LotRO – I caught an exciting bit of news yesterday: phasing is coming to LotRO. Why this wasn’t mentioned at all in the Isengard announcement I can’t imagine. Possibly it’s not marketable enough or a common enough term, but I kind of doubt that given WoW’s popularization of it. These are the kinds of details that I mentioned I was going to wait for yesterday, but I hadn’t expected them to come out so quickly.
E3 Sidenote: That’s it? Seems like the E3 news really faded quickly this year. I didn’t see anything else in the news feeds yesterday that caught my attention. That could be a good thing I guess, it’s not like I don’t have a stack of games I want to play already.
I agree, seems like the first day and a half were the big news-makers, and it was a quiet second half. I’m also left with a nice list of anticipation – Kingdoms of Amalur, Skyrim, and, of course, Isengard. A few others piqued my interest, but to be honest this E3 was pretty limited for me – I’m really not interested in buying new hardware.
Phasing sounds like it will be a really nice addition to LotRO. Anything that adds to Turbine’s ability to tell story, and even being able to present us with choices that have impact – no matter how small on the world at large, and even if they are a bit of smoke and mirrors!
That’s exactly what I was thinking too about phasing, better story telling.
I thought they’d had phasing in LoTRO since forever? Just not used a huge amount?
Well, they’ve had instancing in since launch. For instance the way Archet changes between the starter area and the main game, and they’ve done some stuff with having NPC’s invisible after certain quests are completed. Those aren’t really phasing in the WoW sense of the word which is what most people think of. Layers were added in Mirkwood but that was all about managing server lag, not allowing for more dynamic storytelling.