lonkipt

I like what the original poster of this topic says, even if the ideas he presented are a little vague. For Bombadil to be incorporated, it seems only necessary Goldberry should be included, as well. She has a good line in the books, "Heed no nightly noises," that puts me in mind of the nature of the house of Tom Bombadil: That there is a power there which keeps evil at bay. The Hobbits also seem to have been rather well rested and refreshed from their stay with Bombadil and Goldberry.

Having Tom be able to summon in Old Man Willow works. But what if he could summon in his house with Goldberry? Make Tom a major unit support. Goldberry could be a major buff; the house of Bombadil could be a fear nullifier and provide healing. Or maybe Goldberry herself could provide healing, instead? Maybe she could set up that iconic imagery she's known for: All those bowls of water with the white water lilies floating in them. This could be a way of replacing the heal power for Rivendell: Just Goldberry. I don't know. Something along these lines, though.

I've got to admit, I'm left wondering how worth it it is for the devs to have gone into so much effort to make new textures, etc, as beautiful as they are...only to make so many cool maps relatively unplayable. The new fortress maps are amazing, but how amazing can they really be if you can't really play them? The same with many of the bigger maps for 6 or more players. It's like you're relegated to being able to really play just a fraction of the game....

I think the Edain mod probably does it best in this regard in that they kept, for the most part, the vanilla textures, adding in some stuff here and there and sharpening the visuals a bit, as opposed to going so all out to replace virtually all the textures. Yeah, the maps, even the new ones, don't look nearly as good, visually, as in AOTR, but they have the more critical advantage of better performance and stability while in a game, especially playing alone against AI. Yet AOTR offers better gameplay mechanics for my tastes, so I keep coming back to this.

Yet at the end of the day, in many ways, I kinda wish the AOTR folks wouldn't have gone so far... It just seems to come at too high a price. If you put so much into it but sacrifice essential playability for aesthetics, it sours the gameplay experience and how much the game otherwise has to offer the player.

With all due respect, I think the smarter option is to work at increasing performance in what content their is right now more than adding new content at this rate. Scale back textures and advanced graphics or something. Or even working for the future to back down on pushing graphics limits so much on such an old game.... It is an old game, after all!

To expect so much out of something that old just comes at too high a price.