With Lord Of The Rings Online: The Shadows of Angmar, Turbine has created a viable contender to the World Of Warcraft's dominance over the MMORPG genre. Sure WOW is not the only MMORPG out there, but there is no denying its stranglehold on the market, and there have been many articles devoted just to its eventual downfall and speculation as to who its successor will be. Now LOTRO may or may not be that entity, but it sure has a strong possibility of taking down the champ and at the bare minimum a bright future as an online game that can be played for years to come.

Based off of the world Tolkien created for his book The Lord of the Rings, the game takes place somewhere between The Hobbit and the The Fellowship of the Ring. Your custom character must fight the rising powers of Angmar and the servants of Mordor while joining with your fellow heroes to help the future fellowship stop the spread of evil. Along the way you meet major characters from the books, who give you quests to help the world which is on the brink of war. Now all of this may be vague, but with various storylines for the various races, LOTRO has successfully created a meaningful overarching tale which compels you through the game.

You can play as any of the four "good" races of Middle-Earth: Human, Elf, Hobbit or Dwarf, each bringing their strengths and weaknesses to the individual classes available. At first I thought that I would frankly not be interested in playing a Hobbit or a Dwarf, but after playing for a while, I was addicted to utilizing the best of each race, fully utilizing my 5 characters per server limit and creating a really kick-ass Hobbit burglar along the way. Each race has its own specific story going into the game with Humans and Hobbits sharing the initial starting area in Archet and the Elves and Dwarves sharing an area outside of Thorin's Hall. These quest-lines showcase the depth in which the developers went to provide an immersive experience. Right from the get-go, the quests show maturity and thought, as opposed to the randomness of questing presented in WOW; your actions serve a definite purpose.

Beyond choosing a race, you must also choose a class which defines your fighting style, although not all races have all class options available to them; i.e. you could never have an Elf burglar, because hey, Elves just don't do that. Each race does have an effect on the class statistics with generalities such as Dwarves make better guardians because they are tougher and Elves make better hunters because of their higher agility. For each player there is a class that will work for them; whether it is the champion who specializes in melee or the captain who excels in team building buffs, half of the fun of the game is finding the class that unleashes your true potential.

Gameplay is directly related to the character that you build; a Human lore-master plays completely different from a Dwarf hunter. Although it took me a while to get down my preferred playstyle, it is easy enough for a beginner to pick up yet complicated enough for die-hards to master effectively. Combat controls are intuitive enough, and mouse hovering provides better insight into actions you can take or status effects inflicted on your character, making for a very easy navigation through the online world. Where the game falls slightly short is in the group user interfaces and chatting- not quite as easy as WOW; I still trip over shortcuts to effectively communicate with the groups around me or specific people. While not horrible in any form of the word, it still shows potential room for improvement as the game evolves over time.

The majority of leveling up is accomplished by the plethora of interesting quests available to you. Aside from the ever-present "epic" quest which runs from the beginning of the game to its eventual conclusion, there are numerous available quests that show just as much depth of thought and compelling qualities as the main line, forcing you to see individual sub-plots through while gaining valuable experience. Different from WOW, grinding does not really get you anywhere, and completing quests really impels your leveling; this was a welcome improvement and awesome motivation factor.

In addition to the random quests, there are the occasional instances which are just as fun and the group fellowship quests that encourage you to get together with others. Roughly from my estimates it is approximately 65 percent solo and 35 percent group, which for me turned out to be a nice ratio and forced me as a non-group guy to really jump in and enjoy the fellowship dynamics. And similar to the guilds of WOW, if you find a group of people you enjoy playing with, you can always form a Kinship to further your group play.

If you get tired of questing, there are more options available to you. You could focus on crafting, which gives you a profession with a defined group of three skills to improve. Some professions are better than others, and some make more sense for individual classes; while cooking isn't one of my favorite skills, it does have benefits for hunters who gain the ability to build campfires out in the wilderness from which cooking buffs may be created. Every profession contains at least one gathering skill and one production skill, giving the player means of making money, while still having to hunt for ingredients or resources. I just had all of my characters send each other stuff so they could each progress their individual crafting levels. And like leveling your character, leveling your skill became its own addiction as you slowly progress up to creating better equipment or gathering more valuable materials. Crafting quests deviated from the norm to encourage you to talk to others and trade for materials/items that you couldn't get without having that profession to begin with, and while I mostly avoided these quests because of their lackluster rewards, they do serve a grander purpose in filling out the game.

Graphics will depend upon processor, RAM, and other constraints, but for my nominal system with no fancy bells or whistles, the game has good graphics but falls into the trap that most games aiming for realism fall into, trying to implement that realism. With WOW you are given a little bit of room for error because the game is cartoonish to begin with, but with LOTRO it successfully captures Middle-earth while showing it could improve slightly as the game matures. But luckily its system requirements don't go to the opposite end of the demand spectrum a la' Vanguard and alienate potential players who don't have top of the line computers on which to play. Essentially, LOTRO strikes the perfect balance between graphical content and resource usage without becoming taxing for the players' computer.

If crafting doesn't float your boat, then you could always try playing as a monster. Similar to the Player versus Player modes in WOW, playing as a monster gives you a welcome diversion from the main line, as you spend destiny points to increase your monster or go on monster quests to buff your character. In the bigger picture, this seems to be an under-utilized section of the game which has tremendous potential in the future to really take-off. While not of the scale of Horde versus Alliance, I hope the future expansions embrace this aspect of the game and give it a more in-depth gameplay.

Where the game truly takes the base of MMORPGs and excels is with the addition of Deeds and Titles. Beyond the questing, mindless grinding is given an interesting and compelling purpose as you kill spiders, slugs or whatever. As you slowly farm these nuisance-beings, you first attain displayable titles such as Mork: Spider-foe and then work towards completing advanced levels which give you equipable character enhancements. These bonuses really stack up if you effectively farm the correct beasties, or in the case of area specific deeds, you can use your exploration skills to find all the ruins in Ered Luin or all the farms in the Shire. Regardless, your meandering serves a point as you gain these buffs, and as I found out, these deeds can become quite fun and addictive.

As fun as the game is, it still begs the question: what about the future? The world presented is huge but still a small section of Middle-Earth, and the quests are so numerous that I would expect it would take at least a year for the average gamer to really reach a logical stopping point. But by then expansions could add additional areas already referenced by the books, which would fit in nicely with the already existing content. I could envision two major expansions later, even approaching the gates of mordor, providing a large potential for playing options. All of which leads me to say there is so much available for future releases that this game is assured for at least another two years if not vastly more.

While I can't say this game will be the death of WOW, it sure does give a solid gameplay with amazing storylines and characters that showcase the maturity of the material while maintaining the fun of just playing. Only time will tell how Turbine will run with what they have, but with successful patches through the beta and a more than successful transition to open play, Turbine has eliminated many of the annoyances blizzard forced on people with server downtime and just plain losing equipment. All of this bodes extremely well for the success of this game, and I am just glad to say I was there at the beginning.

May 11, 2007 | 0 comments
Paul Bishop