The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar

[dietvanillapepsi]

My bro started playing this tonight and he wanted me to start it too. I kinda don't want to devote my time to an MMO that turns out to be lame so I am interested in some of your opinions. Anyone playing?

[Paulisdead]

I am playing it at the moment. I think I finally got bored with FFXI. Nothing against Final fantasy I just lost the will to log on at the moment but I am sure it will come back soon enough.

Anyways LOTRO is not a bad game to play its very much like WoW in the style of play and a lot of ideas are copied from WoW. For quest X go to this cave and collect 8 Cave Claw legs, For quest W go to the field west of the road of Noglond and kill 4 bears, 4 lynx and 4 hendrovas then return for 380 XP and a small reward. Visually it is very pretty. But being a game thats 4 days old its very difficult to say whether it will turn out to be a gigantic waste of time or a fun filled experience. So far it is fun but how long that fun will last for is anyones guess.

A long time ago I played WoW but quit after about a week as it wasnt my cup of tea. However at that time I was still deeply hooked on FFXI so that did not help. I think this will probably work out the same but thats just me being me.

Did your brother not get a buddy code in his game ? You could maybe give it a go for a week, get a general feel for it and see how you find it.

[izembo]

plays like wow but feels unfinished. armor models feel flat on the character. dual wielding attack animation is retarded. i tried 3 times to find something about the game that i could stand to play it....didn't happen.

[Bartylby]

It looks like WoW with a new face but minus spellcasting classes cause tolkien is a fucking pussy.

[Fhqwghads]

If you like LotR, either the books or the movies, I highly recommend it. I've been playing it a lot for a few weeks and I can say it certainly does not feel like WoW. If you're going to compare it to WoW by the quests where you have to go to X location with Y item, then you've just made a comparison to about a million other games, WoW not being the first to do it either.

Anyway, the game looks great, I'm very pleased so far. I think there's more to it than WoW from what I recall of WoW. It's certainly a breath of fresh air for people who've been playing FFXI for a few years too many. You get a 30 day free trial when you buy it, and if you know someone IRL who has it the box comes with a buddy pass that allows for a week's worth of free gaming. Just have your friend lend you the DVD to get the game installed and you can use the key to check it out.

As far as the storyline goes, they have done a fantastic job of capturing Tolkien's works. It's like reading another book and seeing the War of the Ring from a completely different perspective. That coupled with wandering the world and seeing all the familiar sights and places in a game is definitely worth the price of admission in my book.

[Fusional]

sucks imo. character models are EQ ripoffs (and all are ugly as hell save for maybe the elves which are tolerable), UI is a WoW ripoff. you also have to have a pretty beeftastic PC to play it on full settings, otherwise everything is chunky and laggy and gross.

the environments are cool, but WoW uses a much more impressive color palette.

battle also feels kind of awkward to me.

the LOTR mystique can only carry it so far. as far as i'm concerned if i'm desperate for more tolkien i'll just wait and look forward to my Philosophy of Tolkien class next semester at uni.

[MisterBob]

UI is a WoW ripoff.

Actually the UI is pretty much a direct copy of Turbine's previous failure, Asheron's Call 2.

I remember seeing this game in development at Turbine HQ during a tour 5-6 or so years ago, wow I'm getting old :(

[Carbon]

The best part is that you can play instruments and other people can listen. There's a part of town where people just hang out and jam out, usually to Final Fantasy tunes or something. lol

I haven't personally played it, just seen it. And it looks very, very similar to WoW.

[dietvanillapepsi]

Yeah, he's got a buddy pass. Still undecided though.

I watched him play a bit and browsed through the manual. My bro doesn't like to read manuals so he wasn't sure of what the game can or can't do.

Some observations:

--Apparently ppl can randomly attack a mob you are fighting which gimps your exp whether you wanted the help or not.

--I read that after lvl 10 you can play as a monster and kill PC's but the manual was kinda hard to understand. Anyone do this yet? Sounds kinda fun.

--My bro's PC is a lot better than mine and he had a lot of choppy play too. Went to medium res and it was fine.

--It does look like WoW in the way the status displays are. Everything seems to be located in the same places as WoW.

--Looks like this is yet another MMO driven by money and thus exploitable by RMT. Why can't they make games that do away with money, or at least make money inconsequential?

[Fhqwghads]

--Apparently ppl can randomly attack a mob you are fighting which gimps your exp whether you wanted the help or not.

--I read that after lvl 10 you can play as a monster and kill PC's but the manual was kinda hard to understand. Anyone do this yet? Sounds kinda fun.

--It does look like WoW in the way the status displays are. Everything seems to be located in the same places as WoW.

--Looks like this is yet another MMO driven by money and thus exploitable by RMT. Why can't they make games that do away with money, or at least make money inconsequential?

-If someone attacks a mob you have claim on it does nothing to your xp. I have had it glitch a few times where it went grey, probably a bug, and when that happened I didn't get drops or xp. However, the majority of the time all that happened is the mob died faster and I still got xp and drops. Btw, quests are where you get most of the XP, so even if the game glitches 1 out of 100 times it's not a big deal from an XP perspective.

-Haven't done monster play yet. Doesn't really sound that appealing to me.

-People are going to compare WoW to everything that comes out. Someone the other day told me he saw the new Pokemon cards and that they were WoW rip-offs.

-It's not driven by money. I get plenty of drops off of mobs to fund whatever I need, and so far all the good loot drops frequently off mobs, obtained by quests, or gained in instances. I have yet to see a piece of kick-ass gear that isn't bind on acquire either. I'm sure they're out there, just haven't seen it yet. So that means RMT can fuck themselves in the ass with a corn cob, because LotR won't be cock-blocked like FFXI is when it comes to mobs. Granted SE has taken massive strides in that war, and kudos to them because FFXI is much friendlier to honest players now and less productive for RMT.

[Khamsin]

With no spellcasting classes, how is healing managed? Items?

[Fhqwghads]

With no spellcasting classes, how is healing managed? Items?

There's casting in a sense. There's both Lore-master and Minstrel. Lore-master uses nature to cause physical as well as elemental damage, and Minstrels use songs to heal.

There's a good reason for not having actual "spell casting" classes: in Middle Earth there was a grand total of 5 wizards, and they're basically demi-gods. Can't really have player characters running around as demi-gods, hehe.

[Eratosthenes]

I played this in the closed beta a few months ago, and I quit after about two weeks. Its gameplay reminded me a lot of Guild Wars. I heard it was supposed to be like WoW, but I've never played that.

The no-claim thing really bugged me. Also, mobs never moved and always repopped about 30 seconds after dying in the exact same spot every time. Did they fix that?

I think all the classes got some sort of health recovery ability. I was playing a Captain in beta and there were some abilities that would regenerate HP, but I could only use them in combat. Also, HP regenerated quickly on its own when not in combat.

Another thing to add is that LotRO's AH is far less organized than FFXI's. It's more like eBay.

[Fhqwghads]

Respawns are a lot longer than 30 seconds. They generally do pop in the same spots though. I do wish there was a delay before they aggro, ala FFXI. Sometimes you can be fighting and unaware that someone cleared a lot of mobs, fooling you into a false sense of confidence... then BAM... 4 of his buddies spawn simultaneously and kick your ass!

[Eratosthenes]

I was talking about the beta. You could literally just kill something, wait 30 seconds, and kill it again. I understand why they would change it.

[Ksandra]

The Warhammer MMO looks like it'll be better than the Lotr MMO.

I think I'll wait to try the warhammer one.

http://www.warhammeronline.com

[Fhqwghads]

Holy crap that does look freakin bad-ass...

Games NEED more mobs like this!

http://mythicmktg.fileburst.com/media/i ... 306_03.jpg

(link vs. image.. image huuuuuuuuuuuge)

TOO MANY MMOs, not enough time... *sigh*

[raginbull]

I think the nicest way of describing the game is it's a poor man's WoW.

[Vinen]

I think the nicest way of describing the game is it's a poor man's WoW.

Still the best game TUrbine has release.... not that thats saying much bwhahahahaah. Coworker of mine is an ex-employee of Turbine. They pretty much speced the game out to clone wow in most aspects.

[TsingTao]

The Warhammer MMO looks like it'll be better than the Lotr MMO.

I think I'll wait to try the warhammer one.

http://www.warhammeronline.com

It does look better, but my wife wasn't interested. Less wife aggro > a lot of things, and with time for only one MMO...oh well. Warhammer will have to wait.

LotRO is pretty fun imo. I'm not a power gamer any more (not enough time in the day) nor do I give a shit if it looks like a game I never played. It's not full of 14 year old retards and is enjoyable to play so my primary needs are covered. Good stories to follow, good looking world, fun (and worthwhile) to actually explore instead of just hopping from camp to camp to grind to the level cap.

If it's boring in 6 months we'll move along but for now it's a good time. I hope Warhammer is good so that I've got a fallback just in case.