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The Destiny of Lord of the Rings Online
An anonymous reader writes "Julian Murdoch over at Gamers With Jobs posits that the recently released Lord of the Rings Online, for all it's flaws, is a new kind of game — the Destiny-Locked RPG: 'The reason that Story sets LOTRO apart is because you know how it ends. This is a luxury World of Warcraft simply can never have. There is no logical end to WoW, where the evil WoW faction of the Horde is victorious, and every member of the good-aligned Alliance dies. The viciously PvP nature of EVE Online means that the story can only sit on the sidelines and inform, not take center stage. But in LOTRO, the game is the story. In this, the game has far more in common with Oblivion than it does with WoW.' The argument here is that a game in which the outcome is known is fundamentally a different (and possibly better) form of gameplay than that the current rage of emergent-gameplay sandbox weak storied games. A challenging idea." It's not so much that the game's ending is already known, as that there is an ending.
> Gandalf you know and love is probably like level 100 or something.
Far greater than that. I know of no games where a topped out caster class could win a melee fight against a giant flaming demon.
And that's ironic because caster classes in games are far better at ignoring giant swords swung at them from point blank range by ogres. Isn't it odd that they can't wear armor because it "disrupts their delicate spell-casting hand movements", yet they can completely ignore a 10 foot tall, 4000 lb. ogre standing right in front of them, swinging a 10 foot long, 200 lb. sword, and not even flinch?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.