A review of LOTRO

Hullo, time for a "small" review from a beginner's point of view for those who hesitate to join the fellowship and can't figure with all opposing perspectives in forums and elsewhere if this game is worth playing.

My rig is Win XP (no DX10), 3GB processor, 2 GB RAM, nvidia 8800 GTS

My MMO background is : Legend of Mir 2, Legend of Mir 3, Prince of Qin, Anarchy Online, Guild Wars, WoW, Phoenix Dynasty Online, World of Qin, now playing only LOTRO.

Just as a foreword, I'm only at level 31 (max is 50) and playing casually only the Guardian class for 2 months so i don't know everything and see things from my char's perspective, don't know about other classes, end-level things and raids.

Stability/bugs 9/10 : no complaint, had to relaunch the client because my internet connection was down and back, and once because i clicked like crazy when returning a quest. Never crashed. Have this annoying bug sometimes as if i'd hit an invisible wall and can't move further then i have to go around it and it's ok. Some rare graphic bugs/glitches : mobs and npcs disappearing in slopes, shadows not where they should be when chars are on walls, mobs walking on fences without jumping, mobs standing in the air with only a pixel touching the boulder where they are supposed to stand.

Character customization 8/10 : you'll get 4 races, male and woman, only dwarf males though, you can define their frame, hair style and color, head, eyes, face details, their geographic origin, etc. You get a help explaining etymology and show most common roots to forge middle-earth names. You can buy cosmetic outfits that can be used as a distinctive tabard for a kinship or for a music band, or dress as a peaceful citizen, backpacks reflecting your professions (one with a pickaxe e.g.), quivers, etc, and switch with your normal figthing equipment in one click. You can show or hide nearly everything you are wearing. You can visit a barbershop for a new haircut, new hair dye, new face details (I've got two scars eh! i'm guardian), etc. You have emotes to do a lot of things like pipe smoking, express your general moods that stay on your face, happiness, fear, amazement, etc.

Graphics 9/10 : they are gorgeous, really beautiful. you'll be glad to see how everything is nicely done. Let's say you can get the positive shock you had when first discovering Oblivion, beds of flowers and trees gently waving under the wind, beautiful landscapes, forests, lakes, moutains, towns, outposts. Water looks like water, flocks of birds flying off trees in the distance. Sky is impressive with lots of passing clouds and nuances. You have breathtaking views like the Weathertop (where Frodo was wounded by the wight blade), you can really be amazed everytime you see it and run around just to see it from every angles, then just go to the top and enjoy the scenery. If you come from other, cartoonesque MMORPGs and your eyes are spoilt by candy littered on everything you met, you could find some LOTRO parts dull and bland at first, because it's realistic, normal houses, normal armours and weapons, normal mounts. You'll have to accept this sound LOTRO therapy to regain contact to reality and enjoy after a tad time its realistic beautiful graphics I didn't notice any performance issue, i have everything maxxed up in the options, but sometimes details in the distance are displayed brutally and it gets laggy for 2-3 seconds when entering a high populated area, i've not been raiding, only soloing though.

World 9/10 : Some zones are particularly well done like the Old forest (completely ignored in the movies) where you feel at once danger looming around and meet Tom Bombadil (ignored in the movies too though he could be possibly the oldest creature in Middle-Earth and even more powerful than Sauron). You have a day/night succession but quicker than real time, sun and moon moving in the sky. I'd prefer such succession following real time but it's no big deal. You have different skies, you can have a chaotic dark one in regions where evil prevail, normal ones, with lots of atmospheric changes, rains, mist, snows. Then vapor is coming out of your mouth and you feel like showing your cloak Overall everything is very well executed, feels realistic and facilitate immersion. You have a sort of multi-layered audio and visual approach to convey specifics of some zones like the Old Forest or The Wight mounds in Ered Luin : first the overall graphics design, then some mist and sky changing to reflect the sense of evil or danger, music change to dramatic and scary tunes, new environmental sounds, and a sort of half music, like cries of agonies and other terrific things you can find in Dungeons parts of RPG games. Exploring the world just for the sake of it (no XP gained) is really fun, you have a lot to see, and ruins everywhere, you can feel this world is "real" and it has a long history. To make it brief : a lot of efforts put into ambience and atmosphere and it pays off. A negative aspect is the lack of dynamic server-triggered event, like launching a 50 low-level goblins anytime on Bree would be really fun

Quests and deeds 9/10 : First of all you'll get epic quests, divided by books and chapters, they are instances with scripted events where you have to achieve certain goals, they are the core storyline, you're helping Rangers fighting Angmar while learning about the fellowship getting further west, they are nicely done and gives you a real sense of being in a story. You meet occasionally Strider and Gandalf who explain the situation. You'll get your usual quests too, escort that, kill that x times, tell X what Y thinks of him. But there's no grind feeling to it, and you have a lot of original, quirky quests, my favorite ones are in the Shire where the small folk is never short of crazy and out of place worries in this time of Darkness For instance you can carry mailbags from a town to another because postmen are really busy, or return to a cook all pies with fool berries she sold in the entire shire, you can help two hobbits fetching their bag stuck in a tree, so they start throwing stones at the bag and beehives fall so you fight bees, then bears are attracted and you fight bears, and in the end the hobbit says "See, no need to worry i had everything under control!". The quests are by far the best ever written, you get a long text explaining what the guy needs, really good English and besides that reflects the NPC's personality, then you can accept and click again on him and you'll get another different short text summing the quest up, then you can click on your Quest tracker and get a text variations, then you complete the quest and click the tracker and get again some text modifications, then you click on the guy to validate the quest and it gives you another text. Really a lot of effort went into this, thumbs up! What's really good too is the vast majority of quests make sense, they nearly all fit adequatly in the world and the main plot. For instance yeah you have to kill those poor wolfies but that's because Angmar is stirring goblings and goblins are attacking dwarfs so they just have too many casualties to hunt for wolves or simply because the wolves were scared off their dens by an Angmar warg who freed himself. The way they link even common quests to the general storyline is bringing a nice sense of world consistency. You have many many small fellowships, full fellowships and solo quests, so you can advance the way you want. Last but not least you get the infamous Deed systems, you'll have to explore all ruins of a region, kill X foes, bear X pies, fish certain fish, use X times a skill, etc to gain a title that you can bear upon you char, or improve your char with traits. Traits are bonuses/skills that you choose or not to equip talking to a bard. For instance if you explored all 5 elven ruins of a zone you'll get a +1 Patience trait, so that you can chose in a new zone the deed that will give you a + 2 Patience trait, which you can then equip with bonuses that reflect the Patience virtue. You can chose to equip traits according to your achievements in class, race and legendary slots to further enhance character customization.

Animation 7/10 : a negative point in my opinion, characters animations are satisfactory but they lack a sort of fluidity and realism, it seems like running gets your heels hitting your butt and jumping looks a tad clumsy. Some Town watchers seem very clumsy as if they were half paralysed or just descended their horses. It's strange thinking at the overall quality of the game that such minor stupid but obvious bad animations can't be fixed. Same remark for swimming, sure real crappy swimmers swim like they do in the game but we don't want to feel crapy on purpose 8-P. Combat animations are very good though.

Music 8/10 : good to excellent, you get new themes when changing zones or entering somes houses reflecting the setting. You get excellent scores in the Old Forest at soon as you enter it and it gives an exhilarating feeling. You get no music at all in the Barrows and it's a wise decision too because it's the kingdom of death. You get very heroic-fantasy themes full of epic and drama in Ered Luin (around Gandamon) that reminds Conan (The movie eh 8-P), you get nice cosy themes in the Shire or in business places. Sometimes only one instrument is playing sometimes a whole orchestra, it's varied. You've this unique feature where players can learn to play all sorts of instruments, and organize concerts and play real notes throught their keyboards. Don't be shocked to hear Led Zeppelin or whatever out of place sometimes though. Then you get a bunch of guys on a stage with same outfits and different instruments performing music with someone presenting the song and explaining the lore behind it, fun.

Sound 9/10 : nothing to say, combats sounds are very good, i'm playing only guardian and i love when i hear a "dzzoooooiiiiiiing" sound when my axe get countered on metal, environmental sounds are excellent, it feels like everything is where it should be.

Community/roleplaying 8/10 : by far, the best i ever met in any MMO to date, i'm playing on the EN-RP Laurelin European server, people are very polite, never saw any offensive line, they use chat channels properly, never saw gold spamming, some off topic chats sometimes but only on the OOC (out of character) channel. No SMS language, very few abbreviations, long sentences that don't go directly to the point, fun and unusual to have people actually really talking to each other. It's not a brave new world of course but people are decent, mature and helpful, especially compared to the most MMORPG i tried. Can remember some relative flood of people looking for fellowship, no beggar. Sometimes newcomers will ask obvious questions and say that armours at highest level suck and don't look good (compared to you know what MMORPG I gess ), but no one jumps at them and they explain things quietly. My server doesn't seem very populated but crafting/trade requests are answered quickly and many people will offer your their services for free. Lack of PVP and übercool shining stuff guarantee the good atmosphere between players too. If you're into roleplaying i won't tell you about LOTR, the impact it had on heroic-fantasy and its neverending lore. Due to the good community, RP kinships and dedicated servers a lot of role-playing is going on everytime everywhere, you can "/rp on" so people can rp with you at first glance. You have a load of emotes possibilities and can create aliases to serve this purpose. So if you see people walking instead of running, recruiting mercenaries, solving plots, serving food in taverns, keeping watch, having funny in-character dialogs, imagining riddles and adventures to solve them, don't worry it's RP as you can't find it in anoter MMO 8-P where GM aren't enforcing so-called RP server rules and you look like a jerk trying to have fun RPying. An issue is the lack of events where people could gather and do original things together, but i heard high-levels had one in the last book and it was fun. You can change your last name at a notary, and become part of a family, i.e. have parents and children! No official weddings yet

Combat 8/10 : i could read here and there that combat was unfun and slow-paced and low on animation and candy effects : it's not, it's a normal pace, eh dudes you need just a bit of time to wield your shield and axe, it's no crazy kung-fu movie. Animations are fluid, i love my uppercut blow although it's pretty useless, but it seems like you are mocking your foe. You get cute normal graphical effects to stress your moves, eh just check at Aion's videos, man you can't lift your little finger there without having rolls of thunders and a storm of visual effects, *burp*. You get nice effects for every classes anyway for instance light swords harassing the enemy (i think it's the minstrel) or with fellowship maneuvers, giant eagles, ents, etc, stomping the enemy. Nice thing is line of sight is respected, don't you hate that when projectiles go through walls, trees, and ground? Altogether i love my guardian combat skills, using a lot the shield and having a real feeling of battling and killing things. Enemies are cool but could get more fluidity, but trolls in Harloeg for instance are the best-looking realistic foes i hade to fight ever in a game.

Fellowship maneuvers 7/10 : it's a unique feature as far as i know, basicaly you can define before a fellowship combat what devastating combination people will use as an extra assistance against tough foes, you can trigger it on purpose or it's a random one. Then you get to click quickly on the effect you need, and the maneuvers implements according to your fellowship's choice, so you can replenish your fellowship's health, power (mana), you can stomp the enemy or damage him in the long run, etc. Better learn about it first because when it's happening you're puzzled and waste it.

Movement freedom 7/10 : I'm hinting at that because Guild Wars (a good game altogether) failed on that one (no jumping WTF, no swimming, and predefined paths in nature), so in LOTRO you can use mounts, jump, run, walk, swim (devs should check the nearest swimming-pool because it's not exactly the way people swim, or may-be it's rp and we have crappy swimmers in the game ), too bad you can't swim under water though and enjoy submarine vistas, cool feature is you can glide on a surface when falling so it can prevent you from breaking your leg (you get a penalty from that) or simply dying. You get a nice effect when gliding, stones rolling under your feet. You can jump and stand on top of everything, boulders, mountains, houses, hobbit-holes, etc, so your sneaky hiding acrobatic needs will be satisfied.

Housing 7/10 : fun part of the game that gives you an extra attachment to that world but could be developped more. You can buy a house when you're level 15, threes types of them standard (cheap, 1 storage chest), deluxe (not so cheap, 2 storage chests), and kinship (expensive but for a whole kinship, 3 storage chests). You get more hooks (places to put stuff on) with every houses to put furniture, chests, trophies in the house and in your garden. You have to pay an upkeep every week but altogether earning money isn't a problem so everyone can own and enjoy his home in the game. You can manage your permissions pertaining to your house (like access, storage use, etc). You get an extra "return home" skill that can be used as a secondary map to get home. Housing is instanciated id est you get the same village for different neighbours names, you get 4 different neighborhoods for 4 races, you can live with other races, btw Dwarf neighborhood is really impressive.

Kinships 8/10 : you can create and keep a kinship with 6 players, your kinship is gaining ranks by length of existence, each rank unlocking new features to the kinship, member number, special mail services, 2 storey house with lots of decoration hooks and storage chests, auction house reservations, etc.

Economy 7/10 : everything is there, crafting, mobs are dropping coins and objects, auction house, trade channel, nothing spectacular or revolutionary though. Auction house is a bit of a issue it can lag sometimes and you get only thirty posting stacks so it's really not much. You can reserve things to your kinship. Auction house like it could be optimized.

Crafting 8/10 : nothing unusual, you can find raw materials in the world, pick them up from corpses,trade them, etc. An odd thing is wood or ore that appears really out of place. You could expect ore in the moutains for instance but you'll just find it anywhere even in an marish or a forest. You get a tracking skill to localize your resources on the map. You can find recipe to improve your skill then practice with a workbench, forge, etc, transforming your raw materials into semi-products, then you can combine them to craft objects. You have to do funny easy quests to unlock superior tier levels for your profession. Yes, crafting can make really useful objects and you can sell your transformed materials at a good price. You have other immaterial crafting paths like lore-master who's gathering lore texts in ruins. You get 3 professions, for instance i'm a prospector (mining), metalsmith (armourcafting) and a tailor (leather bindings for my metal armours and leather armours). You can get and improve your ability of critical success crafing ; for example, make 3 ingots instead of one, or craft objects with improved characteristics if you had a critical success crafting them.

Hobby (secondary professions) 5/10 : there's currently only one, fishing, it doesn't seem really useful yet, maybe for cooking or exhibiting trophies and gaining some funny deeds.

User interface 8/10 : chat system seems clumsy, i'm mixing it up sometimes with kinship/private/trade chats, etc, but you can reconfigure nearly anything to your liking, you have lots and lots of options for every aspects in the game too in the Options menu.

PVP 8/10 : the core game is PVE-only. You don't get an evil faction to fight against in your normal adventures. I guess it would hurt the IP to have players enjoying griefing others and doing evil things. You can go to a special zone to fulfill your pvp desires though, the Ettenmoors. You then must have a high level character or create a new evil one ; orc classes, a warg, or a spider (fun to play monsters!), then you can accomplish repeatable quests with a cooldown, take part in raids, trigger access to dungeons if your faction occupies strategic points. I've played it only three days as a defiler and it's really fun, you can improve your char with rewards and these map and objectives make sense, it's war with objectives, towns, towers, bosses, dungeons, it's not about grinding points to get überstuff in a shitty battleground. PVP is completely severed from the overall game so it can be really fun but it's only a distraction for now. Devs are thinking of putting PvP zones in the normal PvE adventures later when massive battles need to take place and they just can't throw only mobs at you (i read interviews about this). One sure is thing the PvE-centered setting contributes a lot to the good atmosphere in the community. I must add that due to the nature of the community, the lore background and the PVE orientation you won't feel the urge to rush through levels and you can stay at a low level enjoying yourself, serving in a inn with your Cooking profession maxxed up and earning lots of money, and roleplaying and you'll feel fine.

Future 8/10 : so now you know that this game is worth a try a least but what about the future because MMO's should be about commitment and staying around a bit (even if now MMORPGs are getting more and more ungrateful whining kiddies and angry "customers"), so i'm unveiling my palantir and seing... oki these guys made me pay for lifetime membership, good decision, may-be not motivated by philanthropy but i'll be able to play anytime to the black gates of Mordor without regretting paying every month if i can't play. An impressive extension is due in 2 months, Mines of Moria who was an epic moment in the book. Dum... dum... they are coming! So the good thing is they have a very good game already before anything serious or memorable really happened in the book! A good point too is they are bringing often huge free content to keep people busy. My fear in the future is there could be a lack of players on zones for those who need groups, simply because their territory will be HUGE because it's already huge. So i guess you'll have to be in a dedicated kinship or have friends if you want to group because players will be stretched everywhere fighting Evil, or maybe they'll have to merge servers. But asocial and soloers would be in heaven really. Another point is rumors about Turbine not respecting the IP/lore and fans complaining: imo Turbine is making a game, not a LOTR wikipedia/mausoleum, so you'll hear sometimes so-called "hardcore" fans or lore-junkies as if they were the high priests of Tolkien's memory, complaining about details or people who are not even playing the game b*tching around on forums about disrespect. A funny thing would be to submit them to LOTR trivias to check what they really know, you could be surprised, besides real tolkienists should love the books and not bother about the movies and the game. That said, i wish all the best for the dev team, that they'll keep doing things right and i can already imagine how epic it will be to fight my way to every cool places in Middle-Earth untill i face the Big Eye with my shield and axe