The Lord of The Rings Online, or “LoTRO”, is being produced by Turbine Inc. This is the same company behind Dungeons & Dragons Online (aka “DDO”).

It’s no secret that DDO is not especially popular. It breaks a great many fundamental rules of Dungeons & Dragons and in many people’s opinion it is not a good representation of D&D. I will be straight out about this and say that I am one of the people who have that opinion.

Turbine themselves gave a significant blow to their reputation with an expansion for Asheron’s Call 2. They released the expansion whilst knowing full will that they were going to pull the plug on the entire game, yet they gave no indication that this was going to be the case. As far as I know no refunds were offered. This was very under handed behavior.

Why do I bring all of this up in my post about LoTRO? It’s because I want everyone to know what my bias is. There are a lot of people who either rant or rave about something but their point of view is never fully disclosed. I believe that it’s important to lay all of the cards out on the table.

With all of that said it may be surprising, then, that I don’t have a solely negative point of view of LoTRO. Thus it’s also important to point out that I am not a huge fan of Tolkein’s writing, but I loved the movies and the animated version of The Hobbit.

The Lord of The Rings Online is designed in such a way that it mirrors, but does not completely replicate, what I like to think of as “the Guild Wars approach”. LoTRO places the player’s new character into an instanced location in which they are the only actual human. The entire setting is scripted and is used to introduce the player to the game and to kind of explain why the character eventually finds them self in the position that they’re in.

After this instanced introduction is completed the game then loads a cinematic. In the case of the Elf, the cinematic explains that a significant amount of time has passed since what happened in the instance and what the player is about to see. You then find yourself in the same location, only it’s now ruins, and you learn that “centuries have passed”.

As a new human character you will find yourself inside of a jail cell, apparently having been knocked out. A Ranger is in the cell with you and helps you to escape, only to find himself face-to-face with a horse mounted Nazgûl. He’s stabbed, the scene ends, a cinematic plays, and you find yourself in a town. The ranger is weak and one of your tasks will soon be to collect the “weeds” needed to cure him of the Nazgûl blade’s poison.

The hobbit sets out to deliver a piece of mail. Along the road you come across another hobbit who has a brief encounter with a horse mounted Nazgûl, so you both take a detour. The dark rider is encountered again, elves save you, and you encounter the same ranger that you deal with as a Human.

The human and hobbit introductory story lines quickly converge, and you find that each race begins in the same location. Sadly, this means that you experience identical story lines and quests whether you play a hobbit or a human. The only game play difference between the two is the introductory instance.

This is where The Lord of The Rings begins to fall apart in my opinion, and it’s a representation of what I consider to be “an alarming trend” in the MMO industry. Development studios are taking a very single-player approach to the production of MMORPGs, and Turbine is taking the lead in that approach in so far as subscription based MMORPGs are concerned. The game Dungeons & Dragons Online is a stark example of this.

Rather than creating a full fledged world, development studios are relying on instancing and on creating identical experiences for every race and class. You can clearly see the single-player, module level design mindset in the development of Turbine’s games.

However, LoTRO’s use of instancing is not as flagrant as what is seen in Dungeons & Dragons Online (or as in ArenaNet’s Guild Wars, where its use makes a great deal more sense). The world of LoTRO allows players to interact with each other where ever they may be with what seemed to be only a few exceptions. The world also seems a great deal more “alive” than DDO’s or Guild War’s. So while it definitely has a modularized feel to it thanks to the instancing and to the use of zones, it’s not quite to the degree that is experienced in other title’s.

The game world of LoTRO is beautiful. The artists have done a very good job at creating the world itself (see some screen shots below). The clothing fits the characters very well and looks natural, the characters look pretty good (though I would enjoy more customization options than a simple selection of hair and faces) and, in general, everything looks great. My only real complaint about the graphics of the game is that I wish people would stop using that cheesy ass lens flair effect - my character’s eyes are not made of glass!

The audio in the game is pretty average. The music and sound effects certainly get the job done and they were not distracting to the game play experience. I expect very few to find this an area worth praising, but I also don’t expect anyone to hold the audio against the game in any serious way.

Combat and fighting was also rather average. Your character auto attacks, you select specific moves from your hot key, and that pretty much describes it. There are some exceptions, such as the “Captain” class, which has yells in combat that act as buffs or as an opener for an additional, more powerful strike. Like the music, I don’t find anything to complain about but I also don’t have a lot of praise.

All in all, The Lord of The Rings Online is a decent enough title. It’s right on the cusp of being a little too instanced for me, and the use of zones is kind of a ghetto thing to do in an MMORPG these days, but it wasn’t quite so bad that it pushed the game from an OK title into the “this has a subscription fee?” category.

Speaking of subscription fees, if you pre-order the game now you can get a “Founder’s” account. This will allow you to pay $10/mo rather than the normal price, which is probably going to be the usual $15/mo. I am of the opinion that $10/mo is exactly what LoTRO should be asking for from everyone.

If you have a great deal of money burning a hole in your pocket you could also pre-order and choose the $200 Founder’s option. This option allows the player to make a one time payment of $200 and never have to pay a subscription fee.

In both cases if you cancel your account it will remove your “Founder’s” status and to resubscribe to the game at a later date you would need to pay their regular subscription cost.

They’re some interesting options, to be sure.

An Important Note About Performance: I am using Vista 64bit and I have an NVidia graphics card. The performance of NVidia products in Windows Vista is so atrocious that some people are in the process of starting a class action lawsuit against NVidia. See NVidiaclassaction.org for more information about that. As such, it would make no sense what so ever for me to comment on the performance of Lord of The Rings Online.

~Steph

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