The Call On Lord of the Rings Online

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."

Comments

Wrong link

[plaisted]

The link to the full review is wrong. It links to a youtube video of a timelapse of the Wikipedia page on the VT shootings.

Re:The problem with MMOG's

[Sebastopol]

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.

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.