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). |
This review is the perfect example of one of the worst things about the internet. THIS REVIEW NEEDS TO BE UPDATED!! Almost none of the negatives mentioned in this review exist any longer. The idea that a game can’t be good unless it re-invents the wheel is just ignorant. If its good and works, why change it? Believe me, people, there is enough difference in gameplay that combined with the good things they copied from WoW makes this game awesome. Another thing, maybe you should have atleast a decent machine before you review somthing? At 1600×1028 the UI IS NOT A PROBLEM, for that matter it isn’t a problem at 1028×768 or 1280×1024 (you can move it around anywhere you want) and I don’t have a bleeding edge machine. AMD Anthlon 64 4000+, 3Gb RAM, and nVidia 7900 GTX with 528Mb onboard RAM is OK today, but I have most of the settings on High or Ultra High and it runs smooth as silk. Lowering settings on my machine does make it run a little smoother but still looks almost as good as the higher settings. I read a fan review the other day that stated his roommate was running it on a glorified calculator and it was pretty good at low settings. Whats your machine, Ammmon, a Pentium II from 1992? Don’t anyone pay any attention to this review. This game is much much better now.
Since I posted this review over two months ago, I have received a constant stream of venomous criticism for stating that I disliked the game. Boo hoo. I don’t like your game. Big deal. Why should you care?
Thank you, Bryan. Yours is the first reply this post has gotten that actually makes any valid points. I’ve been saving the others as fodder for ridicule in a future article.
I have no intention of “updating” my review. Why would I go back and pay money to re-review a game that I, personally, don’t find entertaining?
I still feel it was a mistake to launch a “stress test” beta when they did. The game was way too unpolished to forcefeed to as many people as they did.
I never intended to write a full review the game so much as simply give my general impressions. At the time I wrote this, nobody else had really written much of anything – outside of blindly glowing praise from fanboys who’d swallow anything with the LOTR stamp on it.
Yay for ignorance! Read the bloody review before you complain, eh?
I never once complained of performance issues. My machine is just fine (3.2ghz amd64, 2gb ram, radeon x1900). The game screamed. I’d have mentioned if it performed as poorly as Matrix Online or something.
(Back when Matrix Online hit beta, we tested it out on what was bleeding edge hardware at the time. We couldn’t turn graphics up more than halfway w/o incurring general meltdown problems)
I complained because the UI made use of fixed pixel art. That means that the buttons get illegibly small when rendered at a high resolution because the number of pixels is fixed. 50×50 pixel art that is fine at 1024×768 is downright invisible at 1600×1050.
Again, if they’ve solved this problem, WONDERFUL, but I still insist that it was a terrible mistake to stress test the game without first cleaning up such glaring issues.
Bryan, you are correct that the notion that games have to be entirely original in order to have merit is terribly flawed.
I have actually been working on an essay on this very subject, but between work and buying a new house and having a new baby… I’ve had a very hard time getting the essay out the door. Perhaps you’ll understand more if you read it whenever I finish writing the thing.
I never meant to compare the game to WoW, and I certainly never intended to say that WoW was in any way better than LOTRO. People who assume that have obviously never read my complaints about Blizzard’s terrible customer service and complete lack of insight into basic player psychology. Blizzard certainly has no moral high ground for originality – other than the fact that they’ve been developing their own IP since I was in jr high. I am very much looking forward to a few new games forcing Blizzard to improve if they want to remain competitive. However, I have no expectation that LOTRO will be one of those games.
WoW is a decent enough game. It is fun, its main draws are their incredibly gentle initial learning curve and their absolutely enormous amount of content once you get into the game. I have canceled my account three times on them now for one reason or another. I play WoW currently because I have family members who do. I play to spend time with my little brother. And, since I’ve played the game quite a bit, I write about it. Just like I write about City of Heroes or anything else that interests me.