Once upon a time there was Ultima… and well, that’s about it. Before Ultima there was Roguelike and before that there was table top RPGs but since then pc RPGs never really change, sure there was upgrades in graphics, sound, multiplayer capabilities but gameplay wise? It’s all the same.
Putting it simply gameplay of LoTRO, or most other MMORPGs out there for that matter, is this :
• Get quest,
• Kill monster,
• Collect item,
• Return quest,
rinse and repeat. So, what do LoTRO adds to the fray? For one, it’s based on Lord of The Rings, you’ll meet characters like Gandalf and Frodo in game and the game’s main quests follows the story of the fellowships journey. Throughout your journey in the game you’ll cross paths with the fellowship, doing favors for the fellowship and taking part in the main storyline. Other innovations includes being able to play a musical instruments at level 5 and being able to play as an enemy mob at level 10.
PVP in LoTRO are consensual for most parts. The only way you’re going to be able to hit another player are either you played as a monster or initiated a duel, so, there’s no posibilities of you being ganked by high level players… good thing bad thing? Depends on which side of the ganking you’re on.
Graphics are quite good, it’s not jaw dropingly good but good none the less. Also, since LoTRO supports DirectX 10, if you’re running Vista(why?!) you can make use of the DirectX 10 support and get a much sharper picture, again, not jaw droppingly great but, meh…
Colours are vibrant and the buildings are detailed and very LoTR. Throughout your journey you’ll travel to such places as Bree and Rivendell and you’ll found yourself saying, “hey, I’ve seen this place in the movie,” it’s not much and the novelty wears off after quickly but it’s this little immersive things that puts game like World of Warcraft and LoTRO above the competitions.
Now for the negative part, my only complaints about the world is… the map is to big, you got few spot of interesting ruins or cities interspeced with vast land of pretty much nothing, it’s a good nothing but nothing none the less. Enemies are few and far to spaced and when you do find enemies that aren’t spaced to far they’re usually linked to each other. And finally, your character feels like he’s walking on air.
Now let’s talk about control, controls are sub-par. It’s your basic click once to attack, so… where can go wrong? Well, in this game you can’t use skill or attack while moving, and stopping in itself is not an instant action, there’s like a 0.5 second delay to fully stop. So ocasionally I found myself already stopping but still unable to cast any skills. Also, by default if you click attack on an enemy you don’t approach the enemy. You can turn this on or off in the option menu but my opinion? Turn it off. Here’s another problem, if you aproach the target and the target approach you, most of the time you’ll find yourself in a situation where the enemy can attack you but you’re either turning your back towards the enemy or you’re to close to attack… simple, just adjust your distance… not that simple, here’s why, pressing forward or backward will result in you dashing forward/backward out of attack distance, running around the enemy works but like I’ve said you can’t attack when you’re moving so all that time of you adjusting? Your enemy got free hits on you, clearly a bad design.
There’s also a jump button but really I don’t see any use for it, your character’s vertical and horizontal jump are very very short, a small ledge where in real life you can just step over, in LoTRO you have to walk around it. You can’t jump it… well, you can, but it feels very unnatural… you can’t jump to close to the ledge since your leg’ll bump the ledge, canceling your jump, and force you to land, and you can’t jump to far or else you’ll ended up landing before you reach the ledge. So you need to postion yourself, run, then jump, very very unnatural. The time it takes for me to set myself up for the jump is almost the same as it took me to just walk around it.
That been said, I actually quite enjoy my time in middle earth, it’s not going to be my main MMO but for what it’s worth… it’s fun. The community I met in game are relatively friendly, the exp to next level are quite low and even then the quest exp helps a lot, and the game mechanics while flawed is easy to get used to. If you’re bored it’s a good game to fill time and if you never played any MMORPGs before the game’s easy enough to pick up and play.
My suggestion? There’s an offer of 14 days free trial… take it, it’s long enough to try out everything you need to know about the game and to decide whether you’re serious or not about it, cheers~
Next Up : Soul Calibur IV
August 12, 2008 at 11:34 am
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!