Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

In Lord of the Rings Online we have deeds, on Xbox Live they are called Achievements and in Warhammer Online it will be the Tome of Knowledge. These are all variations on the same theme of rewarding players for doing innovative little things which you would normally only do for fun, such as killing x number of the local bandit population just because, or going off and exploring high level zones, choosing to explore every inch of the world or doing a mass of quests all in one area (something I personally recommend for those who really want a feel for an area…quests should advance lore, if you don’t know a zone after completing thirty-odd quests then something is wrong with the game.)

Blizzard is ever mindful of popular trends so it came as no surprise to me today, though it pleased me greatly to find out that someone with access to Alpha testing of Wrath of the Lich King has leaked some information on WoW’s new achievement system. Here we have those things I mentioned above, along with achieving so many arena wins and so many battleground wins. There’s been no mention of what these points will go toward, though I quite enjoy titles however I doubt that will happen to any great extent due to Blizzard’s reluctance to reward with anything other than coin and/or gear.

I’ve seen some talk of how this will apply to high level characters, of which there are currently a lot. Even when the expansion releases with it’s new class, the lowest level new characters will still be jumping straight in at level 55 so a lot of the ‘level to 10′ and ‘level to 20′ styled achievements could be obsolete if handled badly. Personally I think that with WoW’s extreme levels of data tracking (check Rayda’s listing on WoWArmoury to see the extent to which third parties alone can access character information) it should be fairly easy to implement this, with high level characters simply being instantly blessed with points they would have achieved so far. I can’t imagine there isn’t a database somewhere which hasn’t tracked all this data.

After the huge disappointment in Vanguard and with World of Warcraft once again claiming all of my attention, I really hadn’t found an MMO I was really excited about. In fact when Lord of the Rings Online, an MMO I first heard about in Vanguard’s early days first came to launch day, I really wasn’t all that fussed. It just didn’t seem my thing.

Eventually I tried it and was really quite impressed. Instancing was finally done in a unique and involving way rather than shutting you out of the rest of the world, the graphics were ‘realistic’ and the lore was there. Over time the world grew for me as I discovered new places and got to grips with the map…what I originally thought were disconnected zones were in fact sub-areas of a very small region of Middle Earth, with the other regions scheduled for later expansions. Other regions aren’t needed for me currently, Eriador (Home of the Shire, Bree, Buckland, et al) is a vast place as it is and absolutely jam packed with life and more importantly soul.
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