Lord of the Rings Online - The Shire

Desolate

The villagers look like they're having fun skating.

They really should focus on the epic scale MMO's (and the movies) "usually" have. The whole gno... i mean hobbits in there happy little village doesn't quite do it for me, but the ingame footage looked good.

Graphically not better then Wow, but the animation quality looked quite poor.

People often look at Wow screenshots and dont realise just how fluid it is. I have tried to play eq II, but the jerkyness of the animation and experience really put me off.

i like how easy wow is and i like the depth that EQ2 has. This looks very nice as well, but its hard to tell what this plays like from this video, so i guess the proof in the pudding, is in the eating...

It does indeed look like the little Frodo's and Samwise's are floating around the village on a Hoverboard.

Sure, the textures are clean and the poly count is quite high in comparison to WoW, but the horrid animation sucks the life out of it.

It is very pretty though, and quite reminiscent of the film.

I remember seeing previews of RF online, laughable as it was.

Sorry Codemasters, but you're going to pull something pretty good out of the hat after your recent flops.

Ho hum.

LOTR is of course an incredible franchise but in Turbines hands Im expecting a lightweight formuleric EQ/WoW clone which will probably be canned within 2 years at most. I mean..this is the company that made a turkey out of D&D....D&D FFS!!! It should really have been in the hands of a games rather than MMOG company since the later have proven that MMOG technical competence doesnt neccessarily translate to games design (Star Wars anyone?).

damnit dont mention RF Online ¬¬ i wanted to like that game so very much, but it was so very bad....

nothing special... looks like an alpha or very early beta...

Fairly pretty, but poor animation.