I admit it: I’m a creep. I love being a creep.
No, no, not that kind of creep, the drunken, bad-pickup-line-using guy at the local bar who won’t stop hitting on you.
(Yes, it’s my first gaming-related post in quite a while.)
I’m talking “creep” in the Lord of the Rings Online sense. During that game’s development it was accepted that there needed to be some form of player-vs-player content beyond simple dueling, but the idea of good guys fighting pitched battles against one another was thought to go against the spirit of Tolkien’s books (though that’s not strictly true, in my opinion). The solution was “Monster play”, a system whereby players could take the roles of the bad guys in a designated area called the Ettenmoors to fight against elves, dwarves, hobbits, and men who dared venture in there. The Free Peoples (“freeps”) battle the orcs, wargs, spiders, etc. (“creeps”) for control of a number of keeps, among other lesser goals.
In the freeps vs. creeps contest the creeps are the underdogs. Individually just about any given freep is more powerful than all but the most accomplished of creeps; they have better healing, better stun/hold/etc abilities, and can do more damage faster. The thought behind this disparity was supposedly that the creeps would have numbers on their side, but out in the real virtual world that’s almost never the case. It’s rare for us to be outnumbered by less than about 1.5 to 1, and fighting against 3-to-1 odds isn’t uncommon. What we lack in power and numbers we have to make up for in tactics and coordination… and let me tell you, plowing into and overrunning a clump of freeps from behind when they’ve twice your numbers is quite a rush.
A rather long while ago, when the non-disclosure for this game lifted, I posted a few pictures and hinted at more to come, but never did bother to post anything else. Well, here are a bunch more, including a few creep-oriented ones. Click the thumbnail to view the gigantic version of any picture.
Freeps and Creeps in the Ettenmoors:
Other random scenes, including the Rangers of Thintaur kinship house and Gollum’s cave:
