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| The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (PC) | ||
| Publisher: Midway Games / Turbine | Developer: Turbine | |
| Genre: Persistent Online RPG | Release Date: 04/24/2007 | |
It hasn't been an easy journey for The Lord of the Rings Online. What first began in 2003 as Middle-earth Online has been plagued by name changes, publisher changes and a huge retrenchment in which the developers essentially went back to the drawing board and rebuilt the product from scratch. Unlike the fantasy stories the game is based on, this is usually a recipe for disaster in the real world, but like the hairy-footed heroes of Tolkien's novels, the development team at Turbine soldiered on and emerged triumphant, creating an exceptional MMO that can easily stand among the best in the genre.
The basic gameplay of The Lord of the Rings Online will be immediately familiar to anyone who's played the original EverQuest, World of Warcraft or, really, just about any MMO released in the last five years. The four racial choices each offer an array of benefits and drawbacks and there are a number of classes that fall more-or-less into basic MMO roles such as tank, healer, crowd control, and ranged and melee DPS. Combat is a familiar series of turn-based rounds punctuated by the player triggering a variety of special attacks and watching the cooldown meter on the interface.
he world is filled with quests to complete, instances to experience, items to craft, PvP that (while segregated from the main game) makes for a nice diversion, and an end-game consisting of several high-end raid zones in Northern Angmar. There's almost no learning curve for anyone even slightly familiar with how an MMO works, and the game's first five or six character levels are structured as a fun tutorial for MMO newbies. Far from being a weakness, the lack of innovation in basic gameplay structures actually turns out to be a strength. It may indeed be WoW-with-Hobbits, but there's something to be said for not fixing what isn't broken.
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
The real genius of The Lord of the Rings Online lies in the way it mixes up familiar MMO structures to offer a constant stream of player accomplishments -- the "ding" moments -- beyond the obvious ones of increasing character level and acquiring new gear. The heart of this dynamic (and the game's best innovation) is the "deed log." This is an achievement-like system of rewards given out for accomplishing things. There are deeds for almost every type of activity in the game. Kill four or five brigands in Ered Luin, for example, and the player gets a message that they've uncovered the "Brigand-slayer" deed. Killing 30 more brigands entitles the player to have "Defender of the Halls" underneath his or her name. Kill 60 more and the player gets the "Justice" trait -- one of a series of permanent buffs that can be loaded on a player by bards in towns. There are exploration deeds accomplished by visiting Elf ruins or scouting out the enemy, class deeds won by just using class skills over and over, racial deeds ferreted out by discovering hidden conditions, and even legendary deeds acquired by fighting the most powerful enemies in the game.
As a practical matter, the deed log operates as a highly customizable talent system. Since traits can be swapped in and out, acquiring the right ones can drastically impact the way a class is played. The right traits can help a Lore-master to become a ranged DPS class or build up their animal companions to bolster their crowd-control capabilities. A Captain can be an effective off-tank with the right system of traits or can just hang back and act as a buffer in an instance, setting up "Fellowship Conjunctions" that offer boosts to damage output or replenish health or mana bars. This customizability also helps in party formation since as players enter higher-level areas, there are situations in which every class gets the opportunity to shine and there really isn't any situation in which a particular class is "useless."
The impact of the deed log system is subtle and profound: it dramatically cuts down on the level of grind in the game. Since deeds are broken up by regions and can be incremented, it makes almost every encounter in the world an opportunity for advancement. During the long run to a quest location, it's actually OK to get jumped by a wandering monster, even if said monster doesn't offer any experience points. If it's a wolf, the player may be working on his or her "Wolf-tamer" title or "Advanced Wolf Slayer" which offers a +1 to the Zeal trait. If they've completed that, there are still class ability deeds that can be worked on during a fight, or the creature may drop a rare piece of crafting material. During my first 20 levels, I spent considerable time doing very low-level quests and fighting low-level monsters that offered no experience points at all because they gave me the opportunity to complete deeds. It stretches the available content for the player by making it worthwhile to run quests that they've out-leveled.
Words and Music
One of the best elements of the game is the emphasis on storytelling as an integral part of the play experience. Every player character starts their lives in one of four multi-layered instanced areas. Elves, for example, start in a short tutorial course that takes place during the burning of Edhelion, an Elven city destroyed by renegade Dwarves called Dourhands. This tutorial area is designed to teach the basics of movement, equipment, combat and questing, but far from being a one-off zone, the characters and story elements in that area continue to come up even as characters level. Much of the Elf and Dwarf starting area of Ered Luin is about questing to re-establish the bonds of trust between Elf and Dwarf that have been broken by the Dourhands. There's even an epic quest-line that goes through the game's current level cap of 50 in which the rewards for completing "chapters" of the line is a string of pre-rendered cutscenes that show the impact of the character's actions on the Fellowship's journey. The bad news is that these pre-rendered cutscenes are rather fuzzy and filled with poorly animated 3D characters.
I also really enjoyed the game's player-created music system. Once a player reaches level five, they can purchase the ability for their character to play an instrument using the number keys on the keyboard. While it has no in-game effects, this simple-to-use system has become amazingly popular. It's not unusual to walk through the center of a town like Bree and see six or eight players hanging out and jamming in front of the town hall. Player bands and orchestras have formed and go on tours of the game's cities and as players translate real-world songs into the game's music system, trading new music has become a hot topic on the official message boards. In fact, it's not unheard of for players in the middle of an instance to occasionally break out into an impromptu performance when one of their members goes AFK.
The basic gameplay of The Lord of the Rings Online will be immediately familiar to anyone who's played the original EverQuest, World of Warcraft or, really, just about any MMO released in the last five years. The four racial choices each offer an array of benefits and drawbacks and there are a number of classes that fall more-or-less into basic MMO roles such as tank, healer, crowd control, and ranged and melee DPS. Combat is a familiar series of turn-based rounds punctuated by the player triggering a variety of special attacks and watching the cooldown meter on the interface.
he world is filled with quests to complete, instances to experience, items to craft, PvP that (while segregated from the main game) makes for a nice diversion, and an end-game consisting of several high-end raid zones in Northern Angmar. There's almost no learning curve for anyone even slightly familiar with how an MMO works, and the game's first five or six character levels are structured as a fun tutorial for MMO newbies. Far from being a weakness, the lack of innovation in basic gameplay structures actually turns out to be a strength. It may indeed be WoW-with-Hobbits, but there's something to be said for not fixing what isn't broken.
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
The real genius of The Lord of the Rings Online lies in the way it mixes up familiar MMO structures to offer a constant stream of player accomplishments -- the "ding" moments -- beyond the obvious ones of increasing character level and acquiring new gear. The heart of this dynamic (and the game's best innovation) is the "deed log." This is an achievement-like system of rewards given out for accomplishing things. There are deeds for almost every type of activity in the game. Kill four or five brigands in Ered Luin, for example, and the player gets a message that they've uncovered the "Brigand-slayer" deed. Killing 30 more brigands entitles the player to have "Defender of the Halls" underneath his or her name. Kill 60 more and the player gets the "Justice" trait -- one of a series of permanent buffs that can be loaded on a player by bards in towns. There are exploration deeds accomplished by visiting Elf ruins or scouting out the enemy, class deeds won by just using class skills over and over, racial deeds ferreted out by discovering hidden conditions, and even legendary deeds acquired by fighting the most powerful enemies in the game.
As a practical matter, the deed log operates as a highly customizable talent system. Since traits can be swapped in and out, acquiring the right ones can drastically impact the way a class is played. The right traits can help a Lore-master to become a ranged DPS class or build up their animal companions to bolster their crowd-control capabilities. A Captain can be an effective off-tank with the right system of traits or can just hang back and act as a buffer in an instance, setting up "Fellowship Conjunctions" that offer boosts to damage output or replenish health or mana bars. This customizability also helps in party formation since as players enter higher-level areas, there are situations in which every class gets the opportunity to shine and there really isn't any situation in which a particular class is "useless."
The impact of the deed log system is subtle and profound: it dramatically cuts down on the level of grind in the game. Since deeds are broken up by regions and can be incremented, it makes almost every encounter in the world an opportunity for advancement. During the long run to a quest location, it's actually OK to get jumped by a wandering monster, even if said monster doesn't offer any experience points. If it's a wolf, the player may be working on his or her "Wolf-tamer" title or "Advanced Wolf Slayer" which offers a +1 to the Zeal trait. If they've completed that, there are still class ability deeds that can be worked on during a fight, or the creature may drop a rare piece of crafting material. During my first 20 levels, I spent considerable time doing very low-level quests and fighting low-level monsters that offered no experience points at all because they gave me the opportunity to complete deeds. It stretches the available content for the player by making it worthwhile to run quests that they've out-leveled.
Words and Music
One of the best elements of the game is the emphasis on storytelling as an integral part of the play experience. Every player character starts their lives in one of four multi-layered instanced areas. Elves, for example, start in a short tutorial course that takes place during the burning of Edhelion, an Elven city destroyed by renegade Dwarves called Dourhands. This tutorial area is designed to teach the basics of movement, equipment, combat and questing, but far from being a one-off zone, the characters and story elements in that area continue to come up even as characters level. Much of the Elf and Dwarf starting area of Ered Luin is about questing to re-establish the bonds of trust between Elf and Dwarf that have been broken by the Dourhands. There's even an epic quest-line that goes through the game's current level cap of 50 in which the rewards for completing "chapters" of the line is a string of pre-rendered cutscenes that show the impact of the character's actions on the Fellowship's journey. The bad news is that these pre-rendered cutscenes are rather fuzzy and filled with poorly animated 3D characters.
I also really enjoyed the game's player-created music system. Once a player reaches level five, they can purchase the ability for their character to play an instrument using the number keys on the keyboard. While it has no in-game effects, this simple-to-use system has become amazingly popular. It's not unusual to walk through the center of a town like Bree and see six or eight players hanging out and jamming in front of the town hall. Player bands and orchestras have formed and go on tours of the game's cities and as players translate real-world songs into the game's music system, trading new music has become a hot topic on the official message boards. In fact, it's not unheard of for players in the middle of an instance to occasionally break out into an impromptu performance when one of their members goes AFK.
In Service to The Eye
LOTRO has an interesting (though heavily segregated) PvP element. The majority of the game is PvE-only and everybody must play on the side of the good guys. Starting at level 10, however, a player may look into a "fell scrying pool" and enter the body of one of five different level 50 monsters in service to Sauron. This "Monster Play" system takes place in an area called the Ettenmoors. High-level player characters can enter and exit this area freely while monster-players cannot. The area houses a number of monster-infested ruins including three castles, some logging camps, a small Hobbit village and cave-and-tunnel complexes. Each of these areas comes with its own contingent of elite level 48-50 NPCs to protect it. There's a parallel quest and deed-and-title system that mirrors the one for a player's main character. The area also has leader board rankings and a system of "destiny points" that can be spent on either temporary buffs for a main character or to improve one's monster.
The genius of the system is that it offers PvP to players who really want it in a structured environment with tangible rewards. For those who hate PvP, they need never enter the zone nor worry about balance shifts made for PvP (since Free Peoples players can't fight each other, only monster-players) affecting the PvE game. Even better, because it's mostly segregated from the rest of the game there's not much risk and great reward associated with entering the zone. That will hopefully encourage more players to do it.
The down side of the system is that it is dependent on player participation and there seem to be very few players willing to give the Ettenmoors a try. This is in part because there aren't many high-level players yet, but I've spent considerable time in the Ettenmoors as a monster doing quests and fighting NPCs to get essentially free destiny points and most of the time I'm in there alone without even other monster-players to keep me company. Hopefully this will be remedied as players hit the level cap because Monster-play is too much fun (based on my pre-launch experience) to just be left to wither on the vine.
If there's one major sticking point with LOTRO, it would have to be the economy. In part, the economy is still young and people have yet to figure out just how much objects are worth. The game also controls its money supply so tightly that it makes Ebenezer Scrooge look like a philanthropist. The big culprit is fixed costs for players. Repair, class training, traveling, postage and crafting components are outrageously expensive and many characters hit level 20 completely broke.
The game's crafting system ties into this. It's well-designed in theory and is really enjoyable as far as it goes, but at this writing it's economically insane. Farming is hopelessly broken because cooks (who farmers are supposed to supply) can get their components cheaper from NPC vendors. Tailoring recipes routinely call for components from creatures four to five levels above the item level. Gear suitable for a level 10 player, for example, require components from level 14 and above creatures which means that tailors can essentially only make gear for lower-level players. As a result, there's not a whole of trade in those items and won't be until players reach levels where they can afford to sink money into the profession. Certain professions, though, especially anything involving medium or heavy armor, are practically a broken slot machine when it comes to the amount of money they can generate. When a big chunk of the player base is broke and the rest are swimming in money, that's an issue that needs to be addressed.
The game does have a few technical issues. There have been a couple of times during which the game's login servers were overloaded and I had a problem getting in. The client seems to run fairly smoothly although I did experience noticeable lag in Bree when it was crowded. This could usually be remedied just by turning off the floating names. There are a number of escort and story quests that are bugged. Sometimes story-based NPCs don't leave or die when they're supposed to, denying the player credit for a completed quest. This isn't a consistent bug, either, as often dropping and re-running the quest or re-logging would solve it. I also experienced the occasional crash to desktop. None of these were more than occasional annoyances and certainly didn't dissuade me from loading the game up again to continue my adventures.
Finally, the game's graphics merit praise. Those who've always wanted to wander the fields of the Shire, hang out in Rivendell, hoist a few at the Prancing Pony or visit Tom Bombadil will be in heaven in The Lord of the Rings Online. This is an amazingly beautiful game filled with stunningly gorgeous forests, stark mountains, placid lakes and fields filled with gently waving flowers. Indoor and city spaces are filled with an eye for detail and enormous respect for Tolkien's work. While walking through Thorin's halls in the Blue Mountains or the streets of Bree, one is filled with a sense of rightness about the world -- the sense that yes, this really is what Middle-earth looks like.
The Road Goes Ever On...
The Lord of the Rings Online had a difficult journey to make it to launch day. Never mind the impossible expectations of legions of Tolkien fans who probably know the lore better than Tolkien himself did, the game also had to be a fun MMO in its own right. That The Lord of the Rings Online could whether the storm of player expectations and its development troubles and still be a decent game is an achievement in itself. That it could go through all that and come out the other side as an exceptional entry into the genre is nothing short of miraculous. Oh, the game has some shakedown issues it needs to deal with -- particularly the economy -- but all told, The Lord of the Rings is off to a great start and its future looks boundless.
