Lord of the Rings Online Impressions

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."

I beta tested, so I have a few things to say

[CrazyJim1]

Good:
The quest vs grind ratio is vastly in favor of questing opposed to WOW where grinding was generally better.
It has excellent graphics.
It's run by Turbine, so that means frequent updates to keep the content fresh.
Player vs Monster is fun. I played as a Warg and got over 100 kills and only finally died when lag froze me in place for 30 s

Bad:
Money is more worthless in this game than any other MMORPG. Somehow no newer MMORPGS seem to care to make an economy.
If you get the best lewt in the game, your character will only be about 5-10% better than a storebought character even though you have lots of flashy stats.
Attributes mean about nothing. I won't even post an example of this. Lets just say your stat sheet is a total joke.

Different from WoW?

[MeanderingMind]

I read a number of the articles, but despite claims that this isn't a WoW clone set in Middle Earth as opposed to Azeroth I couldn't find much substance to prove it.

The blogger's argument simply seemed to consist of noting how everything in LotRO was new, while players of WoW would already be tiring of the Burning Crusade and seeking something new. Exactly what makes LotR different from WoW outside of the setting, the slightly different races and the classes?

The screenshots certainly didn't help. The user interface looked as though it was lifted straight out of WoW in almost every regard. I looked at some EQ screenshots just to be sure WoW hadn't done the same thing. Aside from possibly preferring Middle Earth to Azeroth, I'm having difficulty finding a good reason for someone to pick LotRO over WoW.

Is there something I'm missing?

Skip if not a die-hard, skip it if you are.

[Shivetya]

Honestly, unless you just want to see the world of Middle Earth in graphics form I would suggest skipping this MMORPG interpetation of it.

Highs:
Landscapes and landscape features are nicely done.

Water reflectivity encompasses all drawn items

Quest system. The idea is to flood you with them. Some are new variations of FED-EX others are same old stuff, but its an alternative

No Mages... uh

Traits. The idea was good..

Lows:
ALL, and I mean ALL, indoor areas are INSTANCED. This means if you want to enter a building you instance to do so. Even if this means just going in to complete a quest with no more than a click of a dialog.

NPCs use a different animation engine from PCs, hence they are lifeless and dull. Eyes that don't blink, no facial movement, etc. Some do some animated scripts, but only with other NPCs.

Quest system. The idea is to flood you with them. Yet its really the same old stuff repackaged.

Traits, think Talents from WOW but more random. This is where the grind is. Some examples, trying to gain one trait required me to kill literally hundereds of slugs, yes slugs. It seemed all traits were gained this way.

Magic. They simply renamed it. Don't for a minute believe there are not mages and priests in this game. Loremasters are mages pure and simple. They throw fireballs.

Animation system, combat system is boring. Animations don't even take into account parries and dodges so even though the game said you parried its not drawn. Combats can also take place with a sizable distance between combatants making it look silly.

User Interface. Still Turbine's worst suit. They can't code a UI to save their lives. It looks like each part was done by a different team. Some look very "period" - meaning belonging to a fantasy game, while others look like a PDA from Half Life.

Remember first and foremost that this is Turbine. They love to make promises, they just take forever to deliver them or they don't. They also are on record as being the first game company to permit Automated Combat Macros, they also released a major expansion to a game only to announce shutdown 3 months later, and they still haven't delivered half of what they promised for DDO.

Oh, to top it off, those who pre-order get into beta. Nothing unusual there, except this time they can take their beta characters from that beta into release to get a jump on the rest of the people.

Pass. Its LOTR in name only, more like AC2 with hobbits

Re:I beta tested, so I have a few things to say

[CrazyJim1]

You can duel another person by clicking duel. It works something like WOW's duel option.

You may have misunderstood monster play though. Some people play as monsters. Some people play as characters. Then they try and take over castles, quest, or fight each other.

Re:I beta tested, so I have a few things to say

[Fozzyuw]

The quest vs grind ratio is vastly in favor of questing opposed to WOW where grinding was generally better.

Interesting. I rarely 'grind' in WoW, I'm pretty much doing a quest 99% of the time when I'm killing monsters, more so now the X-pac is out. I would be interested to know how you're defining the term 'grind' in this case in the context of quests.

My definition of 'grind' vs 'questing' would be... quest: "Kill 30 specific mobs and return to quest giver to get a large XP bonus and some loot until you level up and move on". Grind: "Sit in the same area and kill anything you come across and hope for loot drops until you level up and move on".

While it can just be considered grinding in a different context, most modern MMO's seem to call this questing, since you can get large exp bonuses and goals to accomplish. So, how does LOTR online make this different? Each new MMO has always claimed to 'remove the grind by given you endless quests to do', only to find that questing was the 'new grind'.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Re:Skip if not a die-hard, skip it if you are.

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty good summary

I'll just add that grouping/socialization is not required except for some specific quests. You don't really build and keep friendships easily in this game as a result. Once a group is done with the task, it pretty much disappears. Also, if you like doing things with your guild, it's an annoyance when people are on different steps of a quest and you have to synchronize everybody to the same point.

I can't stand grinding, and I thought there wasn't any in this game. Then I got to level 40-50 and discovered that legendary traits and the final class quests are epic grinds. They are not fun at all. I tried to complete them partially to see how fast it would go, and it was something that would take a very long time. I didn't bother with it.

Re:Skip if not a die-hard, skip it if you are.

[jazzmodeus]

I haves to echo everything Shivetya said. I'm in the beta and have been for several months playing both a dwarf and an elf. After playing for the first month after I got in, I stopped for about month and would check in from time to time after major updates. The game was repetitive, lifeless, and dull. The scenery is lovely and was quite interesting to see some of the popular places rendered out and explorable. That's about the only compelling part of the game. Combat felt detached, as though there was no visible correlation between activating a skill and actually seeing it executed (mostly on my dwarf guardian, it was a bit better on my elf hunter). Armor seemed completely arbitrary, no matter how much I upgraded it never seemed like I became more resilient in battle. The crafting system was a joke. On my dwarf, my progress was completely halted because of a dependency on a particular product made and available only through another crafting tree. Despite all the minor complaints and compliments I could give the game, it really just came down to being uninspired, derivative, and lackluster. Remove the LoTR skin and there's just not much there to grip someone once the initial novelty wears off.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Saxophonist]

If you don't care about the graphics, you can role-play in a Middle-earth sort of environment at MUME [pvv.org] (telnet link [pvv.org]). Level-related stuff happens there too, but at least it's free-as-in-beer to play.