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Lord of the Rings Online E3 Review - Turbine
Although coming from the same developers as Dungeons & Dragons Online, you would be hard pressed to find a title more opposite in structure. Lord of the Rings features an open seamless expansive world named of course, Middle Earth. This year the team at Turbine was awarded GameAmp’s Best Theme of 2006 E3 Award and for a damn good reason. Every developer I talked to on the project was extremely knowledgeable about Tolkien’s Middle Earth. I’m not talking about they-watched-the-movie-a-dozen-times type of knowledgeable, I’m talking about someone-at-Turbine-forced-them-all-to-read-The-Hobbitt,-The-Lord-of-the-Rings,-and-the-Silmarillion-twenty-times-each-and-ensured-that-somehow-they-all-had-the-books-on-tape-playing-in-their-cars,-at-home,-and-on-a-continuous-loop-while-working type of knowledgeable and anything with that many hyphens is not to be take lightly. The developers for other games which include the Lord of the Rings title only need a limited amount of knowledge about the original books because they are following a specific, planned out, prewritten, and pre-approved storyline that can only end one way. The dev team over at Turbine is not nearly as fortunate. Just to say you’ll take on the project means you’ve gotta’ have enough cohones to stand up and say, “we can make an MMO that will keep the Tolkien fanboys happy”. That, my fellow gamers, is one of the roughest bunch of geeks you ever didn’t want to mess with. Get the slightest detail wrong and you might very well have a small army of Legolas clad geeks showing up at your office brandishing real bows and opening fire at you window. While it may be humorous at first, an arrow in the eye could be quite painful. Now that we’re in agreement, on to the rest of the review!

LOTRO Screenshot

Graphics

Absolutely amazing; of all the games on the 2006 release list this game looks the best. The modeling, texturing, bump mapping, and character design are all top notch. From the areas shown in the demo it really feels like Middle Earth; from color palette to the shire everything looks superlative. The devs will tell you that they were aiming to be book accurate, not movie accurate but despite the fact, you can tell they have adopted some of the masterful style and look of the movie to incorporate into the game. And I can certainly say I don’t blame them, Peter Jackson’s crew did an excellent job fleshing out the most accurate vision of Tokein’s world and placing it on the big screen.

In short, expect excellent graphics from LOTRO with a ton of mood and theme prevalent throughout every zone.

LOTRO Screenshot

Questing

Both open world and instanced quests are available in Lord of the Rings Online with a variety of objectives and quest triggers. You should also expect to be visited by or in search of, many of the characters from the original books. Turbine has done an outstanding job integrating both characters and pieces of storyline into the main story arc of LOTRO. While I didn’t have a chance to run as many quests as I would have liked, they were definitely very intuitive with prominent symbols displayed over NPCs who would like to converse and a quest log which was very easy to use.

The instanced area in the demo was very well laid out with story line that continues on into the instance. It was good to see the NPCs actually acting out what they were talking about rather than just standing there with a blank expression on their face when they are telling you that their mother was just killed… a nice touch that definitely adds to the immersion factor.

Gameplay

Gameplay was a ton of fun from my time behind the keyboard. They had a six man party setup for people to hop on and try an instanced quest and everything started out rather well. Unfortunately our healer sucked and we didn’t get too far but it was nice to see that there was a definite level of difficulty there so that not every person who just hops on a keyboard can start hacking their way through 100 monsters. Instead, the combat was focused on strategy and works to draw out each class’s unique skills in order to get the job done right.

LOTRO Screenshot Talking to Turbine’s LOTRO Development Team I was informed that there would also be a good deal of solo content and that only in the main story line portions would you be required to group. I definitely like this approach rather than always being forced to group or never having to group the entire game.

While at Turbine’s booth I was able to try out three different classes and each class feels and plays completely different from each other. The skill sets are completely different with the most fun, personally, being the archer-type class. With an intelligent AI that allows monsters to band together or even break when morale and health get low it was awesome to whip around and fire an arrow into the back of an orc’s head. Whether that’s your thing or not is up to you but know that similar role playing type of skills for each class really bring you into the combat in LOTRO.

Character Progression

Character progression was difficult to get a good feel for from the demo due to the machines being setup with specific characters but when questioning the devs I am very comfortable that it will indeed play a large role, as with any other MMORPG and GameAmp will continue to keep you informed on what we learn.

LOTRO Screenshot

Gear

LOTRO will have level requirements for many items but not necessarily for race. Even in the books Bilbo and Frodo were wearing chain mail crafted by the elves. I’m sure the team didn’t want to discourage many players from becoming a certain race due to the fact that say, hobbits don’t really craft armor.

I was assured by the team that there would be lots of armor to discover each with their own distinct look so no complaints there. In fact the only thing I have to complain about for LOTRO is the fact that I can’t play it yet!

Overall

Overall I’d say Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar has a real shot at stealing away some of WoW’s subscriber base. The attention to detail in this game rivals some of the best titles ever released and we can’t wait to get our hands on a few beta accounts. In fact we bet you can’t either and the wonderful community manager over at Turbine for LOTRO handed me four beta account codes to give away for GameAmp so if you want in, make sure to visit the GameAmp Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Site. Even if you plan on participating in our contest make sure you also make your way over to the Official Lord of the Rings Online Site and register for the beta. If you’ve got a guild, get them all to register and increase your chances of getting in!
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