Chicken Play: Do We Really Want More?

Meet ~Ireth, my hero of a chicken who started her Run Across Eriador this weekend.

When Turbine first announced the new Lord of the Rings Online game feature called Session Play, people thought it was a belated April Fool’s joke. But sure enough, when its Book 10 expansion hit the streets in August, players got the chance to play a chicken! The chicken is one of three temporary “classes” that LotRO players get to assume during a single gaming session (ie. you lose the character when you log out) and it’s the only one that’s accessible outside of the Ettenmoors, LotRO’s player-versus-player battleground. It’s been well over a month since Book 10’s release and everyone has had their laugh over chicken play, as people came to call it. However just this past week, Ten Ton Hammer published an interview with Jeffrey Steefel where he was asked about (among other things) session play and he had this to say…

The chicken is the beginning of what we hope will be many types of critters and creatures that players will be able to run around in the world as. Things as kooky as, “I’m a rat in Moria.” But it’s been interesting to see how people react, we want to see how chicken play is being used, what’s working, what’s not working. It’s an oddly – not violently – controversial thing where hardcore gamers both inside and outside the company go, ‘What? Are you kidding me?’ Then they start playing it and have a fun time. Inevitably, almost 9 out of 10 times, they end up coming to me afterwards and saying, “Alright, I’ve got to admit, I’m kind of warming up to chicken play, and I don’t know why.”

Wait a minute…. developers are actually going to spend some time working on “rat play”? Well, I had never tried out session play before, mainly because I could never convince the guys to go play chicken with me, so I thought I’d put in some solo gaming time last weekend and headed out to Sandson’s Farm east of Michel Delving. After all, how can one tell Steefel we don’t want any more of it if one doesn’t even try it?

I had followed a link from the LotRO Vault to this excellent guide on LotRO RP Haven, which got me started on my adventure. Not wanting to spoil the fun, I only read as far as “To start, head over to Sandson’s Farm, northeast of Michel Delving.” I knew exactly where Sandson’s Farm was, since I had done an egg gathering quest there before so I used my handy hunter skill, “Guide to Michel Delving”, to get there quickly and then got on my horse and rode down to Sandson’s Farm. There I found Wald Sandson, the farmer’s son, who was in a quandary because he wanted to return some eggs he had stolen from his father’s farm. My quest was to help him return the eggs to the right nest. Most of the guides I’ve seen online will tell you exactly in which order to return the eggs, but if you’re like me, you’ll want to figure it out for yourself. All you have to do is read Farmer Sandson’s notes (by clicking on the note page in your inventory) and solve the logic puzzle to determine the order in which the eggs were laid. I didn’t transform into a chicken for this quest by the way, and it was a fun quest because it required me to solve a puzzle, albeit a really simple one.

Ward’s next problem was that the farm’s best egg-layer seemed to be on a slump and they couldn’t figure out what was bothering her. So I was given a quest to examine Billina the hen coop’s queen to figure out what was wrong. I went over, clicked on Billina, and got the session play dialogue box. Clickety-click and the next thing I knew I was a chicken called ~Ireth with a quest on my log to find 4 worms for Billina. I found the transition rather abrupt, with no real explanation as to why I became a chicken. I mean, I could have made up a story involving Radagast giving the player a special power – hey maybe the whole quest chain should start with an encounter with the brown wizard! Anyway, so there I was, a level 1 chicken, standing on an empty field and feeling like a noob. I couldn’t see any worms around and after a bit of exploration, I discovered a nearby field that had suspicious mounds. (It helped that the mounds were blinking and showed a treasure icon when I hovered my mouse on it). Soon enough, I had dug up 4 worms and headed back to the farm to give them to Billina. She graciously accepted them, telling chicken-me that all she could eat these days was earthworms as the new farm feed didn’t quite agree with her. Quest completed, I transformed back to elf-me.

Speaking to Ward Sandson again, I found out that Billina was laying eggs now, but seemed to be a little agitated. The wise farmer had figured out that I had an “in” with the animals, so he asked me to “examine” her again to see what was wrong this time. So back to Billina as chicken-me, I found out that the hen mother was bothered with the increasing wolf excursions into the farm. She told me the chickens needed “brave roosters like yourself to go and warn the other coops”… Hey wait a minute, I’m a rooster?! As if the species changeover didn’t cause enough of an identity crisis, now I have to deal with a gender change too! *sigh* Focus on the quest, eye on the prize and all that, my quest was to go and warn the other chickens in the Brownlock, Cotton, and Maggot farms. Luckily, I had explored the Shire quite a bit in my beta testing days while making this map for LotRO Vault so I knew exactly where those farms were. Not that it helped me avoid mishap the first time around. Anyone who has done the quest to save Dora Brownlock’s chickens knows that her farm is teeming with level 10 or so wolves, which isn’t good for a level 1 chicken at all. Rooster-me very foolishly went straight for the coop and was immediately spotted by a couple of hungry wolves. Too late I saw that the chicken with the ring above its head was sitting quite safely on a rooftop that I could have gotten to by circling the farm and thus avoiding the wolves. But at least now I know what it feels like to be a dead chicken. Back on the road a second time, I learned my lesson and stayed away from vicious animals, staying on the road as much as possible.

Now I know what it feels like to be a dead chicken

At this point, the only skills my chicken had were Fowl Fleetness (+50% run speed) and Bob and Weave (+50% evade chance). Both skills last for 30 seconds when activated and have a cooldown of 2 minutes. Quite useful in a tight spot but I would imagine, not if you have a whole mob after you, hungry for a roasted chicken dinner. Now since I had to run practically the whole length of the Shire to get to Farmer Maggot’s farm, I used the speed buff quite a bit. I was almost afraid I would have to run back to turn the quest in, but as soon as I completed my goals, the game kicked me out of session play and teleported me back to Sandson’s Farm. Thank the Turbine gods for small favors like these. Well at least rooster-me’s Shire excursion managed to calm Billina’s nerves but then Ward tells (the elf) me that the head rooster, George is all upset. So guess who was tapped to try and calm him? Rooster-me finds out that George is indeed worried about the state of affairs. He wants me, because I’ve been heroic and all running all the way to Farmer Maggot’s to warn the other coops, to try and see if I can recruit other animals to help the Sandson farm ward off the wolves. The second run across the Shire was less dangerous. It allowed me to pretty much stick to the road, down to Tuckborough, then east to the Maggot Farm once again (the fox was right off the road past the curve where I imagine the hobbits hid from the black rider). By this time, the novelty was wearing off a bit and all the running was making me virtually tired. So imagine my chagrin when, upon my return to the Sandson farm, George presents me with 6 more quests!

George’s Quests

Looks like I have to run all over Eriador to get my cape! As you can imagine, it took me at least an hour to complete the quests up to this point so it was getting a bit late in the day and more mindless running didn’t quite appeal to me but I noticed that rooster-me had acquired two more skills – Possum Impersonation (feigns death for 1 minute) and Paranoia (increases stealth detection). So I thought I’d just do the Breeland run before I quit. Now chickens have their own chat channels (yes, they do chat!) so I could only imagine what the humans around me were saying when I got to crowded Breetown, but they seemed to be quite amused to find a chicken running around. So I hammed it up with them, feigning death when a dwarf ran his pony over me.. and had quite a bit of totally unexpected fun. To my delight, I also discovered (through chicken chat) that the Fat Smokin Hobbits kinship of Silverlode were having a Chicken Race that very evening! I was able to capture some of the race on Fraps and will be posting it here as soon as I get a chance to edit and annotate the footage.

And so at the end of the day, am I one of the 90% of converts that Jeffrey Steefel says actually turned around and said that they DO like chicken play? Yes and no. I like some aspects of it – like the puzzle solving and roleplaying – and I must agree that it was silly fun running around as a chicken. But I found it boring and repetitive to run all the way from one end of the Shire to the other, and then again to the far reaches of Bree on the pretext of trying to convince other animals to help some chickens in a place they can hardly be expected to even know about. I haven’t even done the five other quests and I’m not sure I will, because I’m pretty sure I will get the same answer from all the other animals I’ll talk to – a resounding NO! Also, when I get to the end of the quest chain, does that mean I can never play a chicken ever again (assuming that I’d want to)?

On the other hand, IF the Turbine devs are seriously thinking of expanding session play, perhaps they can find a way to make it more interesting and relevant. I understand that this was a lighthearted effort to bring some fun into a terribly serious setting, but who says Tolkien lore can’t be woven into the fun? I’ve seen some screenshots showing the chicken talking to Radagast the Brown, but why wait until you get to the Lonelands to bring him into the picture? Radagast and Gandalf both communicated with birds and animals so I think it makes sense to have either one or the other teach the player or reward him with the power to speak the language of fowl and beast, in exchange for a favor (ie. completing a quest). And please, can we do away with the gender switchover?

Again, I must admit, my rooster character does have his charms but do I want to see more of this kind of innovation in LotRO? Maybe, but they will have to do a better job of putting it together than they did with Chicken Play.