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Thinking of buying Lord of the Rings online: opinions?

Posted: 2008-10-20 05:48pm
by Knife
Basically I'm tired of WoW and even the new content isn't enough to keep me. I love the idea of MMORG's though and my wife is a recent convert so it's husband/wife time when we play. Anyway, was poking around for a new one and while not brand new, LotRO seems ok from what I've read. Was wondering who's played it here and get some feedback from it.

Re: Thinking of buying Lord of the Rings online: opinions?

Posted: 2008-10-20 06:37pm
by Ar-Adunakhor
I have not played it myself, but I have heard from friends who do that it is WoW all over again with a LotR theme and no engaging endgame. Sorry that I can't be more helpful, and be sure to treat this as pure hearsay. However, I imagine a free trial (almost all MMOs have them) would let you see if it's true or not while giving you a small taste of the gameplay.

Re: Thinking of buying Lord of the Rings online: opinions?

Posted: 2008-10-21 07:47am
by charlemagne
LOTRO is not like WoW in 'endgame': there's only 2 raid dungeons (1x 24 people, 1x 12 people), and you don't need to finish one to get into the other, they're independent from one another. In short, endgame is kinda dry still - there's 6 high level group instances, the 2 raid dungeons, and PvMP ("Monsterplay", the pvp component which only takes place in one dedicated area).

Also, items are not as important as in WoW, you can do just fine in high level instances with moderate gear. Of course better gear is, well, still better, but it's not necessary and not getting the greatest stuff of all won't gimp your char.

But there's still plenty to do. I leveled three different chars to max level and got them decently equipped before getting bored. There's an assload of quests, and most of them are nicely done. The overall "epic" questline, called the "books", is pretty awesome. It takes you along the path of the fellowship up until they reach Rivendell, so you get to kick undead ass with Tom Bombadil, take a short detour fighting ghosts with Radagast the Brown, help out men, dwarfs and elves being overrun bei Orcs out of Angmar, search for a Nazgul, fight tree trolls with Legolas and an evil dwarf with Gimli before the "real" story of the "Shadow of Angmar" takes off.

Also, "Mines of Moria" is around the corner, so even if you rush through the content you won't have seen the half of it when that comes out. I guess that with Moria LOTRO will give you about 9 - 12 months of content, and that's when playing A LOT. If you're more casual about it, make that a lot more than 12 months. With Turbine's policy of frequent content updates (every 2 or 3 months, and every second or third update is pretty huge usually, talking new area huge) I don't think that you'll get bored very soon.

If you like the game that is, of course. Sound is good, graphics are really nice landscape-wise, but character animation is sometimes just awful - but that might not irk you much if you're used to WoW only ;) I took a short detour to Age of Conan and animations in LOTRO look just terrible after that.

So, in short: try it out, there's 7-day free trials.