I also noticed that we didn’t get a chance to even start the Elven side of the epic quest. Not sure if that’s always been the case, or if it closes off the earlier bits of the quest if you start the “unified path”. Wanted to see what changes they had made to the elf side of things, too.

Ah, well, at least they’re trying. ;)

These things do get fixed, eventually, but remember to /bug it!

Moving Unnar down to the tutorial quest hub of Frerin’s Court makes sense and is a good move, but what they maybe should have considered is also changing the player’s spawn point when they leave the tutorial, such that the player arrives in Frerin’s Court rather than at the front of Thorin’s Hall. Perhaps they prefer the dramatic effect of having the player appear in front of those gargantuan gates, but I think the same effect is still achieved – and perhaps generates even more of an impression – by having the player run up that imposing stairway from Frerin’s Court such that the gates start off small in perspective, but gradually come to fill the entirety of the player’s screen.

Add to that the fact that the player leaves the tutorial zone via Frerin’s Court, and I think it makes even more sense from a coherence and spatial awareness point of view to start the new player from the location with which they have become familiar. Although Frerin’s Court is ‘just down the stairs’ from Thorin’s Hall, it’s funny how much a player can become disorientated when you warp them to a place that they have yet to visit in the normal flow of the game.

At the end of the day it’s just a missed bit of information in some quest text – not a big deal – I was just commenting really on my surprise at how much it threw me for a loop, especially when I have had experience of the game before. I don’t know, perhaps my previous experience worked against me in this case, either way I found it to be a fascinating insight into how difficult it must be for developers to guide players through content when a simple single line of quest text can send the player off on a tangent that causes them to lose their way; and this was over the space of a couple of modest sized locations which reside right next to one another.