It might not be one MMORPG to rule them all, but Turbine has still forged a winner.
In your first few moments, it's the story that pulls you in. Just like Bilbo famously leaving Bag End without his pocket handkerchief, you are thrown unexpectedly into the great events of the story of the Lord of the Rings. Frodo has fled the Shire., and your first quest finds you along the road toward Bree, when suddenly the screen darkens as one of the Black Riders, searching for the Ring, comes into view.
Whichever race you choose (Hobbit, Elf, Dwarf or Human) you'll find yourself caught up in a different part of the story. A series of storyline quests takes you from your starting point into the world at large, punctuated with climactic battles and events. As a player, you still have complete freedom to go where you like and do what you want -- but the story backbone always gives you something to return to, even if you have taken a few detours.
And once you get a look at the game world, you're going to want to take a few detours. Middle Earth looks great. The rolling landscape feels solid and fairly realistic, but doesn't lose touch with its fantastic roots. Settlements, towns and ruins hide behind each hill, and seeing distant mountains crowned with stars is a downright elvish experience.
You'll be rewarded for exploring the world, too. In addition to quests, which lead you to various locations throughout an area, LOTRO keeps track of what you've seen and accomplished with a system called Deeds. Once you have visited all of the Dwarf-ruins in an area, for instance, you'll accomplish a Deed and earn a new title or a bonus point to one of your attributes.
Although Tolkien fans will enjoy exploring Middle Earth, they may be disappointed to find the lore of the world is not as deep as they might like. Many of the ruins are just scenery, and the histories and cultures of the various areas don't live up to the rich tales Tolkien wound through all of the locations in the novels. But even with these omissions, the world still feels right.
For the game to last past a few hours of story and exploration, it's got to be fun to play. And here developer Turbine sensibly decided that if it ain't broke, they shouldn't fix it. Like World of Warcraft, LOTRO's game mechanics are solidly designed, easy to learn, and very polished. The game features seven classes with roles so well-understood that they are even identified as "buffer," "crowd control" and "tank" on the character-creation screen (or at least they were during the beta test.)
Lord of the Rings' combat has the familiar slow-to-medium pace of most MMOs, and borrows liberally from the WoW-standard user interface. The class balance is good, and the characters themselves prove distinctive and fun, from the dual-wielding Champion to the concussive shouts of the Minstrel.
If there are a lot of familiar elements of the gameplay, there are also a lot of unwelcome ones. Apart from the storyline, most quests are of the tedious "collect ten pelts" variety. There's plenty of spawn-camping, even in the beta, and the high respawn rates ensure that half of your fights are going to be joined by a newly-minted monster.
Turbine has added a few evolutionary features -- mostly to keep the gameplay tightly aligned with the story and ethos of Tolkien's novels. For example, the death penalty is represented as Dread -- which also afflicts you when you get too close to a Black Rider. Most famously, Turbine has implemented player-vs-player combat as "Monster Play." Because two elves would not fight in Tolkien's world, instead players are able to take on the identity of a servant of Sauron to fight other players. You can't play the whole game as an Orc -- but it's a great diversion from the serious business of saving the Ring.
And as unimportant as it sounds, you don't look for a group - you look for a Fellowship. This isn't so much a change of game mechanics as it is a change in attitude. It's a reminder that LOTRO isn't just a game: it's a world and a story that both players and developers truly care about. Maybe that's a small step toward a more respectful player culture, but it's still a welcome one.
It's been a long time coming, but Turbine's brilliant new MMO has opened up Middle-earth for the masses.
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.
The 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.
"Gold and Jools, They Say!"
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.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Turbine's latest MMORPG delivers.
Put aside the Lord of the Rings license for a second. It's an insanely popular fictional universe, the foundation for a majority of today's fantasy works in games and literature, and of course it's going to color perceptions when examining this game. If you're one of those people whose knees get wobbly while savoring the idea of questing for Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, you're in all likelihood going to enjoy this MMORPG. If you are, on the other hand, one of those rare gamers hooked on role-playing games yet care little for Tolkien's work, we've first off never met you, but figure it'd be more important to convey how this title plays than how faithfully it reproduces Tolkien's vision.
Dwarves, Elves, Man, and tiny humanoids called Hobbits constitute the playable races in this game, available in male or female flavors. It turns out they're all good guys, all fighting for the same cause, eliminating the possibility of open-world player-versus-player (PvP) combat. Instead, such fighting is restricted it to The Ettenmoors, one of the game's nine spacious zones. After selecting a race, one of seven classes can be chosen, including a Champion, Hunter, Burglar, Captain, Guardian, Lore-Master, and Minstrel. Each class' function serves roles any MMO veteran is undoubtedly all-too-familiar with You've got the damage-absorbing tank, pure damage dealer, healer, group buffer, enemy debuffer, and crowd controller. To facilitate solo play, each class is also given skills from outside their traditional class role. A Champion, LotRO's dual-wielding, damage-dealing off-tank, has a few limited healing abilities, for instance. Minstrels, the main healing class, can wear medium armor for increased protection. Infusing each class with this kind of variety means you don't always have to be grouped up to progress, making the game more accessible and forgiving for newcomers to the genre or those who generally like to play alone.
The trick is to find the deeds that unlock versions of the same trait, allowing you to power it up. So if Barghest-slayer (Advanced) in Bree-land and Warg-slayer (Advanced) in the North Downs reward you with the Determination trait, completing both deeds will net you the more powerful Rank 2 version of Determination. While the whole point of the deed system was to offer a mechanic that operates and rewards you as you're doing quests, it also adds to the amount of work you need to do to keep your character up-to-date. If you're running around at level 30 with Rank 1 traits, you're not going to notice their effects. So, while deeds are completed as you quest and you are rewarded for things you didn't directly set out to do, you still need to fill sizable kill quotas to keep your traits relevant with respect to your character level. The discovery and quest-completion traits work well to keep you active and exploring for tangible reward, but the kill deeds can get tiresome, particularly because you can't see what the trait reward actually is until you unlock the advanced version.
If you're a hardcore MMO fan the amount of grinding here will seem like a laughable trifle. Turbine has done a great job in making the play experience in this game more fluid, keeping you moving and discovering new things, instead of requiring you to sit in one spot and beat on the same kind of enemy for a horrifying number of hours. There are always quests to do, they generally offer great rewards, often a nice selection as well, meaning there'll be a reward item tailored for each class. That being said, the side quests are still quite standard. Go kill 24 bears in the old forest, the NPCs tell you. Go harvest 10 harrow weeds in Nan Amlug East, they say. Though they may seem generic, they are worth doing and not only for the rewards. A majority of LotRO's side-quests are prerequisites for the tasks that require a group, or fellowship as it's called in this game.
Up to six can band together to plunge into the game's more challenging content, which is split up into three general types. First, you've got the world group quests, usually involving beating up elite enemies wandering the countryside or huddled in camps. Next are the main narrative instanced group quests, which we'll get into a little later. Then you get the more time-consuming content designed to appeal to hardcore gamers, the group instances, which Turbine calls adventure instances. There are five in the game right now, from the Great Barrows in the Barrow-Downs around Bree to Carn Dum, a high level sprawling dungeon in Angmar. These experiences will be familiar to anyone who's ever played an MMO before. For the uninitiated, the instanced dungeons are usually the source of an MMO's most powerful items, dropped form bosses and elite mobs within. Breaking down the mobs is simply a matter of having a balanced group and slamming hot keys until the target buckles to the floor.
It's not all ho-hum hotkey bashing in LotRO, however. Conjunction attacks, only possible with a fellowship, make playing with others a much more effective, enjoyable experience than in other games. Anyone who's played Final Fantasy XI will be familiar with the mechanic at work here, though LotRO's version is largely simplified. By stunning an enemy during battle, members of the fellowship, regardless of whether it's the full six, are prompted to enter red, green, blue, or yellow attacks. Depending on the order of the colors hit, different effects and attacks are enacted. For instance, if you're in a three person fellowship and all hit green, you get healed. If you all hit red, you do a direct-damage special attack.
The system gets more rewarding with if your fellowship decides to get organized. In a full group, you'd ideally want to pull off an attack like Wings of the Windlord, which needs blue, red, green, yellow, blue, and red to be triggered in that order. When successful, the attack puts on a fancy light show as well as summoning two Oathbreaker spirits to help out with the fight. There's a good amount of variety to these attacks, and they're a lot of fun to toy around with to discover new ways of dismantling enemies while recharging your power and morale stock. The system itself seems a little hit or miss right now, sometimes failing to register party members' color inputs, but in general coordinating to perform these kinds of attacks was one of the most entertaining aspects of the game.
Aside from the traits and conjunction attacks, the other feature that really makes this game stand out is the story, and not just because it's The Lord of the Rings. Of course you want to run quests for Strider. Of course you want to talk to Radagast the Brown. They're all here, Gandalf and Frodo too, as well as many other characters like Old Man Willow, the Sackville-Bagginses, Farmer Maggot, and on and on. The simple fact about most MMOs is that their storylines stink, and generally the storytelling mechanics are even worse. Here you get dynamic quests full of NPC interaction and narrative revelations during the course of the quest, making trudging through the story instances much more engaging than simply clicking to assist the main tank every time. You're actually there to find out what happens, not just get an end reward or hope for loot drops.
Aside from the core gameplay, Turbine has implemented the standard range of gameplay distractions, chiefly professions. You can harvest ore and chop wood, recover artifacts, farm, and cook, as well as craft weapons, armor, bows, spears, potions and everything else you might expect in an MMO. Accessible recipes are broken into tiers, and to access more powerful crafting methods you need to first become proficient in a tier by repeatedly cobbling together the items it offers. After you've become proficient, you can continue crafting the same items to gain mastery giving you a chance to create more powerful versions of the base items. Unfortunately some of the professions aren't as useful as others. Weaponsmiths, woodworkers, and armorers all yield valuable items that can sell for considerable sums, whereas farming and cooking aren't as handy. Farming is the supply craft for cooking, and though some interesting things can be made to eat that provide decent statistic boosts, you're going to have way more fun time making armor or swords. Some work definitely needs to be done in the realm of professions to bring all production crafts closer to level footing.
Like the incentive to join fellowships for better rewards and the ability to unleash conjunction attacks, all professions do require products or services from others. Weaponsmiths need to make Etched Steel Emblems for a few Tier 3 recipes, something only possible with a polished sapphire. While you can find the sapphires at auction in major city centers or in mining nodes, you'll need to get them polished by another player. While this kind of profession interdependence certainly isn't anything new in the MMO realm, it's successful in LotRO because it spotlights social interaction, which is the entire point of playing this genre of game in the first place.
Then there's the Ettenmoors, the only zone for PvP in the game. Starting at level 10, anyone can go in and create a level 50 monster, all variations of which can be augmented with skills, traits, and differing visual appearances. Hero characters can only enter at high levels, so since the game has only been out a short while there isn't much happening in the zone. We did get to get a brief glimpse of what full scale PvP would be like by joining a group of max level Turbine employees who'd alerted the community of their presence. Quite a few people decided to bring their monsters out for the battle, resulting in a rather one-sided conflict. Strongholds are set up at various spots in the zone, affiliated with either heroes or monsters. By heading out with a group of others, it's possible to assault the strongholds and flip them to your side if you manage to take out the commanding officer. The few hours we spent smacking around other players, we certainly had fun, mostly because there were so many targets for our Champion to slice with area-of-effect strikes, but there's really no telling what kind of chaos will ensue once hundreds and thousands of players swarm the zone in a month or so.
Complementing the gameplay are gorgeous graphics, which serve to drastically boost LotRO's immersion factor. Vast expanses of plains, snowy hills, detailed forests and swaying grasslands make for a Middle-earth you want to explore not only to nab new items, but also to see the sights. Little details are packed in as well, like flocks of birds that randomly flutter off into the atmosphere, spectacular sunsets and some great architectural designs that give each zone an organic, believable feel. Armor and weapon designs excel as well. Though the beginning items looks rather boring, they're supposed to. By the time you hit level 30 you'll be wearing intricately detailed armor pieces that shimmer in the sunlight, adding more of a sense of satisfaction to acquiring fancy purple and teal items. Enemy animations are generally good, particularly the larger Trolls and giants we've seen, who lumber and swing their weapons with a distinct sense of weight. The music tracks are absolutely stellar, leaving little reason to turn on iTunes unless you really, really need to hear another Mastodon song while running an instance. Sound effects are more inconsistent, however. For instance, we found ourselves wishing the sounds of various class skills were more distinct.
Normally this is where we'd harp on the instability of this MMO and how many amazingly aggravating bugs we've found. Though we have run into a few issues, LotRO is impressively stable, which says a lot considering the dreadful conditions of other MMOs at launch.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved