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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.
The problem is I really don't give two figs about Blizzards "story" behind Warcraft, for several reasons.
First, it's obviously just taking Tolkien's fantasy elements and using them for their own purpose - which isn't necessarily bad, except for the following reasons:
A. It's not nearly as well written as Tolkien's works.
B. Blizzard's fantasy world is a lot more bland and watered down.
Second, They make the games first, based only on a very rough draft of the "story" and then finish the story afterwards so it "fits" the game. And in the end, you're still left wondering exactly how they got from one game to the next story-wise; some parts just don't work out no matter how much they try to explain them away.
Third, I really just don't care for a PC version of Tolkien's world, which is all Warcraft really is. "Orcs are bad. No wait, humans are bad for enslaving the 'bad' orcs. No wait, neither is really good or bad."
And no, LotRO is no better. In fact it's worse, as they didn't even make their own watered-down story. They just based their game on the movies, which are just Tolkien's story itself watered down to be made "comprehensible" for the average movie-goer.
If someone ever did make an MMORPG really based on Tolkien's world (not necessarily involving any of the events in his story) it would be a much better game than any fantasy MMO we've seen yet. But I'm not holding my breath.
So basically, you ignore what someone wrote in a post, and then proceed to respond based on what you assume they posted.
I read Blizzard's Warcraft "lore". It didn't take long to figure out it really wasn't worth the bother. After which point I started ignoring it.
I'm going to make the wild leap to the conclusion that this is likely a good deal more than you can say for yourself about reading Tolkien's books.