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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."
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.
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.
I've been playing my way through game content since 1974. Here's what the dungeon games all resolve down to:
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.