Lord of the Rings: Online
As Will mentioned, I’m in the Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) beta.
Mini-Review
LOTRO is a MMORPG, and as the name suggests, is based on the works of Tolkien, created by Turbine. Turbine are well known in the MMORPG arena, as they created Asheron’s Call 1 & 2, as well as Dungeons and Dragons Online. I haven’t played their games before, infact, the only MMORPG I’ve played for much time at all has been the juggernaut known as World of Warcraft (WoW), so most of my comparisons will be that.
The game is set at the time of the war of the ring, so the events of the books unfold around you.
Gameplay
(Mechanics and whatnot)
Combat
Combat is like any non turnbased MMORPG, so there are no problems there, unless you’re looking for something new and exciting.
I suppose you could note the differences in the naming of attributes, such as health is actually ‘morale’. As a ministril (healer) class, I was confused that I didn’t have any ‘restores health‘ spell.
Crafting
Crafting feels decent, there are many ‘schools’ of crafting, and when you learn one, you have three different trade skills, such as tailoring, forestry and prospecting. One feeds the other which feeds the other, or something like that.
Achievements
LOTRO has ‘achievments’, which are…interesting. You work towards an achievement throughout the game, and at the end you get a reward.
For example, slaying X amount of spiders in Breeland gave me the title ‘Spider-foe’. The interesting part is some of the achievements are how many times you use a skill (or family of skills). I only have about 970 heals left before I get a healing achievement.
Questing
Quests are very much a case of ‘kill X amount of these‘, ‘gather Y amount of those‘, but the story to go along with a few of them are interesting with the ‘epic’ (as in, the Epic of the Lord of the Rings) quests unfolding the story around the Fellowship of the Ring.
Graphics
The graphics certainly set this game apart from WoW. Even lowering the detail to low or medium, the world has a lot more detail than WoW. However, to be fair, the world presented by Blizzard is much more vibrant, and seems more bursting with life (graphically), because of the cartoon-ish appearance of the game.
Brett argues that comparing WoW to LOTRO is unfair (at least graphically), because of the age of the game. I argue that WoW’s graphics were outdated before it was released (as are many of Blizzards games), and that if they wanted it to be pretty, they could have released a graphical update with The Burning Crusade.
Many ‘pretty’ games were released in 2004 (Game Rankings, select PC, 2004, and list it to uh, 20->200), both of MMORPG and other genres, so I declare his argument invalid.
Those who argue with me are silly.
LOTRO appears very ‘realistic’ (about as ‘realistic’ as any SciFi/Fantasy game can really be I guess)
The Good
The water looks fantastic.
The character models are pretty good too.
You cannot compare MMORPG’s to single-player RPG’s like Dark Messiah or Oblivion, due to the ‘other’ loads in MMORPG’s, so I simply won’t.
I will, however, compare WoW to LOTRO.
WoW certainly doesn’t come close to matching, let alone beating these graphics, however I still prefer LOTRO’s graphics over other pretty games such as Guild Wars.
The following images compare the character models (facial), and the second image compares a water scene, both shots are at highest detail that the game allowed for each game (LOTRO may not have been at ‘ultra’ everything, I can’t recall).
(Click for full size)
(Click for full size)
As you can see, WoW is no competition in either scene. You might think ‘oh, but that WoW screenshot is taken in Ratchet, a port, where there wouldn’t be any reflection anyway’, but you’d be wrong. The water is the same no matter where you are.
The Bad
There are a few down points the graphics, which may or may not be fixed up by the time this is out of beta. The first is the animations. While there is a wide range of animations, and many of them look rather good, the more common animations, such as running, seem to be a little…sucky.
I mean, I’m not trying to discriminate against puppets – they have a right to work too – they just shouldn’t be used for motion tracking.
Performance is also another issue, but given I’m running it on Vista (meaning nVidia drivers really suck), and it is a beta, I’m not too critical of this.
Overall
I haven’t touched on the sound (music/effects, which are rather good), or on the pricing structure (founders club is…interesting, it seems like USD$199 upfront for a life time (products lifetime, not yours) account), because they don’t effect me too much (beta is free, and I haven’t had speakers on too much due to my headaches).
Overall, this game has potential, however I’m not far enough into it to say how long it could really last, without having ‘world PvP’.
Without the constant threat and competition of the Dark Forces, it is hard to say how many people will take up this game.
However, if you’re a big LOTR or RPG fan who enjoys PvE rather than PvP, this game is certainly one to keep your eye on.
That being said, many MMORPG fans have called it a WoW clone and are disappointed with the ‘slaughter’ of Tolkien’s world.
Me? I like it. Enough to buy it? I’m not sure. Its quirks make it interesting, its pretty. It feels a little slow in combat, but every time I play it, I become further sucked into it.
I won’t get to play it much because I signed up the account for Chickz0r, who loves LOTR, and her ADSL will be active by the end of the week ;)
Hey Aeoth,
I have been playing beta for a few months…!!.
Msg me :)