Last time around, we saw Hiltibrant exploring Goblin-town. Before and after that, I’ve been busy. I progressed through the epic quest line, tried to kill the king of Angmar, but failed miserably.
Aragorn wasn’t too devastated though, and I continued, until I hit the taxi books (Volume 1, Books 9 and 10), which can be summarized as follows: “Dear adventurer, after your great deeds here in Angmar, we decided only the most prestigious and important tasks should be handled by you personally. That’s why I’ll send you to Bree, the Lone-Lands, and Esteldín, to fetch some information. And when you get back, I’ll send you to Evendim, where you’ll have to transport despatches between Tinnudir and Annúminas roughly seventeen hundred times, with a short trip to Rivendell for good measure.” At that point, I made a rude gesture to all those smelly Rangers behind their backs and decided it was time to go to Moria.
But first things first. I had heard that you can’t ride horses or ponies in Moria. Luckily, I had invested some time into killing evil dwarves, which made the dwarves of Thorin’s Hall so happy that they graciously allowed me to buy one of their riding goats… for a hefty price, of course. Damn those greedy dwarves. To be honest, the goat looks a bit strange, especially when you have to look at its weirdly wobbling behind for hours. *ahem* But it’s functional, so I won’t complain.
As I said before, I love the world Turbine designed for LotRO. Or rather, the world was already there, but the way they made it looks for the game. So I decided to get used to the goat, and to not use any fast travel skills. Instead I rode all the way from Thorin’s Hall, through Ered Luin, the Shire, Bree-Land, the Lone Lands, the Trollshaws, and Eregion, to the gates of Moria. I made a lot of screenshots to show the beautiful landscape, even though the weather wasn’t the best with mostly overcast and some rain. Since there are a lot of pictures after this point, I’ll hide them behind the cut.
Ered Luin:
The Shire:
Bree-land:
The Lone-lands:
The Trollshaws:
Here, the weather took a turn for the worse.
With the weather like that, and my legendary skills at getting lost in the Trollshaws, I have a bunch of pictures of me going the wrong way and having to backtrack. You can also see the zone-dependent weather. The first screenshot technically was in Eregion, just in a dead-end with no connection to the rest of the zone. The weather was suddenly much nicer, until I turned back to the Trollshaws.
On the second try, I took the right way by crossing the Bruinen at Garbert’s cottage:
Eregion:
At Echad Eregion, I decided to rest (i.e., I had to buy groceries before the shops closed) and rode the last part of the journey at night.
Khazad-dûm, at last!
The last time I entered these halls was to finish Volume 2, Book 1, to get my first Legendary Items. It’s been 5 levels, and 4 months! I’m such a powergamer when it comes to LotRO…
LotRO is gorgeous! These are really good screenies. I couldn’t help but notice no other gamers in these photos, however. Why is that? (Some breathtaking vistas you’ve managed to capture!)
I think there are two main reasons for that: one is that the lower-level areas are quite empty, like in many older games. Add to that that LotRO provides a lot of grinding “pleasure” for min-maxers to get the last 0.1% out of their character at max level, so it probably is less alt-friendly than some other games. The other reason is that I made those pictures during a weekday evening in Europe, so the US population was still at work. That’s the reason Bree is so empty, I think. Also keep in mind I hid floating names, so it’s hard to make out who is a player and who is an NPC.
I noticed that there are a lot more people around in the Moria areas than in the areas before there, except for a couple of hotspots (Bree, and Evendim for the 30-40 range).