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.

Comments

Noone gets it right

[Broken scope]

The horde is not evil in WoW, the alliance isn't good either.
Wow has had 3 maybe now 4 large world story events that were pretty hard to ignore. I thought that they were pretty fun, usually they opened up a new area or a new instance.

Re:Noone gets it right

[shinma]

Which is why World of Warcraft's orcs, trolls, and even Forsaken, to a point, are interesting. They break the mold. You may not see it, because you assume they fit old stereotypes, but they don't. The Orcs, Tauren and Trolls are all generally honorable races. In some ways, they are more "good" than either the humans or the elves.

Humans have enslaved Orcs and humiliated them for years, they kept them in concentration camps. Not to mention that one of their faction leaders is Onyxia.
Night Elves are selfish and desperate, and they even made it possible for the Burning Legion to attack.
Dwarves are nearly as bad as the Venture Co. at destroying the environment they live in, and therefore they clash with the nature-loving Tauren.
Gnomes IRRADIATED their own city to drive out invaders, and now they sponge off the Dwarves.
The Draenei are the opposite of the Blood Elves, in that they are ostensibly the only race in the game that can be called unreservedly "good." (This kind of falls flat when you consider hints that the Naaru aren't exactly the angels they're cracked up to be, and the Draenei become simply "naive" rather than truly "chosen" or anything of the sort.)

Orcs were oppressed, put into concentration camps and simply want their own homeland where people will leave them alone now. Sound familiar?
Tauren are members of the Horde because the orcs saved them from the centaurs that were invading their home. They are extremely honorable.
The Darkspear Trolls have forsaken cannibalism and embraced the Shamanistic culture of the Orcs.
The Forsaken have a faction that wants to kill everyone, yes, but other members are described by humans near Dalaran as "possessing more humanity than my fellow humans."
The Blood Elves are, arguably, the only truly "evil" race in the game. But even they are portrayed as more or less out of control, rather than blatantly malicious.

Everyone in Azeroth is generally far more nuanced than simple "good" or "evil." If you choose to only see the races as Tolkienn portrayed them, you're missing out on a lot of the story of World of Warcraft.

For all it's flaws?

[fr175]

I find LOTRO to be nearly flawless when compared to other MMOs. LOTRO had about as smooth a launch as one could hope for and put other MMOs to shame in this regard. Also, allowing characters to transfer from Beta to Live, and discounted pricing for pre-orders, is a welcome "innovation."

The Epic quest series, which follows the hobbits progress in the books, is amazing. The scripted story events are highly immersive and impressive.

Sure, the economy could use some work, and other tweaks can be made. But, a more polished MMO I have not seen on launch, and the potential for expansion is huge.

Re:The whole point..

[Rhys]

Everyone keeps bringing this up as a point "they just want to keep you hooked and paying."

I'm not sure that's the case with LOTRO. The $199 lifetime membership, while steep, has to be a break-even point for Turbine. The other pre-order option is a $10/month lifetime rate, which lets you calculate that at $199 they expect you to play for about 20 months over the lifetime of the game. They've already built in an end to the game. The fact they give a lifetime membership tells you that much. If they are really smart, they're going to run the MMO through the story of ME, and then close it down shortly after the war.

Given a usual rate of expansions (free or paid), you can estimate the story will finish in 3-5 years. In which time the graphics will have started looking fairly dated. Either they'd have to go back and refresh them (lots of art and dev time)... or they could be in their twilight and say, "story's about to be over folks, we're not doing that sorry! But look at our next project: B5 Online!"

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Especially given this is Turbine aka "exploit early, exploit often." They've had one semi-successful games and two flops, one of which closed just after three years.

Re:Not the first...

[theelectron]

I don't think you realize what the game was initially supposed to be. It wasn't a game where everyone starts as a jedi: that was KotOR. SWG was... well, SWG. It was a MMORPG, not a MMOFPS. If you want that, go play PlanetSide. Galaxies had one of the most complex and fun as hell games when it first came out. They decided that wasn't good enough and made it easy to become a jedi and killed the game because now a bunch of people with a12 year old mentality are running around going 'OMG!1 I b jedi!one chk out me leet skillz1!'