just press ctrl-\ to unlock the UI, move shit around where you want it, and press ctrl-\ again to lock it back down.
- the map is also circa 2007 and the icons are faint and hard to see. However, you can change the colors of tracked quests in the map legend to make them stand out more.
- regarding the Riding skill (ability to use horses & other mounts): subscribers get a quest to unlock Riding at level 20, but why wait that long? What most people do is either buy the Riding Trait (an item that unlocks the skill) from the ingame Mithril vendors - there's one in your starting area and you'll almost certainly start with enough mithril coins to do the trade - or you can buy the trait from the LOTRO microtransaction store. It costs 95 LOTRO points, which are the mtx currency, and you'll get those 95 points pretty quickly just from doing quests.
- fast travel is done by going to stable-masters and renting a horse. You can only travel to stable-masters you've already unlocked by visiting and talking to them, and you can only travel from one stable to the next adjacent stable on the route - so for long trips you gotta Pony Express it, riding from stop to stop, though for very long trips you can pay extra to teleport ("swift travel"). Therefore, as you adventure, definitely make a beeline for any yellow horse-head icons you see on the map. You'll be glad you did this because the world is BIG.
- your character will start with a lot of gift items as they've made the first eight or ten years of expansion packs free to all. Don't open those gifts yet because they're packed with items and will quickly overrun your inventory. Wait until you get somewhere with vault access (for most people this will be the bank in Bree). Bree and its environs are roughly level 12-20 but you can get there quickly and relatively safely even at much lower levels if you stick to the main roads.
- like a lot of f2p games, life becomes significantly easier if you throw the game even a few bucks instead of playing it totally freemo. if you like the game, consider subbing for at least a month ($15, or you can do $30 for 3 months), which gets you 500 LOTRO points and a bunch of extra inventory space and character slots that you get to keep even after your sub expires. Alternatively, drop 5 bucks for 500 points and your account will be upgraded from free to premium, which has a few quality of life perks (ability to use global chat channels, other small but helpful things).
- One purchase I seriously recommend for anyone who has points is the Universal Toolkit for 150 (or the Enduring Universal Toolkit for 450); it's a single tool you equip in your tool slot that does the job of the giant mess of pickaxes, smithing hammers, forestry axes, skinning knives etc that the various crafting jobs require - and it works faster, too.
I haven't touched the single player yet, but I'm definitely going to now that I've got some Joementum going
remember when valve made games?
I'll add that if you don't want to spend money on the universal toolkit, an apprentice metalsmith (very beginner) can make multitools for each vocation that will do the job of all three of it's professions (a vocation is made of 3 crafting professions). It's not as versatile, but it won't cost you mtx cash. If the metalsmith is higher tier they can make better quality multitools but they require more expensive materials.
I just so happen to have a character that's a beginner metalsmith, and I'm willing to make and mail multitools to anyone on the Arkenstone server for free.
You have two hearts, Time Lord, show a little pity once in a while.
Aperture Desk Job is not not a video game
What do you mean you want it to be more than 30 minutes long?
https://kotaku.com/twitch-discord-4chan-shooting-buffalo-tops-jimboboiii-m-1848927240
fuck 4chan in all its forms and incarnations
if a judge can order every isp to block access to an obscure pirate tv site, why the fuck are we allowing anyone to connect to 4chan
Because capitalism?
Worth a shot in times of trouble, though.
One of the best intros ever.
And no other game has ever made me quite as nervous about seeing matching pairs of random office furniture.
I have this memory from my first playthrough of being really excited to craft this weapon at the fabricator called the “boltcaster”, thinking it was either some kind of badass sci-fi laser gun, or a badass crossbow.
And then this fucking dork-ass nerf gun plops out.
Okay, it turned out to be awesome, but it felt like an amazingly cruel joke at the time. “Here, enjoy fighting off murderous aliens with this children’s toy!”
Haven't played much in the last couple says because of a bug in one mod. I'd be fine until I got a gun and holstered it. Once it was holstered, besides getting near constant error codes in the bottom right, I also would not be able to remove the gun from the holster. I'd disable some mods, start a new person, play until I holstered a gun and see the error then sadly quit and try again later. This took time because I have so many mods that it takes a minute to even disable a single mod and several to start a new game.
None of the more recent mods could have been the culprit because none of them touched holsters, clothing, or guns.
Just now I figured it out. One mod that adds in attachments for backpacks updated. The previous version became obsolete with a new one named slightly differently. I somehow had both mods on at once. Turned off the old version and everything seems to work again.
Annoyed that it took me so long to figure out. Lost several promising starts due to it and several days. You can theoretically turn off mods mid save, but sometimes it breaks a ton of stuff so I don't bother and just roll new people.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Yeah, like.. Gandalf is not an elf, and elves aren't supposed to be able to do that kind of magic and my brain catches fire and I pass out whenever I try playing it and I wake up with in a pool of blood with my fancy, three volume set of the History of Middle Earth series strewn all over the floor with "Why am I helping the Fellowship, the whole point was secrecy and stealth!?!?!!" written in crayon all over my walls.