Marriages between licences and video games are renowned for their inability to produce any offspring other than the ugly, stupid and slightly inbred type. Generally such games become yet another coaster for the coffee mug in record time. It’s a historical point of fact and one that grows exponentially with the license’s fame. Name me one good Superman game, one half-decent TV show spinoff turned computer game, unless you are a trekky of the hardest kind then you will struggle to name me a Star Trek game that was decent. Perhaps the biggest license to turn to MMORPG I can think of is Star Wars… and look how that turned out! Now think how the knees must tremble when, as a developer, you must tackle a license the size of The Lord of the Rings. It’s HUGE! Not only some of the finest fantasy literature in history, but also magnificently adapted into three of the best films I have seen since… well forever! Now add a fanbase that can at times redefine the term ‘anal’ when it comes to getting the details PERFECT (you better make sure Gandalf’s hair is exactly the right length), the complexity of producing a MMORPG that allows the players to feel part of such a brilliantly defined story without upsetting the aforementioned Tolkeinites by allowing them to change it, and I would rate their chances of keeping everybody happy whilst producing a game worthy of the license in the non-existent region! That was the task set to Turbine, perhaps one the most experienced teams in the MMORPG field and what follows will hopefully demonstrate what a fine job they have done.
Your Character In LOTRO you can choose one of the good guys as your ‘main’ character (there are ways to be a evil orc rampaging through villages of cutesy hobbits eating them for breakfast as you go… see Monster Play further down this review). You can be a Human, Hobbit, Elf or Dwarf (male only) and have a good selection of classes. Some are the expected ones for such a license; Hunter (think Legolas), Champion (think anyone who wacks people hard!), Guardian (think Brimli), Bard (think hobbits in general) but curiously lacking are out and out Wizards. There is such a thing as a Lore-Master who can throw the odd fireball but also has a pet such as a Crow or a Bear which I personally find a strange mix but as a class it works quite well. Your skills generally develop in a pretty linear way much the same as EQ2 or Asheron’s Call, but their are some very nice little additions to mix up the characters a bit and provide a wider challenge to character development. The first of these are Traits. Traits can be gained a few different ways, racial traits are awarded according to your chosen race (duh!) and are recieved at the start and automatically as you progress. However others have to be earned by (for example) exploring all the important areas of a piece of the map, or more still can be earned for your class. Use a skill enough and eventually you will master it earning nice little damage boosts or similar. It’s a really cool way to subtley customise your character. Because the number of trait slots are limited, you must pick and choose which you will use pretty much ensuring that you will be unique in your abilities as the guy next to you of the same class/level. If it wasn’t for this intriguing variation, levelling and character development would be very linear, but this side of things really spices it up a bit. So having evaded a potentially monotonous character development path with the unique trait system, is there anything else that I would have like to have seen? Well yes… definitely. I think many players will be dissapointed that their main character cannot be a an evil Orc, goblin, or anything else. WoW benefits greatly from this alternative viewpoint to the story-line and although ‘Monster Play’ negates this somewhat, it is a nagging dissapointment I have constantly in the back of my mind whilst playing.
The Environment As the many screenshots posted throughout this article attest to, the engine for LOTRO is at times stunning. Initial impressions are of a WoW-like engine but after just a few minutes play you see that the engine is far more advanced. The textures, shadows, shading, bump-mapping and other spanglies are all far far superior to the rather flat feel of the WoW engine. Think of it as the WoW engine on steriods and it lends a far more solid and tangible feel to the universe. Of course it’s not just about the technicalities of the engine itself. It is important in a license such as this that the world feels, looks and acts like the one that we have all become so familiar with through the movies, but also there is massive scope for the artwork to be adventurous in other areas like we imagine perhaps when we read the books. Some areas like the Shire really feel authentic and are meticulously crafted to look like a genuine land of hobbits. Rolling green pastures, little hobbit houses, vast meadows of brightly coloured grass that sways gently in the breeze will often give you cause to simply stop and admire the world in which you are now living. Likewise the ‘dungeon’ areas (though not enough of them!) are generally deep, complex, moody and dark with a real sensation of fear about what you may find around the next corner. However it is not all perfection as anyone who starts out as a dwarf will confirm. The exterior snowy mountain areas are bland and the artwork and textures seem far inferior to the rest of the land. Having said all this, the best part is yet to come. Beta testers have not yet been able to download the high resolution textures and one can only wonder at how incredible it will look with even better textures, and how much my PC will be battered by them!
Missions & Storyline One complaint I have at this stage of the game is that (at level 30) there are nowhere near enough instanced dungeon crawls. Lets face it, everyone loves a dungeon crawl and with a group who are ready to batter down elite monsters of all shapes and sizes. Yet there has been only (and I emphasise ‘So far’) a handful of dungeon crawl type missions and the rest have been standard ‘Kill these’, ‘Find That’, and ‘Collect Those’ missions. Whilst they are pretty varied there has been little, to no need to group up with a few people and go do some serious beast battling. I am told the higher levels require more grouping and even raiding, but I would like to see more of it introduced early on. The flip-side of this of course is that people who prefer solo adventuring will be happy and busy. Indeed everyone will be very busy as there is a staggering number of quests to do, and its easy to keep track of them in the well designed journal. As an adventurer there is nothing better than having more quests than you can actually complete without out-levelling some as it gives a sense of scale and choice that you are not following some predetermined path. Of course the toughest part for the developers was always going to be the storyline. With the Tolkein fascists looking for any excuse to blow up in a fury of foul mouthed disdain for anything that slightly bends the literary history of the world, the devs are faced with a challenge of making people feel part of the world and the storyline, without actually affecting something in an adverse way. Right here is where things are a bit of a let down and another reason the evil races should be more of a playable race. Everybody joins the game looking forward to the point at which they will take on the Nazgul, or be part of one of those epic battles, or struggle to fend off the hordes from the keep. Alas no such point has arisen so far in my travels or those of a higher level to whom I have talked. There have been missions where the player meets Gandalf or Strider and is given tasks to ‘distract’ the enemy whilst they go off and do the cool stuff…. but it feels like being patted on the head and being asked to deliver some cookery supplies to Old Mother Hubbard whilst they go off and fight vast legions of evil. Personally I think that if there was an opposing playable faction, we could be sent off to do battle with them and have some fantastic Raid versus Raid clashes as a better alternative.
Monster Play The name is pretty crap, but the idea isn’t bad. I mentioned earlier that is possible to play as the evildoer and this is achieved from levels 10 upwards by speaking to a Monster Controller in Bree. You can speak to him and magically create a pseudo character who can be an Orc, Goblin, Spider, or even Warg! This character is level 40 and will go into a pseudo world where you engage in both PvP and PvE quests against level 40+ players of the good factions. Once you have enough of rampaging through little villages raping and pillaging little hobbits, you exit Monster Play mode and return to your normal character. Whilst playing as a monster you earn points that can buy you character upgrades and temporary buffs but not much else can be achieved for your monster character, though you can attempt to capture various keeps and defend them from the opposing faction. I admit to having only spent 3 or 4 hours in monster play and so can’t speak too much of it’s intricacies, but I can say that although it provides a distraction for a while, nothing really seems to effect anything permanently and thus the novelty soon wears off. I spend most of the time wishing I could really create an evil bastard alt that would develop and be as much part of the storyline as my cutesy hobbit hunter.
Combat and Crafting I know I have lumped these two very different parts of the game together, but that is because there is nothing much to say about them. They are both exactly as you would expect them to be and neither element innovates much. Combat is just like most other MMORPGS, although there are some nice group combos that can be pulled off after being initiated by certain classes. Crafting likewise, nothing new or exciting, but that’s not to say it’s done badly. If you have churned out armour in a previous game… you will likely get to grips with it as quickly as the combat as the premise is the same. You can choose from various groups of proffessions such as Weaponsmith, Tailor, Cook, Farmer etc and will no doubt find it a useful and profitable side game.
Conclusion So far Lord of the Rings Online looks to be a very solid and well presented game. Even in early betas it has been more bug free than the recently released Vanguard. The production values are very high and noone will say it is a bad game which is a huge achievement for a license like this! I am sure even more content and even more development will make this a fine if under achieving addition to anyone’s collection. I just feel as things stand it has ‘lacked the balls’ to really push the boat out. I say a big ’screw you’ to the anal-retentive tolkein-gestapo and let the players develop their own version of the story. Hopefully some future expansion will make this more feasable, but in the meantime that are lot more MMORPGS that are far worse than this, and not many better if you prefer a PvE focused plod through a nice world with some friends.
