Well, with the NDA lifted, I guess it’s time I chime in with my thoughts on Lord of the Rings Online.
In a word, the game is… disappointing. After my (6-7 hour) experience with the stress test, I have zero intention of playing the open beta, much less paying money for the game.
I played three characters. A male hobbit hunter type, A dwarven tank type (male, there is no option to play a female dwarf), and a female human mage type. Each race gets their own single player instanced opening quest, which is pretty nice. The story and writing on these are pretty good. There is also a big story quest that accompanies completion of the newbie experience. I only played the dwarf that far (and then played him for a few hours after newbieland).
No female dwarves. Feh. They really were pretty lazy when it came to model design. The dwarf and hobbit models look like humans with their legs chopped off.
Turbine sent out surveys today, and I just finished filling mine out. I was entirely honest. I checked a lot of “average” and “normal” on radio boxes because the game is completely average in almost every way. I checked a handful of more extreme ratings where they did something measurably better or worse than the industry at large.
They also asked me for more detailed comments… twice 
One of my comments (on general impression of the game interface/design/play as a whole) read something like this:
As it stands, there is absolutely nothing to recommend this game over any of the competition other than the draw from the franchise.
The fixed pixel UI elements are unusably bad on anything but a 1024×768 screen. The animation, art, and controls are average at best.
The single-player instanced story content is the game’s most interesting aspect, but it is ruined by the dumb font scaling issues [mentioned above] and the need to constantly adjust the camera to “listen” to dialog. [I had played through 4 of these sequences]
LOTRO is well on its way to becoming another Matrix Online or SWG – perfectly good franchises that would otherwise have made great games had they not been the victims of such inept and uninspiring craftsmanship.
The fact that you pushed to “stress test” an application without apparently even doing internal QA on the UI does not bode well for the quality of the remainder of the product.
That’s right. Fixed. Pixel. 32×32 icons for your action bar that do not scale when you change screen resolutions. 12 pixel high text in the chat/system window, 18 pixel high text over NPC’s when they speak… provided you are close enough to view it at full size. SIX pixel high text over your xp bar… There was no option anywhere to rescale these components. The game was all but impossible to play at 1280×1024. Happily, I didn’t try anything higher than that…
Horrendous UI decisions aside, the game is decent enough… the character balance is decent, the controls are passable, the music is ok. They did some interesting and semi-unique things with how they handled death penalties, falling damage, morale and with some of the class designs. The way players earn visible titles is kind of cool but it’s been done before (CoH comes to mind in a very big way).
Nothing about the game really wows me.
Speaking of WoW… there are several game elements that they completely took from Warcraft. The most blatant of these is the “map home” that you get upon leaving newbiedom, an item with a 1 hour cooldown that teleports you back to town.
Now, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with copying features from the most successful game ever to hit the genre… but… meh. The game has too many borrowed features and not enough unique flavour to be worth the time.
I’ll leave the positive and more detailed feedback to people who actually liked the game or who spent a bit more time playing it than I did.
This is the ONE franchise on the planet that has the right to be a total and complete Tolkien rip-off… and I’m predicting that they’re going to fail. They’ll have a decent launch, get a good number of initial customers… then those customers will cancel their subscriptions… then there will be server merges…
Eventually, they will have one server populated entirely (ie, only) by people who liked the books and have never played any other online rpg’s. And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, LOTR deserves better.
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While doing the end-of-newbie quest, I used FRAPS to capture a bit of combat. The 14 second long scene in question involves me tanking two goblins and receiving some DPS assistance from an NPC whose name should be familiar to anyone who read The Hobbit.
The file in question is a quick and dirty re-encode of the original FRAPS capture to a fairly low bitrate 640×512 mpeg-4/mp3 avi file.
You can download it here (1.8mb – you probably want to do the right click, save as, etc… dance).
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