Green inspired screenshots from virtual Middle-earth

The Shire

It's Five Fandom Friday, and that means another geeky post! This week's topic was the Green Photo Challenge, and the participants were stimulated to share 5 green inspired photos in honour of St. Patrick's Day. In what is by now Ravalation tradition, I decided to go with screenshots instead, and Lord of the Rings Online was the first game that came to my mind.

LOTRO is my go-to game when I want to immerse myself in beautiful landscapes. Even though it's a pretty old MMO by now that has been overtaken graphics wise by new games, there's something about its landscapes that makes it feel more lively and 'real' than any game world I've visited. Perhaps it's the beautiful skies and weather mechanics. Or I'm just biased because I'm a huge Tolkien fan. Either way, here are five pretty green screenies from virtual Middle-earth.

Exploring Zakuul from dazzling heights

A week ago, I wrote in my Zakuul sightseeing post: "The Zakuulan skyline is (...) a beauty to behold. It is unfortunate that you can't get high up yourself to admire it outside story chapters and cutscenes." But then I remembered: my character may not be able to ascend, but my camera can.

Yes, you're reading it right, I found an excuse to fiddle around with SWTOR's max zoom distance again! I was very curious myself to get a grasp of how the city of Zakuul fits together, because you really can't tell when you're just running around using normal character view. I felt this child like sensation of excitement because I was about to enter an unexplored realm of potential beauty. Here are the results.

Zakuul sightseeing for International Picture Posting Month

Around this time one year ago, I posted screenshots of my favourite new SWTOR area: the Endless Swamp of Zakuul. It was International Picture Posting Month (IntPiPoMo) and I took on the challenge of posting fifty pictures in one month. Now, one year later, IntPiPoMo is upon us again and once more I find myself on Zakuul.

It occurred to me that I really like the planet, but never had taken the time to stand still and look around - after all, during most of my visits I was being hunted down by skytroopers. Therefore, especially for IntPiPoMo 2016, I revisited to shoot pictures, of which my favourite are in this article. You can find all my challenge entries under the label InPiPoMo. If you want to participate yourself, scroll down to the end of this post to see how.

An expedition through LOTRO's frills: before and after

With Lord of the Rings Online's latest big update, three things were added to the game: interior housing hooks, frills and a new raid. The topic of most discussion? Frills. These improved grass polls, flowers and shrubberies are meant to make the in-game world more lively and realistic. Indeed, they were already implemented in all post-Mirkwood regions upon creation, and now they've been added to vanilla areas as well.

But LOTRO wouldn't be an MMO if a part of its population wouldn't dislike these changes to their familiar regions. I was curious myself how much had actually changed and started an investigation. It took some effort, but I managed to dig up old screenshots of five regions and revisited each in-game. I'm posting the before picture first, then the after one, so you can easily compare them. Go ahead and judge for yourself!

Six times yellow

It's the sixth again and that means another 6 on 6! If you don't know what that is, scroll down to the bottom of the post and it's explained there. I loved that this month's colour is yellow, because it's my favourite! At first I was having a hard time thinking of screenshots with yellow in it (I didn't want to go with something obvious such as six pictures of the sun), but eventually I think it worked out pretty well. Here you go.

Six times brown

It's the sixth, so it's time to delve into the screenie archive and delve up to brown ones! Many of the games I enjoy take place in a realistic, natural setting with lots of shades of brown, so this one didn't take very long. Enjoy!

Six times green

I'm deeply ashamed to admit that I've missed yet another edition of the 6 on 6 challenge last month. My lame excuse: it's not so much a shortage of screenies (I'm drowning in them), rather me plain forgetting about them. It's just that there's a whole month in between the 6 on 6 posts. Yes - goldfish - I know.

Also, it was very tempting to post six screenshots of grass here, but all the other pretty green screenies started staring at me with those cute imaginary eyes of them, so, fiiiine.

Six times pink

It's time for 6 on 6 again (and yes, it's already 7, sorry about that) and this time I've dug through my screenshot collection for pink pictures. Although pink is not a colour I roll with a lot on my characters, it was easier than expected. This edition is surprisingly Lord of the Rings Online heavy, which may have something to do with me having picked up that game once more.

Six times black

It's time for another 6 on 6, or errr.... 10. Oops, I better not make a habit of this! The past weeks have been crazy, resulting in a long blogging silence of a month. Having already missed out on the white edition of 6 on 6 last month, I decided to post this anyway. I will write more about my analogue adventures later this week.

Six times red

It's that time of the month again: the sixth! I'm currently typing while waiting for my flight from the Netherlands to Sweden, but that doesn't stop me from selecting six screenshots for you that feature the colour red. I've also once again succeeded to include an appropriately skin-coloured alien from my favourite MMO.

Six times gold

Today I'm doing two photo challenges in one: 6 on 6 and IntPiPoMo. Win-win, right? Only this month's colour, gold, was hard. Really hard. On the positive side: by having to dig deep through my screenshot library, I found some pictures from games I don't usually write about. Enjoy!

Warning: screenies incoming

It's november and that means... IntPiPoMo! Or so I'm told. While our hardcore peers are slogging through ten thousands of words for NaNoWriMo, we casuals (yes, I'm admitting I'm a filthy casual here!) collect pretty pictures for its little sister, IntPiPoMo. The directive: to post 50 images (be it photos, screenshots or artwork) in November.

Six times orange

Put mildly, orange is not exactly my favourite colour. Once upon a time, when the internet was young, I even initiated the "Orange club", a website dedicated to loathing oranges and everything that shared the same colour. Every once in a while an orange lover would accidentally join and be hugely disappointed.

So you can see that I truly love you guys, because I decided to endure the pain and stomach finding six suitable pictures for this month's issue of 6 on 6 gamer style!

Six times purple

It's already that day of the month... the sixth! Surely you know what I'm talking about (if not, you can quickly read up here and pretend nothing happened); this month's issue is all about purple.

Six times blue

No, I'm not sad. And yes, I know, I'm one day late with posting. But I have the perfect excuse, hear me out. Oh, and I sincerely hope you guys like blue.

Safari through the games I play

One of the things I liked most of the NBI 2015 was Murf's Screenshot Safari. I had a lot of fun checking out everyone's entries during the course of the event. And I wasn't the only one: Murf counted an overwhelming total of 105 entries from 35 different blogs! Check out his post with all the facts and numbers here if you haven't done so yet. I enjoyed reading it a lot.

The scariest place... for a hungover Elf

I love how the bear looks over the edge anxiously, as if he already knows what is to come

She has faced a Balrog, Gortheron and Saruman and lived to tell the tale, but this is the scariest place lore-master Ravanel has ever been. She and Bear are on a tiny island in the freezing sea of Forochel. The water is so cold that touching it will result in instant death. There's no safe way off, but that's not why she is in distress.

Capturing High Fantasy

One of Murf's screenshot categories of his Screenshot Safari challenge had me scratching my head: High Fantasy. What is High Fantasy? The first thing I thought of was that it might be a synonym for "real fantasy", as in, "Lord of the Rings is real fantasy because Tolkien invented the genre - everything after that is lesser fantasy". Murf doesn't strike me as someone being into fantasy elitism (if such a thing even exists), though, so I googled it:

The Republic wants YOU

The last week of the NBI is there, and I have so many things to post still! More things than my usual writing schedule of Monday - Wednesday - Friday permits, so you will see Ravalation posts on odd days (gasp), just so I can get all the posts out. There, I've warned you.

Juggernaut Neserys: hero or villain?

This is my submission for Murf's 2015 Screenshot Safari, category Heroes or Villains. At first I read the category as requiring a screenshot featuring people of which their status (hero or villain?) was unsure. But then it dawned to me that we were probably allowed to enter either a hero or a villain as well. I decided to stick with my earlier interpretation, though, because I thought it was an interesting approach. What do you think of my juggernaut Neserys depicted above: is she a hero or a villain?