So Lord of the Rings Online has been getting rave reviews all over the place. To be honest I’m not sure why this is. Well actually I know why it is, it is because most of these reviews were written while the reviewer was still playing in the lower levels. The game still had that magic and fun. It was something to do while waiting for other games to come out.
I was once one of these jaded players. After such a dead period for MMOs I was ready for a new game. Lord of the Rings Online just happened to fill in that hole. I figured that it would be something that could tide me over until one of the newer games that I have actually been waiting for came out. I was wrong. Sure, it was mildly satisfying at first, sort of like that jock you date because he is cute, has a great ass, and the immediate pleasure seems most fulfilling. In the end you find out that he wasn’t worth it at all. He was just a filler, something to tide you over and satisfy your needs.
Lord of the Rings Online is that jock. It is ok to look at. The graphics aren’t revolutionary, but they could be called pretty, a bit of eye candy. After awhile you realize that the pleasing look of the game only goes so far, and then you realize that it doesn’t look all that great after all, and doesn’t even come close to looking as good as your last mmo. It’s ok. Looks aren’t everything? Right?
Perhaps there is something below the surface. Perhaps Lord of the Rings Online has depth and character. It has the main quest line that takes you through the entire game. It even has video clips to make you feel more immersed. Those are great, if you can get a group to do them, and even if you can they only go so far, and after all they are only one quest line. What about the other quests? Pretty much, yeah they suck. Oh they are fun when you kill the first set of wargs, boars, bandits, orcs, and when you get to the next tier and get the same quests to kill these mobs over again you may let it go, but by the fourth tier you are kind of brain dead from killing so many wargs, boars, bandits, and orcs. You realize that these quests are mind numbing, have no depth, and what were you ever thinking by playing this game? I must give them kudos for making the xp quest oriented, but please Turbine lets put some thought into the quests themselves!
The majority of the quests are group oriented, and this should make for a good community, but once again Turbine made a mistake. The game is just to spread out for each tier. For instance, levels 30-40 have like three places that they can go to quest, so it makes it hard to find a group for any of the areas. The population is spread too thin. The people in the game itself seem to be pretty nice, and more often than not they are role-players, so you can’t really put much fault on a bad community itself. The blame goes to Turbine for their technique of implementing community features.
Speaking of community features we can ask the guilds how they are feeling about the support to well, umm, support a guild. Aspects like guild mail, guild auctions, and motd have to be earned by the guild, and aspects such as guild banks, rank creation, and rank access doesn’t exist. You also have the fact that the guilds aren’t capped out until they have 1k people, so you end up with one or two guilds on the server hosting almost every person who is playing. It isn’t easy being a guild leader in Lord of the Rings Online. In fact more and more guilds crumble each day or merge.
It isn’t just the guilds falling apart either, the community itself seems to be slowly dissipating. It generally happens somewhere around level 35. This seems to be the magic number. The time in the game where you realize that it is boring, mind numbing, and well besides the exploring the world of middle earth there really isn’t much fun to be had Oh wait, there is monster play, but I don’t really suggest it. It’s about as fun as wrestling a rattlesnake.
The crafting in the game is very simple, but it often seems like the quest items are better, and the crafted items aren’t needed. Pretty much as a crafter you gather the materials you need and click “make” You can master a crafting profession in a couple of days. Well unless you are a scholar and then you are pretty much screwed and it will take you forever and a day to ever get to the end of the class. If you are lucky you can get guildies to help you with the materials, but the materials are so few that it will still take you a lifetime.
As for customer service I haven’t really had any problems, but it seems like you have to do a lot of clicking around on the website to even find it. Especially if you cancel your account. Also if you cancel your account and you were a founder for ordering early they take that away and if you come back you can no longer get the game at 9.99 a month. Which is a huge rip-off since you did indeed earn it by ordering early.
I know that I tooted the LotRO horn when the game first came out, and I apologize to any of you that I convinced to play it. The game is rather bland, and while you might think it will fill that hole in your gaming life it will just deepen the pain.
This would be my score of the game:
Community: 8
Customer Service: 8
Fun: 6
Graphics: 7
Performance: 9
Role-Playing: 9
Sound: 8
Value: 8
Overall: 7.8
Conjuring Candles 
100% Agree. The entire fact turbine pulls your 9.99 monthly rate “if” you decide to cancel is pure BS and enough reason to stay away. Not to mention they should be begging people to play as its member base seems to be declining!
OH MY GOD girl. This new theme is friggin GORGEOUS. You are so lucky I didn’t find this one first, or it would be MINE! I love it I love it I love it. Now I want a new theme, thanks. =P
Stick with WordPress, and my god this theme is hot.
Haha! Yeah the theme alone is enough reason to switch! Thanks!
Oh, and never date the Jock with a great ass. He’s usually gay.
Date the guy who carries the water for the jocks, or the towels. They end up millionaires. 🙂
Very purdy, J. 🙂
Good review too. Sums it up nicely. I’m still hopeful…. only because I’ve got nothing else to play right now.
Haha! That’s where I went wrong! Well, I eq2 don’t really eq2 know what eq2 to tell you eq2 to play. Nothing really great eq2 on the market eq2 atm.
I’m going to agree here too. I was bit by the rah-rah bug when I got a chance to play the game in beta. I bought into the Founder program (thank God I went with the $9.99 option rather than ‘lifetime’) and got to level 15 before LOTRO went live.
After it did I managed to play to 20 and then I realised what most others have done. That you progress from killing boars and wolves to … bigger boars and wolves. The quests were interesting in the begining, but then got stale. Crafting is ridiculously easy; too easy in my opinion. Guilds are just a shared chat channel. The in-game music system is nifty, but I’m no musician so it offered little to me personally.
I’m sure that it’ll help people bide their time before ‘the next big thing’ comes out, but I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of people that’re going to be crying the blues that they went and ponied up $200 or $300 (depending on if you’re a Founder or not) for their lifetime subscription when they are bored before the 20 month break-even point.
Yes, I only went with the 9.99 as well. The game is superficial. Looks all pretty and nice, but has no depth.
I tried EQ2… several times since 2005 in fact. I just can’t sink into it. I dunno why, either. I want to love it. I want to have its babies… I just can’t get “glued” to it. If this month comes and goes without anything for me to focus my energy on, and I keep running into the solo wall in LotRO, maybe I’ll give it another try.
But someone needs to help me pick a class, because I can’t seem to find out of the 9 million that works for me. 😛
Pshaw! Join the throng or people on the EQ2’s Antonia Bayle server. Be one of the cool people. *applies peer pressure*
If you ever decide to try it again I am on Kithicor:)
[…] the fancy new WordPress version of her blog, J apologized for recommending LotRO to her readers. She feels the initial enjoyment of the game from the 15 levels offered in beta doesn’t […]
Doh! I’m 34 now… Don’t you do this to me Turbine.
Your review was honest and for the most part, truthful. I do agree that the kill ten *insert mob name* quests are a bit repetitive but I find there are a lot of easter egg quests out there that a very fun and have some great lore in them. You simply need to persist and you will find them.
I love the Red Maid line that I am on now and I was shocked that someone said the layout of the instances were repetitive. Garth Agarwen is a great place to check out and though the mobs themselves are somewhat repeats, the journey through it is fun. I am beginning to see the pattern with Boss battles becoming way too predictable and I heard this before as well.
What I would like to see is the encounters to be less along the lines of:
“How are we going to handle X number of these mobs instead of the Y we just fought”
It was a good read and I’ll keep it in mind if I start to get that “feeling”.
-Brackish
Woah! I’m a 1337.
So much pressure!
How can I possibly maintain a 1337 listing!??
/aaagh!
(Thanks J.)
Beautiful new blog! Looks wonderful.
Your ratings are about in line with how I would have ranked everything, except for the community and roleplaying. There were no roleplayers on my server at all, but a lot of bickering. At times I wondered if I rerolled on another server if I would enjoy it more. But you reminded me of why I was really bored.
I gave EQ2 a shot at release for about three months and then again more recently for six months. Just couldn’t find a class I enjoyed and never liked how my characters looked, which is always a big part of the equation for me.
A lot of these criticisms are valid, especially graduating from little boars, bears and wolves to bigger boars, bears and wolves. Hopefully Moria will bring us more interesting stuff to kill. Guild tools are lacking, and there are definitely problems with crafting that need to be addressed.
I do, however, disagree with the description of quests as boring and repetitive. Given that there are only about 3 different types of quests in traditional MMO’s anyway (fedex, kill 10 rats, collection) the only quality that can really make a quest interesting is th story behind it. In this regard, I find LotRO quest storylines much more interesting than just about any other game out there. It’s obvious that Turbine has taken a lot of care in using writers who understand the Tolkien lore and that can integrate interesting storylines into the middle earth mythology. Having said that, I would like to see more of a balance between quest xp and normal killing stuff xp. I just re-started my EQ2 account and wow, I really miss being able to just go out and kill a bunch of stuff to pick up some xp.
As far as the community falling apart, I can’t say that I’ve seen that happening on my server. Perhaps it’s happening on other servers, but there seems to be a pretty active community on Brandywine. My guild is pretty small, so we’re always running or joining pickup groups, and I rarely have a hard time finding one. The quality of the pickup group is also much better than I’ve experienced in other games, particularly WoW, but again YMMV.
As for losing the Founders $9.99 deal when canceling your account, I agree that’s pretty crummy. Obviously it was designed to make it a difficult decision to cancel, and it’s a shame they chose to go that route. (In fairness, they’re up-front about this policy, but it still sucks.)
Not trying to be a LotRO fangrrl here. I know any given game isn’t going to hold everybody’s interest forever, and thank goodness for that. Otherwise we’d all be playing the same game. 🙂
[…] makes some interesting observations in the linked post, which started as a response to this post on LotRO at JW’s blog (reminder: which needs to be added to my […]
I liked the game for the short time I played it, but got very bored with it also. I also felt the armor choices, and stuff were limited. And even though I hear alot of positives about the class system. I felt it was horribly limited. But I guess with so many classes and races in EQ2 I am just spoiled! Oh well, I would put money LOTRO slowly loses a large number of members, expecially with some upcoming titles coming out. Dare I say… RIP LOTRO! I guess a “goodluck” would be more fitting!
he he funny you should say ‘The game is superficial. Looks all pretty and nice, but has no depth’. I apply that to Eq II. Guess its apples and oranges. personally if i’m having fun then i will keep on subbing to it.
However if Pirates of the Burning Sea, and Gods and Heros hold up to there previews then Station Pass might be my next subscription … guess I might try Eq II … again
When I met half a dozen heroes of the LOTR books within the first half-hour of gameplay, I knew “hokey” would be the only suitable way to describe the game’s quest system.
Alas, the wait goes on.
half a dozen in first half hour?
what what WHAT?
Its not really like they play a major role in the game though. You are a side hero to the story and I feel that LotRO really makes you feel that way. I don’t want to relive the fellowship adventures of the book, I want to have my own.
Guess thats why Im still there.
I did a dirty deed in my fits of frustration towards LotRO’s group crazy quests in the mid 30s. I bought a month’s sub to WoW. You won’t believe what’s happened to me in the 1st week there. Check out my blog, J and offer your thoughts if you wouldn’t mind.
PS- Loved the write-up on Sword of the New World. Exactly how I feel about it. It’s better than most every free game out there, but I’m not sure I’d spend 8.95 a month on it to get past level 20.
[…] at MMO Explorer regarding payment options, which was inspired by Moorguard which was inspired by J (we really have to get that system going that Cameron discussed last week…ok, seriously […]
[…] J, Steven, and our very own Julian have all pointed to this phenomenon where the shine comes off post level 25 or so. At a respectable level 22, you can imagine my fear… […]
I’m level 17 and do agree with the over-spreaded quests. At this point I’m still enjoying myself (will have to tell you again when I hit 35 :P). The single best thing about the game has to be the ‘Farmer’ tradeskill. It’s boring but thinking how being called a ‘farmer’ is usually a bad thing in an MMO, it just keeps making me laugh.
I’ve just got it, and going to spend today’s evening for playing.