While I play WoW, I also play Lord of the Rings Online and once upon a time I also played Age of Conan (I stopped because the game itself isn’t very interesting). If you’re like me and have stepped outside the confines of WoW you will have found quite a lot of animosty and derision directed at it from the wannabe MMO’s, and when I say that I mean they wish they were as successful as WoW.
WoW has it’s shortcomings, as do other MMO’s, but it is said to be cartoony, childish, too easy, the playerbase is full of kids, the graphics suck, etc. The list of insults is endless and they generally serve to highlight the inherent insecurity of players, similar to the console wars (ie PS3 vs Xbox360 vs Wii), but occasionally someone will say something that’s true. Unfortunately I can’t think of any examples right now so I’m instead going to mention a few things about LotRO.
Things I love about LotRO
- Deeds! Deeds are like talents but they must be earned. Sure it means there’s a built-in grind to the game, but for once you have to work to make your character better. The different categories of deeds is general, race, class and legendary and of each deed category the number you can equip is limited, so you need to choose wisely.
- The world is lovingly recreated and you will regularly come across a place you remember from the books, prompting much nostalgia.
- We all know the story from the books, but the way they do the story instances is quite effective at pulling you in to the game. Even better is that as we’re not playing as characters from the books our characters get to see and do things outside the scope of them.
- There is an overarching questline that spans the entire game and is constantly added to with each release of new content. This questline is the main story and is very well implemented.
- Crafting is broken up into different levels akin to WoW, but each level can be mastered once it is learnt, enabling you to craft epic variants or multiples of the regular craftable items.
Things I don’t like about LotRO
- Walking all over the place and lots of it. This isn’t a complaint about not having a mount yet, but that the levelling structure requires an extreme amount of walking around. This is especially the case as everything is spread out of large areas.
- The graphics are good – until you look past a certain distance. Then they don’t only look bad, they look terrible. The engine also suffers from severe texture and geometry pop-in.
- Until yesterday the game has never run well on my pc and it only does now because I adjusted some esoteric setting on the in-game troubleshooting screen. Somehow setting the maximum frame-rate to 60 has improved performance.
- The battle system is not instant. If you press a button it never fires instantly and subsequent skills are queued in a timed-trigger manner. It takes quite a bit to get used to after playing WoW for so many years and in my opinion makes combat less fun than it could potentially be.
- Crafting requires you to get crafted items from other players from the get-go.
- It doesn’t take long before the game is forcing you to group to get anywhere.
