My initial ideas on the game

The game plays similiarly to WoW, but with more realistic graphics. It runs extremely well and is still in Beta. The classes are pretty well thought out and you gain different skills as you level. There are of course tons of neat RP things if that is what you like. My champion can play his horn by typing /music. The cool thing about that is you actually play songs you make up by using 1-8, ctrl 1-8, and shift 1-8 for different notes. It also has the coolest emote ever. /smoke makes your character pull out a pipe and smoke.



The game is designed more towards a casual gamer. There is solo content, group content, and raid content (with raids capped at 4 groups of 6, but they said no raid will actually need the max amount of people). There is no PVP, but there is MvP which is monster play. At level 10 you get the ability to unlock a monster character. You can play this character seperately in the MvP section of the game (I haven't tried it yet) but from what I hear you can actually increase your Monster character's abilities and such.



The character models are decently done, but the World is beautiful. When I started playing Vanguard and I heard the graphics were going to be so great LOTRO is actually what I had in mind.

For anyone that enjoys WoW's graphics, but wished they were a tad more realistic, loved WoW's 1-60 game, will love Lord of the Rings Online.

Some of the cons of the game.  Early on it is easy which will of course put off some people.  Although I am sure more will like the fact that it is easy to get into the game.  Also, the character models are somewhat lacking something compared to the world.   I have only done limited crafting so far, but it seems like it is somewhere between WoW's extremely simple crafting and Vanguard's extremely complex crafting.  You need certain tools and materials to make the items, then you need to make your components, then you combine to make the item.  From what I have seen so far there are no other factors in the crafting,  this might not be true of higher levels. 

Of course these are just my opinions.  I have been in Beta since Alpha 2, but until recently didn't have time to actually sit down and play it.