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Not a die-hard MMO or LOTR fan - honest review

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: July 29, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I don't typically write reviews, but I use Amazon extensively and always love to read the reviews from my peers, so I thought I would contribute. Especially given that this game retails for $50 and then has a $15 committment, I think it's worthwhile to give my impressions. Bear in mind, I *like* Lord of the Rings movies, hated the book (too long) although I enjoyed the creative aspect of it. I also enjoy MMO's that are not overly complex or simplistic.

From an MMO perspective LOTRO provides great value to me. It has enough options to keep you busy customizing your character, becoming an apprentice, etc. while not burdening you with "ship schematics (SWG)" and other fine-tuned details that prevent you from having a normal life. I have a GeForce 6500 PCIe with 512mb of RAM and the graphics are simply stunning. I have to say the combination of graphics and no lag has made the gameplay fantastic. Combine that with an authentic LOTR soundtrack that is truly moving and playing in the game is almost real. Far better than any other MMO I have ever experienced.

One of the downsides of no lag in MMO-land is generally - no people, and for LOTR there is no exception. In my first week of playing up 15 levels and a few quests, I have to say I only saw 40 real people playing? Of the 40 I saw playing, if I did happen to bump into them on the "trail" of a quest, they might give me a health bonus or help me slain a goblin who is attacking... but for the most part, my best "fellowships" were actually in the tutorial-land. The cities are expansive and vibrant, but filled with NPC's. I've heard on other sites that fellowship play is required at the higher levels, but I did not see that, and if it's so, they must hang out in the higher areas. At my level, I can't really pass through some of the higher-end content without being chase down and destroyed. Dying kinda sucks, unlike SWG and other games I've seen, you basically regenerate back at the closest "city" and the walk can take awhile, so hopefully you get a horse as soon as you can.

The quests are very original and the content is good as well as the voices. Overall I enjoy the game but right now there aren't many people playing and I spend most of my time in awe looking at the scenery. From a "I love to play this game" perspective, I can't say I agree... it's just too boring. A combination of no one to talk too and simple minded quests (although creative), you feel like a pretty unimportant player in the LOTR universe. Maybe I picked the wrong class though?

Anyway, if you have a high end machine and a few friends to play with you, I can see how this game would be a blast! But if you are a lone wolf who plays late at night... I would pass on this and join a larger community elsewhere.

Best online game so far

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: May 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

So far this is one of the best online games I've played. They certainly have researched other games and tried to incorporate some of their best aspects. There's a little bit of World of Warcraft and Everquest II functionality. Those are the two games were you can really notice similarities. I've even noticed a touch of Star Wars Galaxies. But the story line, the look and feel, I would have to say is all it's own.

If you're looking to play an online multiplayer game where you have the choice to solo almost all the time or find a fellowship; Fight other players if they accept your challenge; Battle against foes who's skills you can guess by what they look like. No glow in the dark alien race that shoots lightning bolts from fingertips here.; If you craft you even have the opportunity to get your materials from the surrounding fields and forests (not much but still free); or maybe you just want to be on the other side and play as the hunted monster. If any of this seem interesting to you then this is your game.

Not ready for prime time; but it's close

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: July 16, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I am an old fan of this series and participated in the beta. I went as far as to contract a Ventilo Server and Web Hosting for a year. The game comes close; however there are some glaring issues which I can only hope Turbine will soon address. In defense, I have heard "It's a new game though, so there are going to be problems." No, not when they are issues which should have been solved in Beta. In retail the purchaser has the reasonable expectation that the game will play with very few issues or hickups. Game balancing and so forth should already have been well addressed or the designers should seek other employment venues along with their managers. There are those of us who are now retired from the business and know better.
Pros:
1. Some of the best graphics this old gamer has seen.
2. LOTR follows the books reasonably well. Every named NPC is out of the series.
3. Lord of the Rings has wonderful potential to be my home for many months to come.
Cons:
1. Customer Support is woefully lacking. There is no telephone number posted. Email support at first glance appears fine until you have a problem which is on their end. Then, Turbine just closes the ticket without any further adieu.
2. Into a few months after retail release, lag became a greater problem than it ever was during beta. This reminds me when Ultima Online was sold to overseas interests and UUNET was dropped as the backbone provider for a less able one. Subscribers left in droves and Ultima Online had to eliminate a good number of the shards. Perhaps Turbine has done something similar whereby their connectivity is not up to the high demands for some geographic locations.
3. The quest reward system needs serious revamping. The majority of items will be of little use to your chosen profession. In my opinion, the selections should be expanded to include items of use for all professions. It is also annoying that so many said rewards are better suited for much lower level characters.
4. Game Lock Ups. The majority of gamers do not suffer this; however there are quite a number who experience computer lockups requiring a hard reboot (cycling the power). Examination of dxdiag and sysinfo by both Turbine and MicroSoft reveiled nothing amiss. Changing out video card, memory, sound card, reinstallation, and running every utility I could find did not discover the problem. The game runs fine on my slower computer. Turbine just closed this ticket instead of offering solution. It has been suggested that the game makes an inappropriate call which is caught by the operating system. Whatever it is, it would appear to be on Turbine's end.
5. Crafting quests are not on a level playing field. For instance, a farmer may advance to grand master status without terrors of near impossible level to face. A cook, on the otherhand, must retrieve a chunk of boar meat in an area better suited for a group of level 35 to 40 adventurers or a battalion of ephzones.
6. Experience gained by defeating a monsters is often not commensurate with the difficulty of doing so. Elites should also offer elite xp.
7. While on the subject of experience, in my opinion, the xp gained from completing a quest should never drop since it requires so much more experience for each subsequent level attained.
8. A new fellowship quest change precludes helping your friends unless you only recently accomplished the feat. At lower levels, burglars and loremasters require more concise planning and execution, as example. They therefore must patiently gain a few more levels than a guardian, minstrel, or champion would need.
9. The tedium with far too many quests requiring an insulting amount of running back and forth, when more content should have been included instead.
10. Some minor issues:
a. Crafting drops should name the craft on mouse over.
b. The ghosting mailbox in MD.
c. Abandon horse? NO. Dismount horse? YES.
d. The often haphazzard placement of NPC supply, produce, etc. vendors.

After beta -The game is too small and offers nothing remotely new to genre

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 9 / 19
Date: March 31, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Just got done with closed beta and wow this game needs a lot of help. Too bad there is not enough time before launch. Search problems at auction, interface bugs, quest bugs, memory leaks, and graphics are meh for the power they take.

First of all the game is tiny. They say you can immerse yourself in middle earth. More like wading ankle deep to me. Nine areas total, each maybe twice as big as say a WoW zone. No replayability here. When and if they add new zones, they will all have to be high lvl zones which really makes no sense at all to me.

Some people say loot does nothing and thats good. Wrong! All characters become the same through traits that they can all get. Most traits do very little to enhance your character. A tree based system is always better as the players have to pick and follow different paths of specialization. In LoTR you just always get the best virtues,race traits(7 for 5 slots u do that math), and class traits. Later on in the game it is a grind to get the virtues as well(kill 100 elite gaunt men below your level). How this is better then having good loot is beyond me.

There are very few character class types and since stats do nothing to change your class the race seems to do little (except for race traits which are a nice touch, except everybody will have same ones equipped, read up). The three starting areas offer little replayability as after lvl 16-19 everyone moves on to barrow downs and lone lands anyways.

Finally crafting is terrible. No imagination here. Heavy leather gloves and superb heavy leather gloves for the win. Some items are not bound on use and so market is flooded even more so then other games.

There is however, one good thing. The chapter and book quest are nice and the streamlined storyline is fun. Too bad this is a tiny fraction of the game.

This game has been compared to WoW a lot and for good reason. The interface is exactly the same. The quest structure is similar as well. The land layout, crafting, classes, hell everything. The game looks, smells, and tastes like WoW. Except in almost all ways worse. Smaller, worse PvP, Less Classes, worse trait system. But more importantly, LoTR adds absolutely nothing new to the mmo market. Granted WoW and all other mmos have huge failings and that is why I no longer play any of them. But if they have failings and LoTR is worse, then what does that make LoTR?

A Good Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: September 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I figured I would give the game 100hrs of playtime before I wrote my review but now I have put in over 200+hrs since the game was released and reached the level cap of 50 and started another player that is currently at lvl 41. This is honestly my first MMO that I have spent a decent amount of time playing. I lost interest in WoW, EQ2, and SWG because I really do not like to grind to level and the story just did not suck me. What I like about LoTRO is the fact that you can level at a decent rate just by completing quests. Something I never could do decently in other games without feeling like I had to kill everything I came across to keep gaining XP to level at a decent pace. This could just be my playing style though and nothing else.

The game has some of the nicest graphics I have seen in a MMO to date and I have experienced few technical difficulties with the game. The couple of times I have had a problem I searched the forums and found a solution or submitted a trouble ticket and it was fixed within about 36hrs. The servers are stable and undergo routine maintenance (about once every 3-4 weeks) to keep them operating properly. Since the game was released last Apr there have already been two decent-sized updates adding hundreds of new quests for both mid and high level players.

The only thing that I am disappointed in is the fact that the Player vs Player (PvP) aspect of the game is fairly weak. Since everyone is technically on the same team (you can't be bad guys in the regular game) there is a special zone where people can play their lvl 40+ players from the regular game against lvl 50 monsters that other players can control. That was the one thing I did enjoy about my limited time with WoW was that you could play on a PvP server and have full blown war breakout around you when the different factions or guilds met each other in the game. LoTRO is really a Player vs Environment (PvE) focused game with PvP feeling like an afterthought tacked on at the end. I know it wasn't a last minute addition, it just isn't all that interesting to me.

The last thing I would like to point out is that this game focuses on group questing towards the later lvls of the game...lvl 40+ is largely fellowship group quests. Early on there is quite a bit of solo stuff but later in the game expect to spend time getting groups together to go finish quests. I read some of the reviews disappointed in the fact that they thought the quests could largely be solo'ed and all I can say is this: the books focused on a fellowship so to expect the game to be any different is somewhat unrealistic. Turbine had to stick closely to the lore of LoTR otherwise there would be no game since the property is so tightly controlled by Tolkien's estate.

Bottom line: This game is a lot of fun if you know what you are getting into. If it had a better PvP aspect, it would be a five star in my book. This is not WoW or any other MMO. It takes aspects of many different MMO and combines them into the game however it is unique and not a clone of any other in my opinion. This game is about the lore of LoTR and has to follow that closely since it has been in existence for about three quarters of a century. Turbine cannot be as creative as other developers that have more liberal control over the intellectual property that they created and hence the direction the game takes. If you want to take part in the War of the Ring then this is probably the best way to do so.

A upcoming MMO that is on my radar is Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures it looks like it will be great!

If you are looking for something more WoW-ish I would say go with: Warhammer On-line: Age of Reckoning

Both are slated to come out in Mar 08. I personally will be going with Conan.

Beats WOW bad!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: April 16, 2008
Author: Amazon User

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

Nice MMORPG, but I'm going to play WoW instead

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 14
Date: June 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I played this game for 2 weeks and I think this is a good game, however I am going to play WoW instead.

So, obvious question, is why did I make this decision?

First, some minor differences between WoW and LOTRO
- LOTRO has better graphics
- The quest interface on LOTRO is better also
- WoW is a larger universe and quests seem to be located closer
- LOTRO, being a newer game is a little bit more "crowded" in the noob areas than WoW (a temporary problem)
- LOTRO has time of day (changes from daytime to nightime)
- WoW has a greater variety of monsters, Mobs, and player (races, etc..)
- If you are into Role Playing (or "RP") the Lord or the Rings world, there are some servers and people who do this
- While LOTRO has the movies, the guide, and a few webites, WOW has a lot more guides and online support to help with quests, questions etc..

Now, why am I playing WoW instead of LOTRO?
I, like most people, only have time to play one MMORPG; so I had to make a choice. I am not a hard-core MMORPG raider, so I like to be able to have access to quest guides, maps, forum support, etc... So, I choose WoW because of the stronger community support and all of the extra goodies (strategy guides, quality podcasts, trading cards, shirts, hats, etc...). Now, I realize this is temporary as LOTRO is still new and is currently building a community. So, I may go back and re-visit my decision, but for now I am happy with the choice I have made.

Good if you've never played an MMO before.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 18
Date: September 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is set in Middle Earth, and if you want to set foot in Middle Earth, this is probably the best way to do it.

However, I think this game has exactly the same flaw that Star Wars Galaxies had: it takes a great license, but fails to deliver what was probably the one key aspect most gamers were hoping for -- the war!

There is no War of the Ring in this game. You don't ever get a sense that the forces of Morder or her allies are coming for you. You don't feel as if the fate of the free peoples of middle earth hang in the balance because, of course, they don't. It is still, at its core, just another unchanging MMO where the enemies wander around but never attack and in the end you're basically just an axe murderer going around hacking up creatures that would have been perfectly content to stand there and mind their own business if you hadn't trod into their lair. You can hang out in town and be perfectly safe forever, which is definiately not the sense that should have been conveyed in a LOTR game.

I realize that a truely dynamic wargame is a lot to ask for, but comeon, LOTRO isn't offering us anything new. It's World of Warcraft with less content, but in a LOTR setting.

I rate it as 3 stars because although you'd probably be happy if you tried it out and you'd probably get a couple good months play out of it, this game is just so much less than it could have been or should have been. It's very uninspired and if not for the strength of the LOTR license, it probably wouldn't have sold at all. You'll notice that the people who talk this game up are talking up the LOTR license aspects -- the depictions of Bree and so forth. Nobody is talking up the day-to-day gameplay or combat mechanics, because those just aren't that good. It's pretty, but it's not that fun.

"Monster play", on the other hand, is fairly ingenious. This is the one place in the game where the War of the Ring comes to life, as groups of players fight against the forces of Mordor (also controlled by players). The problem, again, is simply lack of content to the Monster Play section. Monster Play is relegated to a very small section of the world. It's clearly an afterthought when it probably should have been the entire focus of the game.

I would suggest the LOTRO is going to hold lasting appeal to a small section of the audience that simply wants to play a hobbit or elf and hang out in Middle Earth and occasionally kill some stuff. It's going to fall short of expectations for anyone who was hoping to fight the War of the Ring and really get entrenched in the Battle for Middle Earth, because that battle simply isn't going on in this game.

Great game and dedicated developers

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: May 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I was a skeptic coming to LOTRO, thinking it'll be another waste of a license since most licensed games tend to not be very good. LOTRO has completely surprised me. From the very beginning, you are thrusted into the story and the game and your character continued to evolve. What I especially liked was that the game is very quest-centric, which keeps the story and the lore alive, unlike other MMO's that I usually just ignored the lore. The developers have so far been very responsive to the player base. The Old Forest is amazing (and I still get lost in it no matter how many times I've been through it), and the Great Barrow is probably the single most well designed, challenging, and fun dungeon I've ever experienced so far. The graphics are amazing, and has a dream-like quality that suited the setting very well, and sometimes I really feel I'm in Middle Earth. There are a few things I think the developers need to work on, such as more varied character models (though the models themselves look good and detailed) and scalable UI. However, the game was released in a nearly flawless state and nearly bug-free. Also, the game is very friendly to both casual and hardcore players. I can finish half a dozen quests in one hour and have a very enjoyable experience. I highly encourage anyone who has any interest in MMOs and Lord of the Rings try the game.

LOTRO - A solid MMORPG with Tolkien Flare

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: May 16, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is a solid, enjoyable massively multi-player online role-playing game with a strong Tolkien flare.

Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) has good, but not incredible, graphics, even on relatively low end PCs. The game has good sound effects and an enjoyable and unobtrusive musical system that does a good job of setting the mood for different locations without being annoyingly repetitive.

LOTRO's game systems are very well designed, although there are no genre-redefining innovations. Players with previous MMO experience will be immediately comfortable with LOTRO, and new comers should have no trouble with LOTRO's gentle learning curve.

Lord of the Rings Online is highly quest-driven, and there are well over a thousand quests spread across the game world. Although many of these quests are of the 'Kill Creature X and bring me something they carry' variety, they all fit in very nicely with the game's story line.

There are two areas where LOTRO really shines. The game's story line and art direction are truly excellent, and were obviously crafted by writers and artists who had a great deal of respect for Tolkien's fantasy masterpiece. In short, the game feels like Middle Earth should.

If you are a fan of either Lord of the Rings or online role playing games in general, you should take a look at Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar.

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