The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Review: Part One

Note: In the interest of providing full and complete coverage (I don’t feel you can properly review an MMO until you’ve experienced the end game), this review will be broken up into two parts: the early game, levels 1-25, and the later game, levels 25-50 and beyond. Introduction

Perhaps the greatest compliment that I could pay to LOTRO is that I didn’t want to stop playing it long enough to write this review.

No one is more surprised about that than I am. Like many MMO players I know, I was sure that after the cancellation of AC2, and the, shall we say, “less-than-stellar performance” of DDO, LOTRO was destined to be the final nail in Turbine’s coffin. If they didn’t learn from their mistakes the last two times, why would they the third?

Color me shocked. Not only has Turbine learned the lessons of their past missteps, they have created what is arguably one of the most polished and addictive MMO experiences in years.

The Good

In a welcome breath of fresh air, departing from what seems to be the industry standard of “release now, patch later,” LOTRO has a level of polish and overall quality I haven’t seen in an MMO this close after launch in quite some time.

Server stability (at least, on the one I play) is second to none, and crashes, lockups, and other hassles that tend to accompany new releases are nearly non-existent.

Client performance is impressive, as well. My machine hasn’t been top of the line since this time last year, and I’ve been able to run the game on Ultra High with only a few hiccups, mostly when moving into new areas.

The graphics are not the most cutting-edge that I’ve ever seen, but the game world itself is richly detailed, and the art style is exactly what we’ve all come to expect Middle-Earth to look like (I’m sure Peter Jackson had something to do with that).

The gameplay is of the “click skill buttons and wait” variety, which should be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever played an MMO in the past ten years. Turbine obviously wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of mechanics. Instead, they seem to have tried to boil the game down to the pure, basic essentials that make all great MMOs so entertaining and addictive.

This is at once both one of the game’s greatest strengths, and its greatest weakness. On the one hand, jaded veterans (such as myself) will likely experience a distinct feeling of déjà vu at having already played through most of what LOTRO has to offer in a dozen previous titles… On the other hand, for players just starting out in the genre, there hasn’t been an MMO with this level of accessibility to the general public since WoW.

Even one as jaded as myself has to admit, with certain admiration, that although the game doesn’t bring very much that’s new to the table, what’s there is executed to near-perfection.

On top of this, the game is just plain fun to play. Turbine has chosen to buck the prevailing design trends of “harder deaths, slower exp,” and take some of the grind and monotony out of MMOs—though, granted, there’s still plenty of it to go around. The game has no experience loss on death, no corpse runs, and no “hell levels” that you’ll be stuck grinding for a week.

In another departure from most MMOs on the market, you won’t be starting out in this game by killing rats (they save that for later). I won’t spoil all of the openings for you, but, depending on your race, you’ll be doing anything from escaping a brigand camp with the help of a Ranger, to trying to stop the resurrection of an evil Dwarf king. Within minutes of starting, your character will find itself embroiled in an epic quest that will span the entire length of the game.

These introductory sequences are a great hook, and serve to get you into the world and fully immersed in the story right from the start.

And, once you’re into it, you will never find yourself for want of something to do. Every zone seems to have at least a hundred quests, ranging from one-offs that reward only some quick experience, to story-driven chains culminating in boss fights deep within enemy bases.

This wealth of content extends nearly to the point of absurdity; just when you think that you’ve completed all the quests in a particular zone, and are finally ready to move on to the next, you wander into an area you hadn’t explored previously, and find a camp with a dozen more.

If you should ever find that you are not in the questing mood, the game also has a full-featured crafting system that, much like the rest of the game, is very intuitive and easy to get into.

To encourage people to take up a craft, Turbine claims that the best items in the game can only be made by players, but I haven’t seen much evidence of this, yet.

I’ll have more on the crafting system in Part 2 of this review.

The Bad

All of this glowing praise is not to say that the game is without faults.

For instance, all of these hundreds and hundreds of quests necessitate a certain amount of repetition—and, even by level 25, you’ll begin to notice when three NPCs in the same area ask you to kill varying numbers of exactly the same mobs.

Boars, in particular, seem to be a developer favorite. One of the more lighthearted amongst them even pokes fun at this, by having one of the taverns in the Shire selling “More Boar Beer.” Description: “Because you can never have too many boars.”

Turbine also didn’t go out on a limb and attempt to create any bold new quest archetypes… You’ll largely be collecting wolf hides, playing FedEx, and killing conveniently placed mobs, just like the old days.

The crafting system, while very intuitive and easy to get into, is not particularly useful in the early levels.

In most professions, by the time you’re skilled enough to make Master items (which are the only ones worth equipping, when compared to quest rewards, or even common drops), you’ve already out-leveled them.

Worse still, in the later tiers crafting becomes a monotonous resource grind, where you will be spending hours and hours out in the fields mining, chopping, and studying your painfully slow way to Mastery.

The size of the game world itself is another minor detraction for me—or, more specifically, the lack of size.

I own a hardcover copy of The Lord of the Rings with one of Tolkien’s original maps printed on the end pages… According to the map’s distance key, it is approximately a hundred miles to Bree from The Shire.

This being the case, considering the fact that it takes about five minutes to get to Bree from The Shire on horseback either indicates that horses in the game are traveling over a thousand miles per hour, or that Turbine employed a 100:1 compression ratio on Middle Earth.

Now, obviously, 100 miles in any traditional MMO is untenable (and no, Dark and Light does not count). I doubt if all the zones in EverQuest laid out end to end are even 10 miles in total after eight years of expansions.

Still, I think if Turbine went even 50% larger on the game world, it would feel that much more immersive, and more “world-like,” rather than like a Middle-Earth themed Disney World.

But, that’s a personal preference on my part. Many people will likely enjoy a smaller, more “intimate” game that is full of life, as opposed to one that is vast and empty.

My final gripe (for this half of the review) has to do with the amount of lore that the development team is limited to… and to explain it properly, I have to delve into a bit of a history lesson:

The Ugly

In chaos theory, it is said that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon rain forest can trigger a hurricane on the opposite side of the globe.

A similar chain of unlikely events has added up to give us The Lord of the Rings Online today.

In 1968, J.R.R. Tolkien got a bill from the tax man he couldn’t afford to pay. To cover this debt, he sold the film and merchandising rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to MGM Studios. The exact figure he received for them seems to be in dispute (various sources claim it to be anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000), but, suffice it to say, in retrospect it was not nearly enough money.

MGM soon afterward turned around and sold the rights to a Hollywood producer by the name of Saul Zaentz.

Zaentz, evidently a very sly businessman, has gone on to make roughly a bajillion dollars from the rights through his company Tolkien Enterprises, which licenses the creation of movies (including the much-derided 1978 animated version of LOTR), trading cards, collectible figurines, and, of course… games.

Not a single cent of this money has ever gone to the Tolkien estate, aside from the rise in book sales which accompanied the popularity of the more recent films.

Tolkien’s son, Christopher, is understandably somewhat bitter about this, and as such, he refuses to touch anything Zaentz is involved in with a ten foot pole.

As a result, barring an act of God, only lore, characters, and areas depicted in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit will ever make it into the game. The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-Earth are all completely off-limits to the development team. These omissions may not bother the average player who has only read the trilogy or seen the films, but for hardcore Tolkienites (is that even a word?) this fact will likely be a thorn in their sides, and a major detractor to playing.

Moving on…

The Gimmick

Every new MMO these days seems to try to have a gimmick in an attempt to set themselves apart from the other million or so fantasy games on the market, and, in LOTRO’s case, it is arguably its most innovative feature: The Deed System, which serves as LOTRO’s answer to Talent and Alternate Advancement systems.

Every character has what’s called a Deed Log, and, after performing certain tasks (completing a quest, killing a mob, reaching a new level, etc.), new Deeds become available.

The Deed rewards come in three varieties: Titles, Virtues, and Traits, and each comprises a sort of miniature quest, with only one goal, which largely seem to have been designed around the four classic Bartle Types: Achiever, Killer, Explorer, and Socializer.

For Achievers, there is the obtainment of the Virtues and Traits which the Deeds award, which offer various character improvements, such as added stats, in the case of Virtues, and new skills, or improvements of old skills in the case of Traits.

For Killers, there are Deeds to, for example, kill 60 slugs in The Shire (which also has a very amusing title to go along with it).

For Explorers, there are Deeds to find all of the Elven ruins in Ered Luin.

And, for Socializers, there are titles and special role-playing abilities awarded to those who collect a certain number of emotes directed at their character.

The ingenious nature of this system lay in the fact that even after a player reaches the maximum level, there will likely always be some Deeds that they missed along the way (not unlike quests, there are at least a dozen of them to be had in every single zone), which can still help them improve their skills if they’re inclined to put in the effort.

Virtues and Traits can have a major impact on your character, and, as you only have a limited number of slots for them available, choosing between them can at times become a painful decision, just as a system of this nature should be.

A lesser gimmick is the game’s Monster Play system, which allows for PvP (or PvM, as Turbine calls it) against player-controlled mobs. But, as there are currently very few level 50 players to engage against, I will save mention of that for Part 2 of this review.

In Conclusion

The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar doesn’t do a whole lot that’s new, but it does a lot of old very, very well.

It has taken and refined some of the most entertaining and addictive elements of MMOs of the past, and masterfully blended them into the world created by J.R.R. Tolkien (or, at least, the portions of it that Saul Zaentz has the rights to).

When all is said and done, I can summarize this entire review with a single sentence:

“If you like WoW, and you like Lord of the Rings… that’s pretty much it.”

Rating: 4.5 / 5

Recommendation: Buy

In the next part of the review, we’ll take a look at instances, epic traits, monster play, and why if I never set foot in the North Downs again for as long as I live, it will be too soon.