Known for their work on Asheron's Call and Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online is Turbine's latest attempt to gain headway into the massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) market. Given the scale of the story and the debacle that Star Wars Galaxies eventually became, many were understandably concerned about the likely quality ever since previews started appearing back in 2003 when it was known as Middle Earth Online. If that pressure weren't enough, it also had the unfortunate luck of launching against an expansion pack for what is arguably one of the most profitable games of all time, World of Warcraft.
Feel the serenity.
In facing such challenges, you'd hope that Turbine had the courage to change the game, so to speak. They did, and they didn't. Unfortunately, as is becoming depressingly typical, you start by picking a race (limited to Elves, Humans, Hobbits, and Dwarves) and class from a fairly generic set. There's your hunter (nuker), your burglar (de-buffer), your minstrel (priest), your captain (buffer), your champion (damage per second), your lore-master (pets-boy supreme), and your guardian (tank). You're free to customise your character, as long you're happy being a short fat hobbit or a skinny, tall elf. Turbine, here's a free tip - we appreciate that Hobbits are short and fat. We get that. However, if you're going to offer us the ability to customise our characters, it'd nice to be actually able to make them look different. To fit with the back story, there's no magic user - one can't help but wonder whether Gandalf suffered fears of being supernaturally upstaged.
However, things rapidly pick up from there. After the again stereotypical training grounds, you're released into the wilds of Middle Earth to make a living. And, what a world it is - this is one of the few games on the market where the world is actually worth exploring. Veterans of most MMORPGs will probably agree that typically, the geography in the game only serves as a playing field, giving distance between areas. More specifically, big swathes of nothing with small points of interest.
Lord of the Rings Online, in a very welcome change, fills those spaces for the most part - the Shire has the feel of a thriving community, with towns running into each other and hills gently rolling around you. Pop behind Frogmorton, and you're in a small swamp. Follow the river upstream for five minutes, and you wander briefly through a forest before ending up in Budgeford, a town built on farming pigs. From there, it's a short hop, skip, and jump to Maggot's farm or down to the quarry, where forces of Sauron are starting to push through.
Rock on in Hobbiton.
To be fair, the areas do vary significantly in feel. The Dwarven, Elven, and Human realms feel far less "dense" than the Shire. On the other hand, this seems to fit with how Middle Earth was described by Tolkien - the Shire was always a place of safety and happiness. As Frodo's Fellowship wandered into the realms of the big people, the world rapidly became less friendly. The content levels in each area appear to be relatively consistent, it's just that it's a lot more consolidated outside of the Shire, largely because the towns appear to be.
The gameplay mechanics are on par with almost every other big name MMORG out there - you grind, you escort, you deliver, and you collect, frequently one right after the other. What saves this fairly standard formula is the story - unlike some of the more generic cookie-cutter MMORPGs out there, every quest provides backstory about Tolkien's world. As long as you're happy to read, this is a very good thing - many quests are multi-layered, and most build on activities and situations alluded to in the books. And, quest you will - unlike some of the other offerings on the market, the gameplay is very heavily biased towards completing quests, including everything from hunting down barrow-wights to retrieving spoiled pies from hungry hobbits (one of the more ... irritating quests). While combat does offer experience, and while there is a combat XP bonus that builds while you're logged out, the experience you get from fighting takes second fiddle to the bonuses and experience offered through completing quests.
Fancy some lunch?
This doesn't mean there isn't grinding - you'll find yourself regularly running from area to area, whacking wolf after wolf after wolf. However, Lord of the Rings Online offers a slightly different take on the grind - slaughtering a few hundred worms doesn't sound like much fun, and you'd be right. Rather than forcing players to grind for the sake of grinding, the world offers a unique reward system in the form of titles and character traits for completing specific grinds. Kill enough spiders, and you become Bob, the Spider-Foe. Kill a whole bunch more spiders, and you get a trait that boosts your character's stats (such as "patience", natch). As you progress through Middle-Earth you unlock additional area and class-dependent deeds, each of which relates to achieving an objective relating to the environs and ecology around you.
These traits can be virtuous, class-specific, racial-specific, or legendary, and can be equipped at some financial cost with the aid of a Bard. These local musicians also offer access to one of the more innovative concepts in the game - shared music. By purchasing an instrument, players can compose to their heart's content in real-time, allowing other players to bask (or more commonly balk) at their brilliance. Not surprisingly, most gamers apparently aren't very good musicians, at least not unless your tastes run towards the more discordant. Still, it's an interesting addition to the world, and hearing someone rocking out a ska Greensleeves as you run through Hobbiton is definitely a memorable experience.
Player vs. player content is handled through another innovation - rather than bastardise Tolkien's world by allowing Elves to fight Elves and so on, player vs. player content is handled by allowing players to create a level 50 monster in the Ettenmoors, a point of entry for the forces of Sauron. Quests in the realm involve doing evil, and territory is controlled by maintaining ownership of various bastion points, both as a monster and as a player character.
You are going to be so sorry you met this guy.
Graphically, the game shows significant variation. If you’ve got a low-end system, expect to be disappointed - draw distances are short, character animations limited, and visual effects negligible. It's playable, but one questions whether one would really want to. On the other hand, if your system is a reasonable workhorse, the graphics are among the best (if not the best) in the market. With settings tweaked to max, draw distances are phenomenal - if you take the time out to climb a hill and look around, it's possible to see geographic points of interest from miles away. Spotting Brandywine Bridge for the first time on your way to Bree and watching it gradually scale as you draw close is an experience to be savored.
While it would have been nice to have heard the music from the movies, copyright, alas, seems to have raised its ugly head. So, rather than massive orchestral scores with soaring violins and crashing cymbals, we got Hobbits playing fiddles. Or at least what sounds like Hobbits playing fiddles. It's not all bad - it's unoffensive, and is actually quite well composed. Most importantly of all, there's enough variation in composition to prevent it from getting too repetitive. You probably won't remember the tune half an hour after logging out, but is that really a bad thing?
Overall, it works well. It's too early to say whether it's for the hardcore at this point, as the combat is relatively slow and the grinding relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Raids are apparently on the way with the free expansion content coming out in July 2007, and a new area is being opened with more higher-level content. However, and this can't be emphasised enough, it's the most polished MMORPG to be released at launch - the content is there, it's strong, and there's been minimal (if any) downtime and barely any bugs.
Level 50 is pretty easy to make if you're an unemployed Uni student with aspirations of failing, but it offers a measured (and steady) progression for more casual players. If you're enjoying World of Warcraft, there's honestly (and somewhat unfortunately) probably not much reason to move. If, however, you're new to MMORPGs, found World of Warcraft too generic and boring, or found that it required too much time investment, you could do far worse than giving Lord of the Rings Online a shot. It's a solid game, and there's at least a few months of sustained quest playing and exploration for an average player. And, thanks to the well-designed geography and high quality graphics, it's also one of the first games this reviewer has played where the exploration itself is actually an enjoyable part of the game.
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