The Lord of the Rings Online Comments by Rob Fahey

What no mention of the graphics? This is generally considered to be the best looking MMO by some distance and doesn't require a PC from the future to run it.

Looks nice - might be the excuse to install Bootcamp on my Mac.

Certainly one of the friendlier previews this game has had, looks like I might have to put Vanguard to sleep until they fix some of the damn bugs in it.

Can you play as an Orc? If not, there is hardly any point tbh.

Hm, graphics? It kinda looks dull to me.

I deliberately didn't go into the graphics in too much detail - there are a lot of videos and screenshots on the site, and I think people can make their own mind up about the visuals. It's definitely incredibly pretty but the style won't appeal to everyone - I figured it was better to talk in some depth about how the game will play, rather than how it looks, since you can work out the latter from pictures, but not the former.

when i played recently in the beta, i wasn't that impressed with the graphics. The game itself was ok. It was great to start (i did an instanced tutorial rescuing a few hobbits) and it really made me feel a part of the universe. Then when you get released into the main world the game IMO took a turn for the worse. Still if you stick with it, it does offer more, and as Rob says, you can't help feeling great, when you get those little moments that make you feel that you are IN middle earth :)

The music is awful in places though :/

This has peaked my interest and at 5.99 a month should hold me over until Conan arrives.

/nerds up

There's nothing wrong with expanding the gameworld away from the books. Iron Crown did a fantastic job with their source material in the MERP RPG.

If they can keep this away from the usual "kill X orcs for some loot" quests and there's no bloody Hobbit-themed penny whistle tunage then I'll give it a go.

@ Errol
No you can't "really" play with the bad guys, at least at this time. You can play as an Human, Hobbit, Dwarf and Elf.

The way at this point to play with a bad guy is called monster play. Haven't tested it yet so I can't tell much about it.

@ fawe3
The graphics are indeed quiet good for a mmo. If you have a decent pc and you have everything to max it looks really nice. Even on medium it still looks great.

"kill X orcs for some loot"

erm.... you might be disappointed then.. ;)

One thing before I jump at the pre-order button, how is the solo play? There's nothing worse than not being able to find a group and being stuck with very little to do in the mean time.

What I can't stand about fantasy MMOs at the moment is that they all look so much alike. I mean I would love to see something with an artistic style all it's own. Something like the washed out look of a higher-def shadow of the colossus... The graphical feel of this game strays too closely to WoW i think, I dunno I'm just not getting any kind of mythic 'Tolkien' feeling from it at all. Perhaps playing will be different...

Same with Warhammer Online, to me that game should be profoundly grim. The initial shots from way back when indicated that, but now it just looks like - one again - WoW.

Some high-res screenshots half way down page

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-ge...

Kostabi: in the beta my champion is now level 9 and I haven't grouped once - and i've even done two instances! Solo-instances are really well scripted and feel genuinely "epic". I'm quite looking forward to this now!

my alliance WoW guild has disbanded because they have all got the beta of this and have decided its more fun than WoW to play, I've never been a big fan of the books or the films so I'm undecided

@Kostabi

Read http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?art...

"Jeff Steefel: We're trying to stay away from ever actually enforcing grouping. We feel like... You know, I can't remember who it was, someone wrote an article quite a while back about being "alone together" in MMOs, and the truth is that that's something we've all learned. People like to group, but they also like doing things alone, with other people around, feeling like they're in a place that's populated.

The game is designed to allow solo play pretty much throughout. Now that said, there are going to be some high-level instances where you must have a group. There are very few of those - but there are a lot of high level instances or difficult challenges which you could solo, but you'd have to really over-level yourself, practice... But you can do it.

The goal, the curve that we've created for the game in the design is that in the beginning, you can solo anything. Over time, you get to a point where the majority of it is still solo-able, there are just a few things which require the considered effort of a group. The feel of the game should be that as an individual player, I can pretty much experience the game by myself if I want to."

As for the graphics, I will disagree with some posters here. They do have a definite Tolkien feel. And the intro quests for new players do a great job of drawing you into the world.

To those who wonder if you can play evil races: read the preview. That's what it's there for. It explains all about Monster Play (PvM) and how it's a way for you to fulfill your PvP and evil race play needs.

It's also a great feature which means that the PvE game can be balanced without having to make PvP compromises. Smart move.

Thanks Wendelius and Katsumoto. Muchos helpful. :)

/pre-orders.

Is monster play purely in 'battleground'-type areas, or can people monster up a quest instance? That would be very interesting, though prone to abuse...

So how come US & Canadian residents get two in-game items items if they pre-order and EU residents only get one...?

I've got this on preorder after dabbling with it recently. It seems like good fun, lets see how long I stay with it.

Quine - it's essentially "World PvP", in that it's restricted to a specific part of the world, but players wander in and out of that area as they would with any other zone.

I'm in the Euro beta and have really enjoyed my time playing it, there's plenty of variety, the 360 like achievements are good and the graphics really are rather nice.

It's quite fun being able to play your musical instrument in real time too which is pretty unique, although a human captain playing "Sweet Child Of Mine" in Bree town probably had JRR spinning in his grave, just as well I was a bit rubbish...

just tell us if it's shit or not?

The only thing I had trouble with when playing, was that targeting was a bit weird when there are many mobs on the screen.

"just tell us if it's shit or not?"

personally its shit

If you love LOTR then you will love this if you don't then stay away very very generic MMO , Has taken so much from others but haven't improved on any of it , in fact they made it worse everything is instanced Wow did instancing sensibly only dungeons , this makes you zone every building you go into and way to small world.

Best way of describing it is a mod for DDO .

oh just thought of a plus the story instances where you meet the main chars are fun to watch but that's all.



been burnt twice by turbine AC2 and DDO wont go back to them rather stick with vanguard sure it has bugs and no polish but its a proper RPG where you can play magic users and play the bad guys.

Roll on Warhammer on-line later this year.

I don't believe muftak has played more than an hour of the game tops. He's openly wrong about the level of instancing, and could only really get the impression from playing the opening section - which *is* instanced.

KG

As Kieron says, what muftak wrote is bollocks. Each character you create has an instanced intro tutorial, followed by the noob zone where you do a load of quests amongst your fellow players, the storyline also starts here.

Once you complete the instanced end mission in the zone, you are now in the real game and probably have a few levels under your belt. You can skip this if you've done it before and be in the main game at level 2 as soon as you've created a character by the way.

After that individual missions, storyline ones mostly, might be instanced, everything else is fairly normal big world MMO stuff.

It's a big world, it's fun and as someone who enjoyed the movies but can't stand the books I'm just debating which version of the game to actually order.

In another comments thread I questioned anyone's wisdom in being in at launch of an MMO, I've beta tested enough of them to know when they're not ready to ship, I've played in the region of 40 odd hours and have had only 4 CTDs, there's a memory leak somewhere.

It's incredibly polished and something that anyone who's not that interested in WoW should consider as an alternative.

edit: one criticism, they've got to sort out the crafting tool switching, for example if you're an explorer and you've got an axe, a sewing kit and a pick axe the game should switch what you've got automatically in use rather than having to equip it yourself!

I am getting quite excited about this. Even with the expansion WoW has lots its appeal for me a bit. The end game encounters are just getting too fiddly to be fun for me (and I have mt'd all the way through zg and MC pre expansion so I have a fair amount of experience)

Be nice to have a game you can dip into more. and i do like the graphics

Sorry KG, while Vanguard has its problems its shown the world how a lack of instances really contributes to the experience. I *hated* the intro to LotRO. It reeked of pushing the player down a particular path rather than letting them decide and the fact it was instanced just contributed to that feeling of being boxed away from the populace.

Not good, hence I never went back, even after bearing with it, getting into the gameworld and shooting wolves, point-blank, with my bow.

*sigh*

I must say I was less than impressed with the beta, I'm sticking with WoW until Warhammer Online at least :)

"I don't believe muftak has played more than an hour of the game tops. He's openly wrong about the level of instancing, and could only really get the impression from playing the opening section - which *is* instanced.
"

that's weird cause it really is its the same as DDO insane instancing , also if you read around the web the most common crit of this game is the instances .

There is no atmosphere in this game , nice scenery to look out but has just a boring mundane lvling experience ,

Ive not found a quest that excites me , or found a challenging solo challenge very 1 track minded get you to the end while telling a story , this should have been a single player or a free part of a single player game ie diablo style.

any MMO where you can solo all the way to endgame without any trouble (WoW and this ) isn't worth the time of day in my mind it just defeats the object of a MMO , you find the community sucks big time very selfish players as its single minded driven , guilds breaking up all the time cause players are after self gratification and not after the friendship of a good guild .

Ill stick with vanguard cause it makes me group and that's the fun for me , working hard to get a great prize not getting the best stuff given to me with no effort ( WoW again).


Anyhow roll on WaR

I enjoyed it in the begin but it grew dull very fast. I can't explain why - really, there is something about it that just puts you to sleep???

Played the beta. Boring like every other MMOG out there.
The only good MMOGs to come are Age of Conan and Pirates of the Burning Sea. So wait for those.

"This is generally considered to be the best looking MMO by some distance"
Are you kidding me? It looks nothing better than Everquest 2.

Age of Conan looks better than any ego shooter today by the way.

Been playing on the US servers and it’s been quite good fun, though the most fun I have had so far is getting a lute and using the /music command.

Great fun playing the Star Wars music in the LoTR world :)

Game wise, I don't think it will keep my attention for more then a few months (which is probably a good thing - bloody wow addiction).

personally i think the more instancing the better, esp. in a world like Lord of the Rings where you need to be immersed as much as possible. Instances allow the developers to implement awesome scripted sequences they cant in an open play area. It also means you can choose who you experience this epic battle or encounter with, rather than having some 12 year old run into the middle of it and spam duel you

"Ill stick with vanguard cause it makes me group and that's the fun for me , working hard to get a great prize not getting the best stuff given to me with no effort ( WoW again). "

ROFL... if anything WoW is ridiculous about getting the best gear. You need uber guildies to be able to run the end-game stuff (and I hate that BTW).

I never got the intense hate people have for instances. DDO was entirely designed around small party dungeon runs with traps to disable and the like, and worked well at that level.

Sure it's great to have a huge seamless world to explore, but there are other areas of the RPG side of MMORPG that can only be done well using instances. Until we have world-sized worlds with a gajillion quests to do, anyway...

muftak: The idea that the majority of the game is in instances is just openly completely wrong. 95% of your time is outside of instances. Which makes your "DDOnline mod" comparison ludicrous.

I'm not even saying anything about the game's quality. You're just slagging the game off for a reason that's simply not true.*

I'm glad you're enjoying Vanguard, but trolling every other game that isn't like Vanguard with plain lies is a desperate act of a fanboy. Stop it, man.

KG

*In terms of the teaming stuff, ironically, the Instances are the places where you often DO need to team. Soloable content is mainly in the open world.

They should create a game set in the First age. I might buy that.

I'm personally burnt out on MMORPG's after WOW and COH. I wish this one good luck though. I suspect many gamers will feel the same. Why play another of these if its basically WOW all over again with less cartoony graphics? It bears mentioning that their previous game Asheron 2 was quite poor.

As far as the future of MMOs go, the person who gave the go ahead for a 40k game deserves a hug.

griiiiiiind