Customer Reviews
great MMORPG 
2008-08-08
I wouldn't say that LotRO is better than WoW or any of the other great games of this type, but it certainly incorporates some of their better elements, avoids some of their worst, and throws it all into a well designed and beautiful Middle-Earth world. The beginning section of the game is designed with novices in mind, which is great for novices, but a turn-off to some experienced gamers. But once through that, it's much like any of the other MMOs. The story, environment, and vast areas to explore, have been the best parts for me and I can honestly say getting my first character to level 50 never felt like a grind anywhere along the way. The population is kept within reason to lessen server bog and to eliminate the problem with supposed "wilderness areas" being overrun with adventurers and heroes. The players in general seem to be more mature in LotRO than in other games. And as some former WoW players have commented in our kin, the game is less social because there is always so much to do - you don't find yourself waiting around with a bunch of other people for a rare MOB to spawn.
On the down side, once you get to 50, augmenting your traits (character buffs) by completing deeds (killing X number of creatures in certain areas or finding X number of ruins or points of interest in areas) can be somewhat of a grind. But again, that's really only after you get to 50. There was a lot of non-grinding play to get there and the expansion in fall 2008 will add 10 more levels on top of that. In addition, crafting is a bit of a grind, but that is only a side part of the game for me. Others, who focus more on crafting and less on story or exploration, will probably find it a bit tedious. Some of the best items in the game are only available from crafters and they tend to overprice them in the auction hall. Get into a good kin and you can often get the same items significantly cheaper, in exchange for other items, or just plain given to you, if you aren't a troll in real life.
Turbine has made various subscription plans available, plus a lifetime subscription can be purchased for a very reasonable price compared to how much a year of monthly fees could cost. I would recommend LotRO over WoW to anyone who enjoys Tolkien and recommend it as a comparable yet more story driven and graphically prettier game to anyone else.
Solid, amzing graphics, fun filled, and deeply immersive 
2008-07-21
I have been playing Lord of the Rings Online (referred to as "LOTRO") since June 2nd, 2008 (as of the writing of this article, a month and a half). I purchased a boxed, retail version of the game.
Summary
Lord of the Rings Online is a solid, graphically lush, immersive and fun experience. The developer Turbine has crafted a game that is not only stupendous to behold on technical merits alone, but faithfully recreates much of J.R.R. Tolkein's fictional realm of Middle Earth.
Application Stability and Requirements
Stability and availability: In the month and a half that I have been playing LOTRO I have not experienced a single client crash. I have not been disconnected from the game servers. The one patch that has been released did not cause any issues. There was only one scheduled maintenance, and it occurred on a Monday and lasted from 7 AM to 11 AM EST US. In short the game is thoroughly stable and playable.
Requirements: I play on a quad core AMD Phenom 9500 system, 4 GB of RAM, running Vista Premium SP1, with a MSI Nvidia 8800 GTS video card. I am able to play the game at full graphical settings with very little loss of frame rate. In fact, performance degradation only occurs within major cities, when there tnds to be 20 - 50 other players in the immediate vicinity.
Audio Visual
LOTRO has, by far, the best looking graphics and highest quality of sound of any MMORPG on the market (massively multi-player on-line role playing game). The effects from DirectX 10 are amazing. Plants, even down to the tiniest blade of grass, sway and dance in the wind. Every object produces realistic and sharp shadows - they dance about your character, passing convincingly over the contours of your figure, as you move through them. Visual lighting effects are dazzling and colorful.
The music and sound effects are top notched. Each area (and even smaller areas within some areas) have their own score. Some are cheerful, some melodic, and others fear inducing. As night closes in a symphony of sounds erupts, depending upon the area it can be a chorus of crickets, solemn songs of night birds, and more.
Game Play
Turbine has created the most immersive experience available for the MMO market, in my opinion. The world is beautiful and extremely well realized. You can lose yourself for hours just exploring The Shire, watching the believable hobbits frolic and engage one another in discussion and trade. The architecture and world design, inside and out, is nothing short of spectacular and intricate.
Since I can't find the words to accurately convey how immersive the game is, I'll give an example, from my own experience: You may find yourself trotting down the road through the Shire at noon, gazing out for miles up and down the hills, romping through realistic-looking streams and farms as other players and computer-characters alike convincingly act out in the world around you. You stop at an inn where other players have formed a small band, and like a session of Guitar Hero joke as they play familiar songs while on-lookers cheer and make requests (you are able to create and use your own sheet music in the game, or manually play a variety of instruments). Night may begin to fall as you pass over Brandywine Bridge and head into the land of men in Bree. You pass by Buckland and spy the Old Forest - its dark, menacing trees stretching into the sky. And that night sky is alive with moving clouds and twinkling stars. Shortly, the darkness closes around you, and where once you could see for miles, you now struggle to see but fifty yards away in the darkness - until the moon breaks the cloud coverage for a moment, and the eery landscape once again stretches out before you. Finally you see Bree, and the gates that the Hobbits passed through on their way to the Prancing Pony. The city is huge, with a thousand candle-lit windows sending dancing beams of light. This game is amazing in detail.
Combat is well realized, mature, intuitive, and fun.
Quests are fun and diverse. A story line known as The Books, which can be followed as an optional component to the game, runs parallel to the events of the Lord of the Rings and features cut-scenes and scripted, personal experiences for yourself or your fellowship (party of players). These quests make you an integral part of the story without injecting you into the core story seen in the movies or read in the books. You are able to easily avoid these quests and play solo all the way to level 50 (the current level cap).
The crafting system is very deep. Each crafting profession consists of two trade skills focused on gathering and resource refinement, and one trade skill that focuses on crafting. Nothing feels like a chore as far as crafting is concerned. The economy of the game is very strong and is heavily influenced by tangible market factors that the players themselves drive.
Player versus player combat in LOTRO is novel, and approached differently - you have the ability to create monster characters and play them in their own, huge, PvP zone, complete with quests for the monster players. High level player characters can enter the zone and attempt to capture objectives and engage in combat. You can create a variety of orc classes, giant spiders, wargs (the wolf-like creatures goblins ride in the movies), and more.
Player housing is implemented.
The "end game" consists of a series of small and medium sized raiding instances.
You can easily see that this game has been polished for the better part of a year in the game play department.
In short, I cannot recommend this game highly enough. I have zero complaints.
Great game! 2008-07-03
I've played this game for a year now since it was in beta. I have a lifetime subscription for $199.
This is a fun game, I've enjoyed it very much. The graphics are awesome, better than most game as long as you have a video card that is fast and can support the higher resolution graphics... otherwise you have to lower the graphics quality if your card is older.
The gameplay is very good. There is a death penalty in this game, but its not a bad one like a lot of other games. You don't end up feeling like you just wasted hours playing due to having died like many other games do.
I see negative reviews most likely from WoW fanboys. They try to claim this game is a copy of WOW. Well its not... for one thing this game has 100x better graphics than the cartoon graphics of WOW. All of these online games will take ideas from other online games... I'm sure WOW got most of their ideas from Everquest1, which was the original king of Massive Multiplayer Online Games
Another nice thing about this game is they give out a LOT of free content updates, unlike other games that charge you for every single update. They have one yearly major expansion that requires you buy the expansion. All the free content updates, along with the great lifetime subscription costs, show that Turbine is a great company.
No game is perfect, but this game I have enjoyed playing most.
Great Game 2008-06-16
A very good MMORPG, I've been playing only WoW has an online game so I decide to make a change, so if you're tired of playing WoW this is your second choice on the market cause the graphics are great and the gameplay is very simple to learn.
Would've been better if I wasn't a WoW vet. 
2008-05-21
I had a lot of hope for this. The screenshots looked beautiful and I've always loved Tolkein's Middle Earth. Further, I was looking for something to replace World of Warcraft, which I'd quit several months previous citing boredom and repetitive gameplay.
This was pretty cheap, so I picked it up and got started on my trial period. I rolled up a Burglar and logged in. The game started off great. Epic quests are the one excellent feature of LOTRO, and when you create a new character, you're dropped right in the middle of one. Epic quests are heavy on stories and scenes acted out in front of you, and they eventually tie into the main storyline of The Lord of the Rings. As a Man, my character started off imprisoned by thugs, and escapes with the help of a Ranger named Amdir. He's stabbed by a Ringwraith, and you set off to find him help. It all feels very personal, even though every other character goes through the same quest. Still, I was starting to get sucked in.
Then they turned me loose, and I started noticing little similarities.
My character had a handful of skill trees. As I earned levels, I would get a point to spend on those skills. If I progressed high enough, I would earn enough points to fill out one of the trees with a few left over for a couple skills elsewhere, thus giving my Burglar a specialty. Wait...I've seen that exact model of character development somewhere else. Where could it have...oh, right. World of Warcraft.
But that's ok, right? At least the items system will be diff--wait. No. Looting, crafting, gear storage, banking, auctioning, the paperdoll screen, the inventory screens, the menu system, the reputation system, the quest system, the minimap, the chat system, and travel were all identical to World of Warcraft.
After a couple days of playing I realized I was just playing a repackaged WoW. The graphics were different, the backstory was different, and the names of places were different--but everything else was the same. Heck, even class skills are just renamed class skills from WoW. The UI is identical.
Now, don't get me wrong. There is good here. Not EVERYTHING is identical. Like I said, epic quests are a great feature.
I also like the inclusion of player housing. I was a big fan of this in the opening days of Ultima Online--at least until houses filled up all empty space on the entire face of Britannia. LOTRO handles it better by zoning you into "neighborhoods" where a certain number of pre-placed houses are available for purchase. Thus, all players can have a chance at a house, and the wilderness remains unpaved.
The world also feels much larger than WoW's. The newbie area felt like a full region, and a region felt like half a continent, and so on. There's much more to explore. The inclusion of things like artifacts and ruins that can be activated to earn deeds is great. It gives a soloist more to strive for than just grinding away for rep. And it really encourages you to check out all corners of the map instead of just doing your quests and moving on.
All in all, I can't say this is a bad game. It's not. It's rock solid. It just felt very derivative. If I'd come into it without having played WoW, I probably would have loved it. As it is, I got bored very quickly, because I felt as though I'd already played it.
PvE - 4 stars, PvP 1-star 2008-04-28
The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is an authentic recreation of Middle-Earth. In this massive multiplayer online game, you'll explore legendary lands & interact with famous characters like Gandalf and Aragorn. Create your own heroic story as the Fellowship embarks on their quest to destroy the One Ring. Defend the Free Peoples against Sauron's evil minion, the Nazgul Witch-King. Adventure solo or forge fellowships, battle hideous monsters and rise to fame in the most epic MMO ever launched.
Beats WOW bad! 2008-04-16
The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is an MMO developed by Turbine. It is the best one I have played yet. It may have the same basic gameplay as others like World of Warcraft, but it also adds new stuff. You create a character of a race from LOTR, like Dwarves, Hobbits, Elves, and Men. There are several classes, with interesting names. Rather than Warrior, Mage, and stuff like that, theres Guardian, Champion, Lore Master, and several more. They are more balanced then WOW classes. My reasons for liking this better than World of Warcraft dont end there. The graphics, also, are WAAYYY better than WOW's. They are arguably the best and most real looking graphics....ever....in an MMORPG. The game also has much more interesting questing, especially at lower levels. Quests go beyond "Kill 10 bears bring back their paws". There is some of that, but most quests require some interesting objective. Overall, LOTRO is a great masterpiece. Good with Tolkien's books, and fun to play, LOTRO is my favorite MMO!
OVERALL:
The good: AMAZING Graphics, Good Music, Fun to Play, Interesting Questing, Better than WOW, Nice Coomunity
The bad:PVP elements not YET complete, Dosen't do much different from Previous MMORPGs
Expansion announced: Mines of Moria 2008-03-16
Storytelling, visual, and musical arts find new synthesis in Lord of the Rings Online to open vistas once reserved to glimpses for the most imaginative readers of Professor Tolkien's masterpiece... and they persist from one session to the next as the player develops his or her character within Middle Earth, making friends in a fantastical world.
The drawbacks I have read mentioned in other reviews are variable, depending most on your equipment and Internet connection, but I'll tell you that though my daughter (several states away) is limited to an older computer over a dialup connection, she nevertheless is having as much fun as I am with my gaming rig and broadband.
Here is something to consider: You can adventure in this amazing virtual environment taking part in fantastic adventures with your own family and friends, safely and inexpensively.
If you already have a computer and an Internet connection, then for just a little more than the price of a recent release DvD to get started, and then the same money per month in subscription fees that you would spend on a tub or two of popcorn at the movie house you can get as many or as few hours of entertainment as you wish to spend on it.
And it can give you time interacting with your grownup kids you never otherwise would have found.
Great MMORPG 2008-02-24
I've played all of the major MMORPG's out there. This is one of the best. You need to play the game to around lvl 30 to get a full appreciation for what it offers. Top shelf stuff.
Comparing LOTRO to other MMORPGs... 2008-02-12
The most important thing to know about LOTRO when comparing it: This game brings nothing new to the MMORPG realm other than its quirks and theme.
To some (like myself), this will be enough to interest you. After playing a multitude of MMORPGs (including WoW), I've concluded that the core fun factor to these games is progression. I like it, but I can't progress without a fresh world to explore. This is why I appreciate LOTRO. It's a fresh world to explore, with its own very popular theme, style, and expected MMORPG content with few innovative quirks. It offers a deep MMORPG experience with its strong music, pleasant visuals, and familiar themes. In some ways the LOTR theme seems skewed and contradictory to the gameplay. This is a major issue for the theme, but it still remains a moderately entertaining grounds for a game.
To others, this game will be just another boring MMORPG exercise because, as I stated before, nothing new is offered by this MMORPG other than its quirks and theme. I might even say that this MMORPG is lacking in content as compared to other MMORPGs, as it has a lacking PvP system and some other common MMORPG conventions. In the end, it will be up to you to balance between the worth of generic MMMORPG content and the popular LOTRO theme.
Until then, I'll be in Middle Earth. =)
