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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."
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Waiting for Warhammer Online.
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.
God spoke to me.
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
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.