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The Call On Lord of the Rings Online
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Apr 20, 2007 04:20 PM
from the a-wizard-is-never-late-frodo-baggins dept.
from the a-wizard-is-never-late-frodo-baggins dept.
The Beta has been going on for some time now, and for all intents and purposes Lord of the Rings Online has launched. Pre-order players will be able to move their characters to the live game when the title officially lights up on April 24th, and commentators on Massively Multiplayer games have weighed in. Their opinion, generally, is unanimous: buy it. Tobold contributes a full-on review, as does CVG. AFK Gamer doesn't go in for such long-form opinions, but he still has a lot to say. Specifically, Foton comments on the good, the okay, and the bad, as well as a few words on the game's (somewhat out of the ordinary) classes. "[The game is] deep and broad. An MMOG, any MMOG, with its premium box price and its premium subscription prices, needs to offer more activities than: you can kill stuff, and, umm, you can kill other players, and umm, you could check the auctions/trade channel. There's many ways to screw around in this MMOG: Deeds, accomplishments, exploration (easy to outrun higher level mobs), titles, player-made music, engaging quest text, a solid start to the crafting system, MONSTER PLAY!!! There's probably more, but that's all I've tried so far."
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Lord of the Rings Online Impressions 99 comments
The Non-Disclosure Agreement for the Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) beta test has been lifted, and with the game set for release soon it may be useful to you to peruse some hands-on previews of the title. Hexus.net offers A Day in the Life of a Hobbit, and Tobold's MMORPG blog has similar hobbit-related impressions. Tobold also has a comparison between LORTRO and World of Warcraft for those who might be thinking about making the jump. More hands-on info is available from Warcry, Kill Ten Rats, and Gamers With Jobs. Van Hemlock offers up a high level overview of the title, mentioning recent releases and pointing out the realities of Massive gaming: "How the Great Fantasy Epic Saga will stand the ravages thousands of petty powerlevelling smacktalkers all loitering about Rivendell bank, level one hobbit girls - dancing as naked as the game will allow, shouting ridiculous three-letter-acronyms and generally not getting into the spirit of the thing, remains to be seen. I expect Our People can crush even The Lord of the Rings beneath our metagaming heel without feeling too guilty."
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Wrong link (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wrong link (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Wrong link (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Everything I've heard has been good (Score:2)
Re:Everything I've heard has been good (Score:4, Informative)
You can grab an instrument and jam outside the Prancing Pony. Pretty avatars of other people stand around to listen, dance and make comments. Hard to resist that sometimes. Killer idea; allow players to rate performances. The game has me thinking.
Turbine has some good IP to work with. They've done it some credit. Work with the right NPC vendors enough and you'll learn scraps of Elvish. I've no doubt after sufficient play one will have a grasp of Middle Earth geography. It is certain that the effort placed on combat is matched elsewhere.
Tanks (guys with thick necks covered in metal) are functional. Champions own melee. Hunters don't. Hunters rely on a Legolas style repeating rifle called a Bow. Paper, scissors, rock.
Lag abounds occasionally. If I'm feeling it I know others are; plenty of hardware and bandwidth here. Not into WOW myself but by all evidence Blizzard has scalability figured out. I sense that LOTRO has some work to do there. If the game is a big hit they'll get it right.
The GUI needs some heavy lifting; it's confined by a lack of re-sizable windows. Perhaps customization will eventually permit it.
Like other online fantasy games, it requires a commitment in time. If I find that I can walk away for a few weeks and still have fun when I get around to playing I'll be playing for years. If not well, there is always Warhammer. [warhammeronline.com]
Parent
Bad link..? (Score:2)
My thoughts (Score:4, Informative)
The intro really impressed me. Along with the $199 lifetime subscription. And the way they worked classes (trying to stay true to the era but still incorporating the archetypes people are familiar with: for example the minstrel is a healer... you get your healer but recast into something that would fit in to LOTR). But beyond that, I'm not so sure the game will stand the tests of time. One the problems I forsee is the limited number of races. I also liked combat a bit more than WoW
And with that being said 'There's only one Return, and its not of the King, its of the Jedi' -Clerks 2.
Good, but not quite good enough yet (Score:5, Interesting)
The third FA puts it best:
"If you're still playing World of Warcraft and loving it, stick with WoW."
"If you're looking to add to your online gaming options, this game is a fine choice. Beautiful, engaging, deep, different."
"Between online games? Without a doubt, buy it."
That's true. Is it better than WoW? No. Is it worth trying if you're against WoW? Yeah.
I do also have to disagree about how the Tolkeen-y-ness of it all makes it somehow automatically better. Do I really need a deep backstory for my 'kill ten boars' quest? Not really. And because I skipped reading that, I also skipped some thing important. Now I'm lost, and starting not to care. Likewise, after being dumped out of the newbie levels, I have no idea where I am, why I chose to be there, or where I'm supposed to go next. Sure, sure, I've heard the name Bree before, but am I supposed to go there now or later? What's a 'scholar' and what's 'wood lore'? Oh, that can only be crafted by another player? Nice.
What WoW offered was a more distilled version of the online game. Doesn't require much thought but certainly can lead to spending lots of time enjoying it. LOTRO falls short of this, probably on purpose, but somewhat to it's detriment.
Re:Good, but not quite good enough yet (Score:4, Interesting)
But I do have to pick a nit... there's really not much "Tolkeen-y-ness" in this game. It's based 100% on the movies, which themselves have very little Tolkien in them, save in very broad strokes. They didn't even manage to build BagEnd the way Tolkien describes it, let alone anything else.
And the game world as a whole feels much much too small after just re-reading the trilogy. Places that took days and weeks to travel between on ponies take... a couple minutes on foot in the game. Yeah I know, you can't make the game-world anywhere near large enough to be anything close to realistic... but please... this to me is just ridiculous.
That said, if you're bored with what you've been playing and/or are looking for a WoW/EQ clone that's fun to play, this game delivers. But it's not for me.
Parent
The problem with MMOG's (Score:5, Insightful)
for (iLevel = 1; iLevel iMaxLevelAllowed; iLevel++)
{
currentMonsters.hitPoints = X * iLevel;
currentMonsters.attackStrength = Y * iLevel;
currentMonsters.graphics = GetMonsterGraphics(iLevel);
currentTreasures.value = Z * iLevel;
}
And we players crank through the iLevel loop and get bored about the third or fourth time through. It's been this way since D&D was played only on paper with dice. Even with EQ2 and WoW it's still basically the same.
Why?
Two reasons. First, because there are far more players than content producers. And because computers are good at looping. So, the content producers, in a natural attempt to provide more play-time given a limited amount of content production resource use looping and repetition...this is why player's grind.
What does this have to do with LOTR MMO? Not much, except it's still going to, ultimately, be a boring grind.
To get past the boredom, we need an open RPG game where people are encouraged to produce content for other players. Maybe 2nd life fits that criteria. I dunno because 2nd Life doesn't have monsters and spells and wizards, so I've got no interest in it.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The problem with MMOG's (Score:5, Informative)
Not even close. If that's all D&D was to you, you missed out entirely. Leveling was not the goal, storytelling was. If you recall, it took FOREVER to level, so much so that there was no need to define rules for class such as magic users above level 10: no one would ever get there! Sure there were lots of tables to show hit statistics, but loot and XP was up to the DM: books were just guidelines. The goal was to role play, not to level grind, hence the moniker RPG.
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm trying to write the very thing you want. Being a lone developer with a small budget (as in none), and nowt but a dream and gcc, it's going to take a while. I'm probably two years away from a small beta test group, and I have no idea where the 3d models are
LOTRO isn't about equipment! (Score:3, Informative)
Not a WoW clone anymore? (Score:2)
Anyways, I've been WoW-free for about a year now, and I'm enjoying my time actually playing other video games.
MUME - Multi Users in Middle Earth (Score:3, Informative)
The non-PvP parts were great, too; the world was so huge since so many people around the earth have contributed to it(Tolkien has been translated into 30+ languages, so many international fans). I loved exploring it and I also recall my fast-beating heart the first time I had to sneak into Moria for a quest and heard the BOOOM, BOOOM, BOOM, of the Orcish wardrums. http://mume.org/ [mume.org]
Might want to try it out if you want a free game or to see something of the beginning of these types of games. I see that folks have even developed some graphical addons for representing/mapping the rooms of the text-based world.
It's WoW in ME (Score:2)
The problem is "then what". There is very little that differentiates this game from any other game out there. Elves are not Tolkien's elves, they're the same generic elves from other games. Everybody says "no fireballs", but my first level loremaster was tossing fire. Then there's t
Meh. Age of Conan! :p (Score:2)
Magic, everywhere! (Score:3, Interesting)
Magic was always subtle throughout the trilogy, the Hobbit, and even the Silmarillion. Well, far subtler than D&D magic, anyway, and certainly rarer. The passing of the Elves meant that mundane Men were in charge, and while some of them were very talented at war, and a select few had a divine bloodline, they were still just using natural human ability to do what they did.
Now, I'm not necessarily opposed to shoving a massive damage spell up the arse of the nearest Balrog, and I realize that it's far, far too late to change the design of this game if they have made magic overt and pervasive. Much as with the movies, it's a game I'd still consider playing. But I'd still cringe every time my loser groupmates Araporn and Legolass started lobbing fireballs around the room.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not a big MMO fan, but... (Score:2)
While I did sign up for some crafts, I haven't done mu
Not distinct enough. (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is that the grind is the draw. It's a form on conditioning. Perform set actions repetitively to bring about a positive outcome, in this case character growth. This allows new areas, new equipment and new foes to be revealed. That in turn promotes further growth which brings about additional content. It's satisfying to see a character hit that next level. And when it comes down to it real live involves a lot of repetition so it's inevitable that the sort of game that gets closest to emulation life, in some regards anyway, would also involve a lot of that repetition. Some games simple manage to package it more nicely than others. The grind is obscured in a way that makes gameplay enjoyable.
So I don't see that as the major issue here. The problem I have with LOTR Online is that it's yet another fantasy game. It may be one of the originals, but at this point that's irrelevant. I've heard good things about it, but it just doesn't strike me as interesting. Inevitably it comes off as yet another World of Warcraft.
Other genres have been long overdo. The problem is that the ones that have appeared have generally been lackluster or a bit too esoteric to make the sort of impact World of Warcraft has.
LOTR Online may have an edge over WoW in terms of gameplay. Unfortunately, WoW is just too dominant to be so easily unseated from its position as number one. LOTR Online needs to offer something truly phenomenal and distinct beyond it's source material. Of course, this may be just the thing those bored with WoW are looking for. But if people are tired with WoW they might be tired of the fantasy genre in general, going back to my point above.
It's unanimous! (Score:2)
It's supposed to be real purty though.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)