My visit to LotRO's Middle-Earth

When I wrote about my experiences with the Age of Conan 7-day free trial in my previous blog entry, one of my colleagues here at HG told me that I should also give a try to Lord of the Rings Online. As I said in my previous entry, these are practically my first experiences with MMORPGs and that explains the lack of comparisons drawn between these and the other MMORPGs out there. But, onto the business at hand.

Having previously downloaded Age of Conan, I was prepared to the long downloads and upgrading processes before I actually got to play LotRO. And, in fact, the waiting period was very similar to Age of Conan in that regard, but the 14-day trial (a nice perk for Europeans) felt luxurious in comparison to the measly 7 days that Age of Conan let me have fun in the Hyborean world. I played almost every day for the first 10 or so days, but a little less on the last couple of days. This drop in enthusiasm was probably only natural after having played both AoC and LotRO every day for almost 3 weeks.

As all of you probably know already, the graphics in LotRO are nowhere near as good as they are in AoC. Given that I was dismayed by AoC's graphics at first, you can imagine that I experienced a similar period of dismay when I launched into my first game of LotRO. You get used to the graphics style in a few hours, but, aside from a few pretty nice lighting effects, they are nothing to write home about.

Similarly, the character design was awfully plain in comparison to the tweaking that you can do in AoC - there were only a few different generic face types for different cultures and not much to customise after that. Also the profession selection was surprising considering the pen&paper RPGs set in the Middle-Earth - the designers had apparently decided to start from scratch when designing the system in LotRO.

A third point that annoyed me in LotRO was the fighting system: you have to click to select the enemy that you want to strike before any of your strikes are taken into account. The game sometimes auto-selects the enemy who attacks you, but often does not, so you have to do it manually. This also means that taking on multiple opponents does not get as fun as it was in AoC where it was possible to cause damage to multiple opponents at once, if they were nicely positioned in front of your character (of course this also led to some funny situations in AoC when an opponent standing behind the one you were hitting suddenly died from his wounds - perhaps the blood sprays got him?). All in all, the fighting system in LotRO felt clumsy and there was little tactical consideration required (other than knowing when to run away).

In addition to these points, LotRO suffered from some of the same problems as AoC: enemies have a sensor radius that determines when and if they react to your presence, meaning that you can kill their friends while they just stand still. Also, you cannot pick up the weapons that your enemies used against you - which is just stupid (are there any MMORPGs that handle this aspect better?). Also, the same problem with invulnerable enemies surfaced that I had experienced in AoC: sometimes the enemies could not spot you even if you shot them with an arrow and this caused my character to auto-miss every following arrow until the enemy could locate and attack me.

However, despite these annoying little details, I was able to also enjoy the game. After all, it is Middle-Earth that we are talking about and I actually got to see barrow wights and Nazgul. The first time I encountered the latter, I actually went "Oh, crap" in my head and prepared to turn around and run away as fast as my character's (female hunter called Arinel) feet could carry me.

Similarly, meeting Strider, striding through the Shire and entering Bree felt like memorable moments to me. It was also nice how the plot and missions are bound with the story of Tolkien's books, effectively adding further depth into the story by telling about missions and events that took place in Middle-Earth even as Elijah Wood bulged his eyes at his ring at every turn on his way to Rivendell and eventually to Moria.

All in all, I must admit that I cannot say which one of the two games that I tried will eventually draw me back and make me invest actual money into them. Just now, I feel more attracted by AoC, mainly because I liked the single-player storyline in it. Of course, I never got past the intro area as it was not included in the free trial and don't know what the actual gameplay will be like (will it also start to force party missions down my throat like LotRO started to do on higher levels or not?). But LotRO also has its own kind of attraction, so my choice is in no way final. Furthermore, I still have time to try other MMORPGs before my summer holiday.