It’s been a few days since my last update and I’ve been pretty busy with RL. I guess that happens to most of us from time to time but I’ve still been trying to get over my SOE hang over since they announced RMT is coming to all Vanguard servers. It’s coming to Vanguard and I’ll bet it won’t be long before Live Gamer hits EQ and EQ2 as well bringing with it officially sanctioned sales of accounts, gold, items etc… My theory is that Vanguard is the test bed for this type of service, along with the two EQ2 servers that have it already of course. My subscriptions are currently canceled to all their games and I won’t be reactivating them until they reverse course. I was also planning to go to my 4th Fanfaire this year to celebrate the 10th anniversary of EQ but I think I’ll do something else with that cash. Anyways, enough about SOE and Vanguard.
With no SOE games to play, I’m down to Warhammer, Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online. I feel like I’ve been there and done that when it comes to World of Warcraft and Warhammer is a ghost town at the lower levels so I’m having a hard time getting motivated to keep leveling in that game. Out of those three options, Lord of the Rings is enjoying quite a resurgence these days. You can’t hit a major MMO web site, read a blog or hear a podcast without MMO veterans raising their glasses to toast Turbine and their newest game. I couldn’t resist. I had to see what all the fuss was about.
I rolled up a Minstrel tonight on the Brandywine server. My buddy Theo rolled a Hunter and a Warden. We both made it through the newbie experience and hit level 7 in an hour or two of game play. What are my thoughts so far? Well, first of all the world is beautiful. I’m able to run the game smoothly on ultra high video quality at 1900×1200 resolution with shadows and directX 10. Character creation was simple enough although I must admit I’m a bit tired of elves and dwarves. The hobbit race is somewhat interesting but those guys get on my nerves to be honest – always have. That left me with the decision to play the race of man. There are a good number of customization options for all the races but certain classes can only be played by certain races which is a bit of a bummer.
After entering the game, you immediately notice an increased level of engagement as you find yourself wanting to read the quest dialogue and enjoying the cut scenes along with the stellar in game audio. Turbine did a nice job of making you feel immersed in the world and the story from the very beginning. After a quick instance where you basically save some hobbits and see your first black rider you are put out in a newbie version of the first town. There are a number of areas to investigate and quests to pick up. There is corruption afoot and it’s your job to out it and to save the town. Along the way, I met this named mob shown below. My “instrument” is very intimidating.
One of the potential downsides of this game for me is that there really isn’t an option to play on a pvp server. I know lots of people would view this as a positive and of course others would say monster play counts as pvp. For me, I like the added level of excitement that pvp brings to an MMO. It’s not a deal breaker – as I still enjoy PVE gameplay but I think I will miss it not being around. That said, I did get into a situation tonight where I was camping this named boar and out of the blue this burgular appeared and did a nice kill steal on my mob. I challenged him to a /duel and he went invisible. He snuck around me and stabbed me in the back. The fight was on.
I had found PVP after all. We had a nice battle and at the end of the engagement, which lasted about a minute and a half, he was down. My heals proved to be too much for him. It was poetic justice for the kill stealer. No seriously, I don’t have any hard feelings towards this guy – it was actually quite fun just to have the fight.
Before too long one of the major NPCs was offering me a quest with a warning to clear all other quests in the area because once you accept his quest you have to leave the newbie area for good. I accepted his quest, saved the town and ended up appearing in the “real world” version of that same town – now burned and battered from the fight that happened earlier in the newbie area. After scouting out the burned town, I discovered that many of the familiar npcs were now dead and others were wounded. At this point, I decided to call it a night and get some sleep. My first night in LOTRO was pretty fun. I’m looking forward to checking the game out further in the days and weeks to come.
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