Having now canceled my last remaining MMO (LOTRO), I have been looking around for other games to play. Even before canceling it, having gotten to that pre-cancelation stage where I am not able to stay logged in for hours on end, but still want to do some gaming, I started searching for, and found, a good one: Civilization IV. Now, I had not played Civ III, but I had played Civs I and II and really enjoyed them years ago, so I expected good things from the game, and also had a basic intuitive understanding of the game’s main elements. I’ve leaned toward real-time strategy (RTS) rather than turn-based strategy (TBS) games of late, but I thought it might be fun to have a change of pace. This review may seem a little untimely, as it has been a couple of years since Civ IV was initially released, and I am only reviewing the vanilla version of it (I’ve not yet gotten around to buying expansions). However, I can only review a game when I actually play it, and I thought it would be worth posting a more positive review here, since many of my more recent ones have been largely negative. This isn’t to say that I don’t think those negative reviews are justified — they absolutely are, and if anything I feel more strongly about games like Spore now than I did when reviewing them. But it’s also as important to help steer people toward quality offerings as it is to warn them of the caveats of the poorer titles.

Civilization has been around for years in computer games. I think the first Civilization game came out in the mid-90s, followed by Civ II a little later. I played the first one on my 486-33 MHz computer (and it ran well), and the second, I believe, on either that one or possibly my Pentium I-75. I never played Civilization III, beause not long after getting tired of II, I started to develop more of an interest in the RTS (as I said above). For the last decade or so, almost all my strategy gaming has been of the RTS variety. The main reason for this was that RTSes provided faster games (1-2 hours rather than 10+), and also had more interesting animations to watch in most cases. However, the TBS games have caught up in the graphics area (though they will never be RTSes), and the fact remains that most RTS games are shallow and uninteresting once you remove all the fancy visuals.

I was surprised at how well the Civilization I mechanics have worn over the years. Certainly there have been many tweaks and changes since Civilization first came onto the market, but the basic, fundamental game is still very similar. You start with a tribe of settlers (whose only function is to found a city when you find a good site) and either a scout or a warrior to help you explore. You slowly push back the “unexplored” blackness and the “fog of war” as your civilization expands, and you meet and interact with other civilization leaders (run by the game’s Artificial Intelligence, hereafter “AI”). You can either trade and be nice to them or you can try to take them over culturally (by spreading your religion and culture) or by force. As your civilization grows you will have to manage your economy, make sure you are producing improvements and military units at the necessary rate, and invest in research to gain new technologies. In the end you can win by either being the first to build an interstellar rocket, by conquering your foes, by being elected “Pesident of the World” through the U.N., or by getting three cities to become “legendary” in cultural status. Which one of these you decide to do impacts the strategy you will have as the game unfolds. If you are the first to reach one of these victory conditions, you are declared the winner, and then given a score and a rating on the scale of historical leaders.

Visuals – 8/10

The graphics and visual effects of the game are good, but not outstanding. The terrain features look reasonably smooth, and the units look good at whatever zoom you care to use. The animations look fine, but are not mind-blowing. Basically the units have one or two “attack move” animations that they will use, and a “dying” move if they get wiped out. There is nothing spectacular here in the visual area but nothing to complain about. Special effects are minimal, but appropriate. You won’t see laser beams blasting across the battle field, but as this is a realistic setting on our Earth, you really shouldn’t see those either.

Sound – 9/10

The sound effects and music of the game are good. I very much appreciate some of the classical music scores that you hear after you obtain certain techs and get into the appropriate age (Rennaisance), including some wonderful sections of Beethoven’s symphonies. Gaining technologies gets you a quote from a famous person such as Churchill or Aristotle, and the voice-overs for these are done by none other than Leonard Nimoy, who does a great job on them. Individual units “speak” much the way they do in a typical RTS game, usually in what at least sounds like their own real world language (German for the German units; Latin for the Roman units; etc) — though I don’t know whether they’re speaking anything coherent in the non-English languages. Battle sounds are good, if nothing to write home about, and sounds for things like gaining wonders, changing ages, etc, are all good. This is not a game that makes me want to turn the sound off and substitute my own soundtrack (as many do), so I’m happy with the audio part of the game.

Gameplay/Strategy – 8/10

The game-play in Civ IV is engaging and about as deep as you find in most TBS, and much deeper than you will find in an RTS (for obvious reasons).  There are many ways to play, from ruthless warmonger to peaceful diplomat.  Many elements from turn to turn conspire to force you to think on your feet and react properly — to other civs, to changes in your own society such as disgruntled citizens, to the layout of the terrain.  Even accomplishing a simple “rush” such as the “Axe Rush” (where one builds a bunch of axe-men and sends them after a neighboring civilization very early on in the hope of gaining an early lead) requires thought and planning.  As the difficulty level increases, opposing civilizations become increasingly more difficult to please, and increasingly likely to launch a war that will, if not damage your empire, at least slow it down sufficiently that other non-warring civilizations may gain an insurmountable lead.  This is something I enjoy about the TBS game: the complexity can be ramped up because you have an unlimited amount of time to think and plan and execute your strategies (as opposed to only minutes or sometimes seconds in an RTS).

However, the linchpin of any strategy game, as I have said in other reviews on this site, is the artificial intelligence (AI) — the programming that allows the computer to use what looks like strategic skill to a human player (no computer can use true strategy, as that requires thought; but computers can be programmed to mimic it rather closely if this is done well). Unfortunately, there are no real advances in this area.   Indeed players on the third-party forums devoted to the game frequently discuss how easy it is to defeat the AI militarily, or to trick it into giving them blindingly stupid deals in trades.  Increasing the difficulty, as is traditionally the case with these games, does not improve the game’s strategic skill.  Instead, raising the difficulty level just gives the game more and more license to cheat.   For example, an enemy civilization might be given a free technology (that it has not researched) every so many turns.  I have always viewed this sort of “difficulty increase” as a rather poor cheat, and I’m not impressed that Civ IV still does this.  It’s equivalent to the hard levels of  a chess game forcing you to start off with less and less pieces than the computer does. This undoubtedly would make the game harder, but is it really making the game harder in the proper way? I argue that it is not.

As a result of the relatively weak AI, I docked a couple of points and gave them an 8/10 for this rating.  The strength of the game is its depth and variability.

Controls/UI – 9/10

The controls and user interface features are relatively straight-forward and obvious.  Scrolling around the screen and selecting units are accomplished in an intuitive way, and the icons and text are readable and easy to understand.  There are ways to automate units and city management, which can certainly help the “casual” gamer playing on the lower difficulties. However, if you intend to win the game at the medium and higher difficulty levels, leaving control of whole cities, or even of a few units, up to automation is asking for trouble.  Most of the more successful strategies — ones that allow you to win on levels like “Deity” and “Immortal” by the year 1800, for example — require intense turn-by-turn micro-management of what can eventually become upwards of 20 cities.  The interface does allow you to do this in a relatively easy way, but no interface can help you do this level of micro-management without you investing a lot of time yourself.

There are a few mild annoyances with the interface, but nothing major. I did dock them a point for the interface of the tutorial. The main issue with it is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to save your progress in the 30-minute (or so) tutorial, so if you get 15 minutes into it and need to stop for some reason (as I did), you have to go re-play the whole thing to finish it.  They really should’ve given it a “save” feature.  Also, a lot of things are never really explained well in the manual or in the tutorial, and this should not be the case — they need better tutorials for such a complex game.  I miss the days when games like Age of Empires II would give you a whole tutorial campaign, and that game is nowhere near as complex as Civ IV.  We need something like that here.

Replayability – 9/10

Civ IV has a very high replay factor, because the game is truly different each time.  Where you start on the map can dictate what strategies make sense to use, for example, and how the world is arranged will determine who your friends and enemies are.  There are also various scenarios that come with the game, and others that can be downloaded from various fan sites. I have played the game through on random maps at least 15 times now, and I still find myself wanting to try it again.  As you change the difficulty level or the starting conditions, you change how the game plays, meaning that there are many hours of fun to be had with this game.

Fun 10/10

And speaking of fun, I would say this is the most fun I’ve had with a game in a long, long time.  It’s been quite a while since a strategy game had me so engrossed that I was up until way past my normal bed time.  I often found myself saying, “OK, just one more turn…” and then saying, “Well… one more can’t hurt,” and then again, and again, until an hour more went by than I was planning to play. The game is addictive, not the least because I keep finding out about new strategies on fan sites and then wanting to try them out and see if I can make them work.  If you like strategy games, whether RTS or TBS, I can recommend this one for hours of fun, strategy, and interesting game-play.

Overall – 8.8/10

Overall, Civ IV is an excellent game — probably the best overall game I have reviewed on this site, as the high 8.8 score reflects. It does have its flaws, most notably the weak (and predictable) AI, but in general it is a very fun game with lots of replay potential. Given that it’s now a couple of years old, you should be able to get it for a fairly good price (I think I got my copy for $24.99), and it would be well worth it if you are a fan of strategy games.

Just yesterday, after much research online and a few test drives, I purchased a new 2010 Toyota Camry. And no, it does not corner like it’s on rails. But the idea of a car having great high-speed cornering ability, which is what that phrase means, is the subject of this post.

The reason I’ve chosen to discuss high-speed cornering ability is because it’s something that a lot of car reviews seem to hinge upon – with generally better reviews being given to cars with generally better tight-cornering ability. The reason I’m blogging about this particular characteristic of an automobile is because it’s probably one of the least important characteristics under normal (legal) driving conditions, and yet people seem to care about it an awful lot.

First, let me provide some context for why I’ve brought this up at all. In my market research as I looked for the perfect car, two stand-outs came to the fore: the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord. I will say off the bat that I like the Accord’s external look far better: it’s just a sleeker-looking car. However, I was not in the market just for looks (although that does matter somewhat, when spending thousands of dollars on a car – it shouldn’t look hideous after all), but I was interested in quality, reliability, comfort, handling, etc. All the reviews seem to agree that the Camry has the smoother, more “comfortable” ride while, in many reviewers’ words, the Accord’s ride is “sportier.”

It takes a good deal of digging to find out just exactly what “sporty” means, and not all writers seem to use it in exactly the same way. However, the general meaning seems to be a greater “tightness” to the steering wheel. Having test-driven both cars, I can agree with the assessment: the Camry’s steering wheel has more “give” to it, meaning that slight movements of the wheel do not instantly translate into noticeable changes in direction, whereas the Accord has less of that “give.” If this is one’s definition of “sporty,” then I’ll agree that the Accord has more of that feel to it. I could also definitely “feel the speed” more in the Honda than in the Toyota; the Camry seems to have been designed to muffle out noise, bumps, and the like to a greater degree than the Accord. As I have never been a “speed demon” as a driver, I was really more interested in comfort than in “feeling the speed,” and I ended up with the Camry. However, I have found myself thinking more and more about the remarkable number of reviews that seem to deplore this sort of “comfortable” ride.

It is fine, of course, if people like the sort of ride that they call “sporty.” But honestly, some of the reviews that have criticized the Camry (and also criticized several of the Hyundai offerings, which also seem to be comfort-based rather than “sporty” in their design) seem to dwell on this “tight cornering” ability too much. For example, Consumer Guide Automotive states in its review of the 2009 Camry that all but the sporty SE models are “spoiled by marked cornering lean from their comfort-biased suspensions” and feel “slightly clumsy in fast turns.” And Edmunds even makes the importance of the car cornering like it’s on rails explicit in their rather politely worded but nevertheless look-down-the-nose-at the-rest-of-us comment near the end of their review: “Toyota knows that the majority of buyers in this market segment are more interested in comfortable, stress-free travel than tearing through corners.”

I think that Edmunds has correctly characterized Toyota, and that Toyota has probably correctly anticipated the needs of the market. I’d like to make one slight edit to it though. Not only are the majority of buyers probably not interested in tearing through corners; the reality is that tearing around corners is usually illegal, at least in the U.S. and Canada (and probably elsewhere, though those are the only two countries in which I’ve done any driving) and most of us tend to drive within the boundaries of the law.

After all, think about the conditions these reviewers are talking about and how frequently they ever come up. They’re specifically complaining that the Camry isn’t good at hurtling around corners at high speed. When does a driver in the U.S. ever, legally, have the opportunity to do this? The answer is: hardly ever. In fact, aside from having to make a sudden turn to avoid a collision from an unexpected event (like a truck jack-knifing right in front of you, or a child running into the street after a soccer ball), I can’t think of any time when it would be legal to tear around tight turns at high velocity. The only roads on which it’s even legal to drive at high speeds at all (50 mph and up) are highways, parkways, turnpikes, freeways, and the like – roads specifically designed with smooth grading and very gradual curves. Highways are built on purpose so that you are going “mostly straight,” even when the road has an ultimate turn to it. Thus, one isn’t exactly going to have the opportunity to do any tight cornering on a highway.

There are, of course, three other situations that frequently require one to make what might be called a tight turn:

• Many on- and off-ramps are very tight indeed, often forcing nearly 360 degrees of turn in a very tight space. However, those same ramps have very low posted speed limits – usually 35 mph or lower. I’m not sure I could call taking an off-ramp at 25 mph “tearing” around a curve. One could, of course, drive faster than this, but then one would be breaking the law, and you aren’t supposed to drive that way on exit/entrance ramps.
• Turning onto a cross street in a city or suburb usually requires one to make a sharp, right-angle turn. If one were to take these turns at high velocity, tight cornering would certainly be required. Here again, however, one would not legally have occasion to do this. The posted speed limit in most cities is not what I’d call “high speed” – usually 25-45 mph depending on where you are and on how wide the street happens to be. Even if one were to take these corners while going at the posted speed limit, I couldn’t see calling this a “high speed turn.” In addition, it’s illegal to take corners at full speed under most conditions. For example, North Carolina’s driving manual instructs drivers to “reduce the vehicle’s speed before making the turn”. New Jersey’s driving manual instructs drivers to “slow down before reaching an intersection.” This means that legally, you are required in these states (and most others have similarly worded rules) to reduce your speed below the posted speed limit as you make your turn. In other words, if the speed limit is 35 mph, you’re not supposed to be going around the turn at 35 mph, and you could be given a ticket if you did so, since you’re supposed to slow down when you make a turn on a city street.
• Winding country or mountain roads offer many opportunities to practice your ability to make tight turns, frequently switching from left to right to left again. Here, an improved cornering ability would certainly help you “tear through” these turns, but again, the law doesn’t generally permit it. Winding roads are potentially dangerous at high speeds, and as the government’s job is to help stop us from (accidentally, or on purpose) driving dangerously, the posted speed limit on these winding country roads is usually fairly low – rarely even 50 mph, and frequently as low as 25 mph. Here again, we have a situation where hurtling around curves might be easier to do in a “sporty” car, but it would be illegal regardless of what car you’re driving.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that I don’t think it’s fair to “knock” Toyota for not having engineered the Camry to perform well when being driven illegally. I’m sure the Honda Accord or an even sportier car like a Mazda RX-8 would handle all of the above turns better at high speed than the Camry. They’d be better at whipping down an off-ramp at 70 mph, or at taking a city intersection at 45 mph, or at hurtling down a winding country road at 65 mph. But it would also be illegal to do any of those things anyway.

Again, if you like the “sporty” feel – if you like “feeling your speed” – then that’s certainly up to you, and I’m not going to suggest that’s a bad option for people. I happen to prefer the smoother more comfort-based ride, but that’s simply a matter of taste. But it just strikes me as a little crazy that so many reviews out there complain about the inability of comfort-based cars to “corner like they’re on rails” when, in most cases, that kind of driving is illegal. It’d be like complaining that a car’s top speed is only 120 mph instead of 140 mph. You’ll never be allowed to drive the car over 75 mph legally anyway, so what’s the difference? Or are we just assuming here that nobody drives legally anyway? (Which maybe is not a terrible assumption based on a lot of the driving I see every day.) Maybe we’re being given an insight here into just why there are so many accidents….

In the end, I think too many people worry about the theoretical abilities of their cars rather than taking practical concerns into account. The reality for most of us is that we’re going to do most of our driving near home – driving to and from work, or driving home from the store with shopping packages, or taking the kids to school, or what have you. In the case of almost all of your driving, cornering like the car is on rails is just a non-issue, as is the car’s top speed once you start talking about speeds in the triple digits. In fact, most cars are made to handle well enough in the types of driving conditions that usually come up. As a consumer you really don’t have to worry all that much about “performance.” As long as the car can drive well up to the legal speed limit (which tops out at 75 mph in even the most permissive states), brakes well, and handles well in typical conditions such as rainy weather, city roads, highways, and the like, then the rest of what it could “theoretically” do really doesn’t matter to most of us. In the end you should buy the car you like… a car with a ride you like, that is comfortable, and of course, one that fits your budget. Those things are what you should worry about, and not whether the car “corners like it’s on rails.”

And to the reviewers out there, I think some of you need to stop dwelling on how well the car could handle for us if we ever happened to get it onto a race track alongside Danica Patrick, and place more emphasis in your reviews on how well the car handles under normal, legal conditions – because those are the only conditions 99.9% of us will ever have occasion to face.

What do we mean by “grind?”

As readers of this blog know by now, I have been playing Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online for a few months now. My opinion of this game has changed gradually as my character has advanced to the upper levels. She’s now level 42, and has moved into the “higher level” areas — places such as Angmar and the Misty Mountains. The game-play of LOTRO has remained very consistent in some ways, and changed dramatically in others, at the same time. The real change however, has been a change not of kind, but of degree. The degree I’m referring to specifically is what MMORPG gamers call “the grind.”

Before I get into the details of “the grind” in LOTRO, let me first define what most gamers mean when they say something is a “grind.” To me, a “grind” is anything a game makes you do over and over again for no reason other than to increase the number of times you have done it. A great example of “grinding” is the way crafting is done in most games. If you want to level up your crafting, you have to collect hundreds of some resource, and then craft some useless object over and over again, to level up. Most people aren’t having fun while doing this. They don’t want to craft the useless object once, let alone hundreds of times. But the game makes them do it hundreds of times before they get to the “next level.”

Now, I want to be clear that this definition doesn’t just mean “repeating content a little bit.” I don’t consider having to kill 5 wolves to be “a grind” because it’s over in a few minutes. But when I am asked to kill 500 wolves, or 50, or heck even 20, now it’s a grind – because it’s going to take up a significant portion of my time (many minutes, maybe even several hours). And my time is being taken up by doing the same mind-numbing thing over and over again. This is what a grind is, at its heart – doing something over and over again that gives you no substantial “value add” to your entertainment. Boring the player to the point of falling into a stupor over and over again.

I’m going to be blunt here: I hate grinding. I think it has no place in a game, and should never exist even in small doses. If a designer is asking me to do the same thing more than 3 or 4 times, that designer has asked me to grind, and I’m going to object. Now, the reality is that all games have some “grind” aspects to them, and I have had to just live with that. But when a game is made out to be mostly or all grind, my objections become stronger… and they become stronger in direct proportion to the amount of grinding I am being asked to do.

The reason I hate grind is simple: it’s a poor, lame substitute for content. To me, “content” in a game is something unique, interesting, and fun that I can do. It’s certainly true that killing a “rabid wolf” once is content. But the 99 times I have to kill it after that are not content; they’re “grind.” That’s how I view it. I realize others will have a different definition, but this is my blog, so this is the definition I’m going to use.

Why games have grind

Lots of players hate grind as much as I do, and one will frequently see them complain on the internet or on web forums (as I am doing right now, in fact). So why do games have grind in them? Well, I think there are a few reasons, these being:

The grandfather clause of stupidity: Years ago I read the website of a really interesting guy named Musashi, or “Mu” for short. He has a bunch of long rants about game design, and one of his best and most interesting has “The Grandfather Clause of Stupidity” as its title. Succinctly, what he’s talking about is that games of today frequently have no better reason to incorporate a system (most often, a bad system) except that other games in the past had the system. For example, the “armor class” feature that most games have is taken from Dungeons and Dragons, which took them from its parent, Chainmail. Rather than creating a system based on how armor actually works in the real world, designers in 2009 will just co-opt the idea of “armor class” from D&D, and this will include whatever bad features were included in the original game, Chainmail (and there were many – because chainmail was a game for miniatures, not for roleplaying). This extends even more so to the computer gaming genre. The “grandfathers” of today’s MMORPGs are Ultima Online and Everquest. Now when these two games came out, online gaming was new, and there were lots of technical limitations to servers and clients. Therefore, just having creatures be “out in the world” and telling players “go kill 50 of them” made sense, because anything more complex than that (even things like cutscenes, animated art, voice-overs) would have been impossible using 1998-2000 tech. People were using dial-up and had 200 MHZ machines for crying out loud… they could not have done much more than the game allowed in those days.

However, we are far, far past the days of 1999. Computers have multi-core processors. People have high-speed DSL and cable modems. Artificial intelligence has advanced by 10 years since EQ launched. There is no reason that games of today need to be anything remotely like EQ, because the technical limitations under which EQ’s authors labored no longer exist – just as the technical limitations of using pencils, paper, and “to hit” tables no longer exist. And yet, designers keep incorporating all the same kludges that EQ and UO used because they had no other choice, on the logic that “it’s how EQ did it.” So when someone writes a quest to “kill 20 beefalos,” it’s not because the computers of today can’t handle something more complex, or because you couldn’t make something more complex work in a game, but rather, because “that’s what people do in MMORPGs” because “that’s what has always been done.”

And so, one reason why MMORPGs have “the grind” is because “they’ve always had the grind” and so, “that’s how they are supposed to be.”

Gamers as employees: A lot of designers, and players, think that an MMORPG is supposed to be a job, rather than just a fun diversion. They think you should have to “work” for everything you get in an MMORPG. You shouldn’t be able to just go kill one giant rat and get the quest done. You should have to kill 100 rats because doing that is “hard work” and completing the quest should “mean something.” I’ve always found this argument to be extremely bizarre, mainly because MMORPGs are games, and games are meant to be fun (not work, not a job). It’s also an odd argument because it’s not clear to me that anyone who is just clicking buttons and watching a bunch of pixels on a computer screen is ever going to “accomplish” anything that means something. However, this is one reason for the grind. If the designer thinks you should have to “work” while playing his game, one easy way to do that is to make you grind 1,000 of something instead of just 2. The other 998 are the “work” part.

The trainsitive property of MMO grinding: In mathematics, the transitive property says that if A = B and B = C, then A = C. I think in the minds of game designers, there is something similar to this going on. They know that grinding takes time, and that taking time needs people to subscribe longer, so they think that grinding will lead to longer subscription times. In pseudo-math terms, grinding = time and time = subs so grinding = subs. Of course, they’re ignoring a second set of equations, namely that grinding is boring, and bored players cancel, or, “mathematically,” grinding = boredom and boredom = cancel, so for some of us, grinding = cancel. Unfortunately because “grinding is a part of MMOs,” the game designers don’t consider this sequent set of “equations” – they seem to figure that we’ll all expect their game to have a lot of grind in it, and that nobody who likes MMOs would cancel because of grind. In fact other players will even tell you this: “If you don’t like mindless grind, don’t play MMOs,” someone said on a forum once… in defense of the grinding.

The uber-grind of LOTRO

Now that I’ve defined “grind” and explained why games have it, I will turn my attention to the second-grindiest game I have ever played (WOW is in first place in this category): LOTRO. My early writings on LOTRO do not reveal this, because the “grind” is minimized or masked in the game until you hit level 25 or so. In the early game, when they ask you to collect things that drop (paws, hides, etc), it’s almost always 10 or less. Although 10 can still feel a little grindy, it’s over quickly enough that I tend not to notice it too much. Also, in the low levels, they were very careful to make sure that the thing you were looking off dropped nearly 100% of the time off of the target. For example, if you’re supposed to collect 10 bear paws, after killing 10 bears, at least 9 and frequently all 10 will have dropped. Unfortunately this aspect of the game changes as you level. By level 40, in Evendim, I was asked to collect some bandit loot drops that required me to kill over 100 guys to collect 4 things. That’s a 4% drop rate… and 100 bandits worth of pure, utter grind.

Also in the early game, in LOTRO, you are engaged in the story much of the time. The first several levels are highly story-driven, with the tutorial, and then you get into the epic quests, which can carry you quite far. The Bree-land adventures are not grindy, and so it seems like the game is more story-based than other MMOs. But that’s a false perception. As you get into the Lone-lands and North Downs, the level 20+ areas, the grind gets more intense, and by the time you’re level 40, the grind becomes insane. For example, in LOTRO, “deeds” are given for killing certain enemies. In the low level areas, like Bree, you’ll get a title (like “Slayer of Spiders”) for killing 30 and then a virtue bonus (such as +1 to Empathy) for killing another 60. That’s 90 total enemies, which is a grind enough… but at least with that many, half or more of them come from doing quests anyway, so it’s not that bad. But in later zones the number goes up… you’ll have to do 60 and then 120 in zones like the Lone-lands or North Downs. Then you get into even higher zones like the Misty Mountains and now it’s 120 for the title, 240 for the trait bonus. And some go as high as 150/300 (450 total mobs to kill… talk about uber-grind!).

The fact is that by the time I got to level 40, I started to realize that almost all the content in LOTRO is grind-based. The Epic Quests are not, because they are story based, but you only do a few of those relative to all the non-story quests that are just grinds. Let’s look at the kinds of grind in LOTRO:

Trash quests: This category is probably 90% of the quests in the game. The NPC gives you a few paragraphs of text weakly justifying why you are supposed to go out and kill a bunch of enemies or go find drops off of enemies (that you of course have to kill first). The story they give you is utterly irrelevant (unless maybe it hints at where to find the things you’re going to kill). These quests are lifted right out of the other MMOs out there, and could be transferred without loss of relevance to WOW, EQ, Lineage, you name it. There is nothing “Middle-Earth” about these quests… they are pure, mindless grind.

Virtue deeds: The virtue traits, such as Empathy, Zeal, and so forth, require grinding to obtain in many cases. Some of them don’t, such as ones that ask you to find ancient landmarks (that’s exploring, not grinding). But the majority of them are just rewarded for killing a couple of hundred enemies, and hence are pure grind.

Class deeds: These are absolutely ridiculous “quests” that ask you to just use a special move 500 times to get a stat bonus. You are limited to raising this deed 50 per day, so it takes at least 10 days to get the deed. Most people seem to just find some trash mobs that are easy to fight, and just do their special move over and over again during a few dozen fights with the trash mobs, until they hit their 50 for the day. There is no thought to this… just mindless grind.

Faction reputation: Another thing you have to grind in the game is reputation with different factions. The reputation can grant virtues or access to special areas or items. The only way to gain faction reputation is to grind it by doing the things that raise faction over and over again. For example, you can raise Ranger faction by crafting some special sashes, as a tailor. Craft 5 and turn them in, and you’ll get 300 faction points. That sounds like a lot, except you need 10,000 faction points just to get the first “faction level”, then 20,000 and it goes up from there. Since 5 sashes are worth 300 faction, that means each sash is worth 60 faction. A little quick math tells us that to raise faction by 10,000 points through crafting sashes, one would need to craft about 170 sashes… and then another 340 to get the next level of faction. Of course, crafting sashes requires boiled hides – about 4 of each. So if you wanted to faction up by crafting, you’d need about 2,100 boiled hides to get the first 2 faction ranks, each of which takes 2 raw hides to make, or a grand total of 4,200 hide drops taken off of animals in the wild. Since each animal drops at most 1 hide, and sometimes none, you’d need to kill around 5,000 wargs to get 2 ranks of Ranger faction in Esteldin. Of course, making sashes is not the only way to raise faction, but any other way will be equally grindy. Quests grant you about 700 faction in most cases, so this means you need to do 14 quests, most of which will be asking you to do more grinding.

Crafting: To level up crafting, there’s only one way: grind, grind, grind. You’ll need to collect thousands of resources, and then refine them into hundreds of components, and then go ahead and make hundreds of items. For instance, to master the mere second tier (of 6) in Tailor, you will need 840 “crafting experience” points. You gain about 4 each from making components and 6 from making an item like an armor vest. Since two components make the item, by the time you’re done, that’s 14 craft xp. To make each component takes 2 boiled hides (4 total for two components), and then 1 boiled hide for the armor vest. This means you get 14 craft xp per 5 boiled hides, and since boiled hides take 2 raw hides to make, 14 craft xp per 10 hides you collect in the wild. This means you will need roughly 600 hides to master the tier 2 crafting. Again since hides drop usually, but not always (let’s call it about 90% of the time), you’re going to have to kill about 700 bears and boars to level up just the 2^nd of the 6 crafting tiers. By tier 6 that number will be something like 2,000 if I’ve done my conversions right. This is pure, utter grind.

Looking at the above, many people would probably say, “Wow, that’s a lot of grind!” And it is. By now you might be thinking that surely there are some non-grindy aspects to LOTRO. And you’d be right… sort of. There is one, and only one, element to LOTRO that is not a grind: the Epic storyline. Those are pretty much the only quests in the game that are not “kill a bunch of these things” or “get loot drops from a bunch of these things.” Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of these quests. You certainly can’t just do them and level up to 60. Rather, most of the leveling is done via grind, and then every few levels (at least to 42) you do some “epics.” As I said above, epics constitute perhaps 10% of your game-playing time. The rest of it – all the rest of it – is taken up as with the above… grind, and nothing but grind.

Conclusion

LOTRO has done a very good job capturing certain aspects of Middle-Earth. The landscape and flora and fauna of the world are good representations of Tolkien’s universe. However, where the game utterly fails to be Middle-Earth-like is in all the non-epic quests. I mean really, when in the books, did you see hobbits going around killing wolves over and over again? Or dwarves grinding spiders? One of the really unfortunate consequences of all this grinding is that it takes one completely out of the head-space of Middle-Earth, and into the head-space of “standard gaming.” I’ve already done all these other grinds in other games, so there’s nothing new here in terms of the grind. It’s the same thing I’ve seen before, and everyone else has seen before. Doesn’t Middle-Earth, which is the richest, most expertly created fictional world/universe in the history of fantasy and science fiction, deserve better than this? I think so.

One thing has definitely happened as a result of all this grinding. Early on, I could not stop playing LOTRO. I hadn’t done fantasy in a long time, and it seemed a well done game. I would estimate that I played probably about 20-25 hours a week back then. Now, I have to almost force myself to log in, and after 45 minutes or an hour, I want to log out. The grind is too boring to do for more than an hour, and I am quickly losing interest. I do not like the grind, and since LOTRO is almost all grind, I’m starting not to like LOTRO.

Fortunately I do have my excellent Kinship, the Green Company, which is a role-play oriented group. And Middle-Earth is still an awesome world to RP in. So, I’ll stick around for a while, perhaps a long while, for the RPing opportunity. It’s worth $15/month to be able to role-play in Tolkien’s world, with good RPers who also know a lot about that world. But take the RP out of it, and you just have a grind with a thin veneer of Middle-Earth over it. And that’s sad.

The Theory of Risk vs. Reward

I’m going to continue musing today on a topic that I touched on in my LOTRO review: the concept of Risk vs. Reward, and how, in my view, the scale is so completely broken as to be meaningless in LOTRO.  First, I will begin with the game design theory, and then I will describe how it works (or, rather, doesn’t work) in LOTRO, and finish up with suggestions on how to fix it.

Most MMORPG gamers are familiar with the concept called the “Risk vs. Reward Ratio.”  Simply put, the idea is that a reward item you receive in game should depend on how much risk you undertook to attain it. First let us define some terms here. A “reward” in a game like this boils down to either a looted item that’s “good” or “useful” to your character, or experience points, which are how your character gains levels, and through them skills, etc.  A “risk” in a game like this boils down to the risk of being defeated (dying, or “retreating” in LOTRO parlance), including the various penalties such as wear and tear on your current (previously looted, usually) items.

Therefore, when someone says that the “risk should scale with the reward,” what he means is that the better the reward is, the greater the chance should be of “dying” (retreating) while attempting to obtain it.  The less useful or “worthwhile” the reward is, the lower the risk of dying should be.  You might hear someone on the forum, for instance, complain “I had to die 13 times to get this sword,” and others might respond, “reward = risk”. By this shorthand they mean, “If you wanted that huge reward you should have expected an enormous risk of dying.”

This, then, is the basic MMORPG theory of “risk vs. reward” — the greater the risk of character death in doing something, the greater the reward should be. The less the risk of character death, the less the reward should be.  When the game gives you huge risk without reward, people will say it’s “too hard.” And when it gives you too big of a reward without risk, it is usually said to be “too easy.”

Risk without Reward in LOTRO

The problem with LOTRO is that this balance seems to be off on one side of the scale.  It is true in LOTRO that you rarely get a good reward without undertaking some substantial risk, so that part lines up with the theory.  But the flip side is where it goes astray — in LOTRO, it is possible to undertake enormous risk and receive little, if any, reward.  The reason for this is that rewards are based on the level of the foe relative to your level, but the risk of fighting the foe is not based on its level, but rather, on its class.

Let me use something that happened the other night as an example. A friend and I were in the trollshaws and she had to go AFK suddenly. We were near the road by Thorenhad, and that road is patrolled by a level 36 Elite troll.  My character was 41… 5 levels above the troll. As a result, it conned “green” to me.

However, the elite troll had about 3x as much morale as my character (5,000 or something to my 1,800ish), and is anything but “easy” to fight. As it wandered along, I accidentally aggroed it (my fault, no question). Since it was 36 I figured I could probably survive. And I did, but it took 2 potions and everything my 41 Warden had in her to beat this green conning Elite mob, and the battle took around 2 minutes of real time. The risk, therefore, was quite high. The Reward? A paltry 91 xp (rested… presumably 45 without rest), and a few bits of junk loot.  Thus, a very high risk of death netted me less than 100 xp and nothing else.

Contrast this with fighting a normal (non-elite) enemy 2 levels higher than my character. At level 43, these normals have only a few more morale than she does, and can be taken down in about 20 seconds with a few quick attacks, and no need to hit the potions, defense gambits, or anything like that.  This is an easy fight with little risk, and the reward is something on the order of 400 xp (200 if I hadn’t been rested)… a whopping 4x as much experience. I also got more valuable loot drops (pristine hides for instance, or more silver pieces) than the troll dropped.

The above examples clearly demonstrate that the risk-vs-reward ratio in LOTRO is off-kilter.  Even if the risk of death had not been higher, battling the troll under rested xp conditions netted me something on the order of 50 xp/minute, while battling the glenn-buck 2 levels higher than my character would net something like 600 xp a minute (I can kill roughly 3 in 2 minutes).  One cannot make the argument that the risk-reward ratio is “set right” when I can net 12x the reward with 1/12th the risk in one case vs. the other.

The problem is that LOTRO bases the reward on target level, but the risk on the class of the target, not its level.  An elite that is 20 levels below me is still a threat, even though I get zero reward.  Let me repeat that: something that can kill me can be worth no experience points.  I have honestly never encountered another game like this of any sort. In all games, whether MMO or solo CRPG or even pen-and-paper, if there is a chance the thing can kill you (barring being purposely suicidal like attacking 1,000 of them and then not fighting back), there should be some reward for fighting it.  If there is no reward then (again barring doing something purposely suicidal), there should be no risk.  In City of Heroes, if you fight something that is “gray” to you, it has no chance against you, and gives you no reward. If it had a chance, you’d get at least some reward from fighting it.

I consider this to be a major game design flaw in LOTRO. In point of fact they have messed their risk/reward ratio up so much that it’s actually foolish to fight elites or even signatures in the game, at least if you want to gain XP. I’ve tried timing it and the fastest, easieast way to gain XP is to simply do mindless grinding of yellow conning or orange conning normal mobs. There is very little risk, and lots of quick reward.  Fighting elites either requires you to fight something way below your level, which drops xp to a trickle, or grouping, which also lowers your xp gain per mob.  It may be true that grouped, you kill elites fast enough that if you’re lucky, you can equal or perhaps slightly exceed the xp/minute rewards of soloing orange normal mobs. But, because of the time it would take to get your group together, any minor gains in this regard will be negated.

Now, the main reward I’ve spoken about here is experience.  There is another kind: Loot. And it is true that elites will drop better loot. But here again, I question the value of the whole thing. Once again you are going to have to be grouped to get on-level or above-level loot drops, and that means you’ll only get the drop 1/6th of the time… vs. every time of a lower-probability drop from a non-elite mob.  I haven’t done any hard statistics on this but my general sense is that I make money, gain decent items, and gain experience points, all three, faster while just soloing +1 and +2 mobs, than by grouping up to fight elites.

This setup makes no sense to me. If the risk is higher and the time it takes is longer to beat elites, then shouldn’t the rewards be much higher than those for fighting normals as a consequence?  According to the risk/reward theory this would be a foregone conclusion, yet it is the opposite of how LOTRO is designed.

How to fix the system

One thing I try never to do is point out an issue or problem with a game without proposing a solution.  So let me propose a couple of potential solutions here.  I can see two ways to go to correct the probloem. Let us recall what it is: the risk of fighting light cyan, green, and gray elites is way too high for the paltry reward that they provide.  For grays this is less of an issue, because they generally do not aggro do you… but greens and cyans will still aggro and can essentially “force” you to fight them, with big risk for lousy reward.

If the risk is too high for the reward provided, then, there are two fixes, which are:

Raise the reward: This is a simple fix. Keep the risk the same, but raise the reward. A simple multiplier will suffice. Call a normal mob’s experience multiplier, for reference, 1x. Call a singature’s 1.5x. Call an elite’s 3x.  Now you’re giving me a reason to fight that elite. It’ll be worth 3x as much xp as a normal mob of the same level. That troll would now provide 270 xp (under rest) compared with the normal’s ~300 xp for a white con.  It’s still not a perfect solution, but I hestitate to suggest more xp than that simply because it’s already a pretty radical change. Do it this much, see how it works. If nothing breaks, double it or so again. Basically the timing needs to work out so that elites are worth more xp per minute than normals, rather than far, far less (as they are right now). Give me a reason to want to fight elites, rather than a reason to avoid them at all costs due to the low reward.

Lower the risk: If you think the “xp curve” is already too easy and leveling is too fast (many do), then the alternative is equally simple. Give increasing penalties “to hit” and “to damage” to mobs as level drops off. That -5 green con should have almost no chance to hit me and do almost no damage. If he’s worth 1/3 the reward of a white conning normal, then he should be only 1/3 as risky (hard to fight) as a white conning normal.  Make him take triple damage from my attacks, do -66% damage to me, and have a -66% chance to hit.  Now you’ve scaled it right — he’ll be a cinch to take down, and provide almost no reward… making him just as useless to fight as he already is, but at least you’re not wasting my time and risking my life on the useless encounter.  Oh and if he’s gray, and I can’t get any reward from him? His chance to hit me should be near zero — like 1% to hit, -99% damage.  Why can I die vs. a gray con that’s -12 levels to me when I can’t get a single pip of xp from him? That makes no sense, so let’s get rid of it.

Wrap up

Well, there’s the problem, as I see it, and my proposed solutions. Do I think Turbine’ll do anything about this? Nah.  The players don’t seem bothered by it (well, other than me), and as long as they’re making money as things are, I guess they don’t see the need to change it.

What this means for me, though, is a declining “enjoyment curve.” As the levels go up and I am faced with more and more cases of having to deal with elite mobs (and presumably “higher than elites” — a set of classes of mobs I’ve heard of but not yet encountered), the fun factor seems like it’s going to be bled out of the game bit by bit.  And when that happens, odds are, I will probably just go back to COH… as I have done with other games in the past that do this (bleed the fun out of it as you level)… Vanguard, GW… etc.

For now, the game is still fun enough… as long as I avoid the elites whenever possible. For now… things are still good (but not great). We shall see what happens in places like Angmar, though…

I have been playing Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online game for about two months now, and gotten my highest-level character (a Warden) to level 38.  There’s a lot to like about the game, but also a lot to dislike, and frankly I think Turbine has made a lot of the same mistakes that other MMOs like WOW and Vanguard have made, at least with regard to my preferences.  Frankly it’s starting to look like maybe the MMORPG genre is just not for me, since in game after game I keep coming up with the same issues. The #1 issue in all these games is the mindless, repetitive grind. I just don’t have the endurance for that. The game becomes a job sooner or later (in WOW, it was basically from level 1, which is why I didn’t last long there; in City of Heroes that started in the 20s; in LOTRO it started a bit later, in the mid-30s), and I start questioning just what the point is after that.  Now, in LOTRO, I have a good guild (a Kinship in that game) and we have great RP sessions, and there is a fairly good Epic story-line, so I will keep playing for those things, at least through the summer.  But the game is not as fun as it could have been, had they done a better job on the design – had they decided, because of the wonderful, rich, unique world they got to play with, that they were going to make it be different from your standard MMO, instead of just being “WOW in Middle-Earth.” Below is my (long, flame-inducing) review.

Visuals/Graphics 10/10
The visual design of LOTRO is excellent.  By this I mean the way the world looks – how trees and landscapes appear, how animals look in the world, how the shadows work.  Turbine has done an outstanding job of molding, shaping, and designing Middle-Earth.  All of the notable places from the novels are present (at least to the degree that the world has so far been “opened up”), and all of the ones I have visited look pretty much exactly as I pictured them when I read the novels. I would say, in fact, that Turbine has done a better job of making the world look and feel like the Middle-Earth of my imagination than Peter Jackson et al. did in the movie version – and that’s saying something, because I felt they did an outstanding job on this aspect of the movies, too.  But Turbine has done well: the hobbit areas feel like hobbit areas; the dwarf areas look dwarfish, and so on.  The world of LOTRO looks great, and they get very high marks for it.

Character Animations/Visual Effects 4/10

Strangely enough, given how well the static elements of the world (water, trees, mountains, grass, etc) are done, the dynamic aspects of it, such as character animations and visual effects, are mediocre at best.  The animations for combat are, in particular, choppy. My character looks gimpy and awkward – holding her weapon at an odd angle, and never seeming to really “uncurl” her limbs to actually complete forceful blows.  Bows and javelins are held in ways that certainly no Olympian would hold them.  It seems like despite their high level and supposed combat expertise, none of the characters of LOTRO have figured out the proper “form” to have when using a weapon. Animations are incredibly awkward and frankly painful to look at.  It’s really puzzling to me how they could have done such a poor job with animations in a game that was released in 2007.  The animations are better in City of Heroes and Star Wars Galaxies, both many years older than LOTRO, than they are in this game.  Turbine clearly didn’t put much effort into this part of the game, or if they did, then the people who designed it have little talent. I hate to be harsh but, honestly, the animations are ugly and really painful to watch.

Music/Ambient Sound 10/10
The music of LOTRO is just wonderful. Again they have something very good to compete with – the soundtrack of the movies. At first I thought that this was the only music for Middle-Earth that I could really get on board with, because Howard Shore did such a good job with it. But the composer(s) of Turbine came through in fine fashion, giving each zone its own theme song and making each one appropriate and most of the quite beautiful. I particularly like the music of Kingsfell in the North Downs, and Rivendell in the Trollshaws. The music is scored beautifully, and might be the best music I’ve ever heard in an MMO, barring perhaps Star Wars Galaxies, since they actually used the John Williams soundtracks, and it’s hard to beat those.  Still, Turbine did an excellent job on the musical score.

Sound Effects 4/10
Strangely enough, the sound effects of the game mirror the quality of the visual effects. In much the same way that the world is gorgeous but the character animations hideous, the world music is lovely but the sound effects for things like combat frequently leave a lot to be desired.  My Warden’s gambit attacks frequently sound like someone is ringing a gong when she strikes, or knocking on my door.  How that is supposed to reflect combat sounds with spears and swords, I honestly don’t quite understand, but the effect is jarring.  Worse than this are the “shout” attacks that melee characters and even minstrels have. These are taunts against the enemy designed to draw hatred (draw “aggro’ in the MMO vernacular), and probably were meant to be obvious so other players would know what I was doing when trying to draw hate.  However, get a few characters with “shout” attacks onto the battle field and it’s a jarring, unpleasant experience that frequently has me turning the sound completely off (since there is no way to just lower the shout volume).  Other games have taunt shouts (like City of Heroes) that are much less annoying. But this is symptomatic of the larger problem, which is that the sound effects for combat in general are amateurish and poorly done.  They really need to have someone go collect new sounds and update this, because when one combines the poor sound with the poor animation effects, combat seems like something out of 2001, such as the original Neverwinter Nights, than a 2007 game with expansions.

Character Design/Development – 5/10
Character design in LOTRO leaves an awful lot to be desired. Sadly they have gone the same direction as most WOW-copying MMOs (and let there be no mistake, the basic game is almost a replica of WOW).  By this I mean that you can’t really design your character much at all. Other than picking some facial features at the starting screen, characters all look very similar in game.  There are only a few types of armor or weapons that one can use in a given level range, so unless you feel like walking around with armor much lower than your level, your level 30 Hunter is going to look about like every other level 30 Hunter.  You’ll have all the same skills as all other level 30 Hunters, unless you purposely decided to gimp yourself and not buy all of the skills available. You’ll probably have the same exact weapon as every other Hunter of level 30.  Basically the only difference between Hunter A and Hunter B at a given level is which “traits” they have slotted in, and although these do allow for some variety, the total amount of variety we’re talking about here is quite low.

In short, what has happened is that basically the designers have built one character of each class and your job as a player is not to design one, so much as to “unlock” the parts of the character that the designers have already made for you.  Your unlocks happen as you (a) level, or (b) complete deeds (which usually amounts to finding points of interest or killing a lot of the same thing over and over again).  The trait system might be better if it were not such a grind, but it’s still an extremely shallow method of introducing character variation.  It’s a far cry from even the D&D idea of having a huge pool of skills and you choose which ones your character will specialize in – and in D&D that idea was not taken far enough to suit me.

The amount of customization here is trivial at best, and that’s rather sad, given how non-homogeneous the characters of the novels were.

Game system 6/10
The underlying game system of LOTRO is fundamentally the same as pretty  much every other MMORPG out there on the  market today.  You have an “auto-attack,” and then a series of “skills” or special moves. Each one has a cool-down time and an animation time, and the button fades out after use and slowly (over the cool-down period) lights back up.  This is basically the same fundamental system as the one pioneered by City of Heroes in 2004, then copied by World of Warcraft and eventually every other game on the market.  There’s not much original here with the basic game (Shadows of Angmar), and it literally amounts to a WOW re-skin.

The only difference I’ve seen is with my chosen class, the Warden, where there are very few special moves that you can just click on. Instead, the base special moves can be clicked in sequence to open up (temporarily) a combination move called a “gambit.” These gambits are the real work-horse of the class, as they’re the ones that do the damage or steal threat or what have you.  If the entire game had worked more like this, I’d give it a higher rating in this category, because the way gambits works is at least reasonably original (though there are too many redundant gambits for my taste).  But it’s just one of about eight classes, and all the others are very “been there/done that” before you even get out of the gate.

In addition to unoriginal skill activation systems, the quest system is, again, exactly like WOW, with the exception of the “epic” storyline. This is a storyline that follows the plot of the trilogy, and that part is original (to gaming) and quite fun. Unfortunately, the “epic quests” only account for about 10% of the total questing you do in the game, with the rest of the quests being exactly what you’d expect from WOW – about 65% kill quests, with the two main varieties being (a) just flat out “kill X of these”, and (b) “kill this thing and loot X of these things off of it.”  Early in the game the ‘looting’ variety is identical to kill X – that is, “take 10 things off of these guys” means “kill 10 guys and each will drop this thing.” However, in the upper levels they maddeningly reduced the percentage chance of a drop, so “collect 10 widgets” really means “kill about 200 guys, off of which there’s maybe a 5% chance a widget will drop.”  I absolutely detested this about WOW, and I detest it about LOTRO. If you want me to kill 200 guys, then tell me so, make something drop off of each one, and tell me to collect 200 so I know what I’m in for (or more likely, know not to take the quest at all).  Don’t tell me “collect 2” when you mean “collect 40” – it’s just annoying when that happens, and definitely not fun in my book.

The other issue I have with the game is that their con system makes absolutely no sense. In the normal MMO vernacular, a “white con” is an even match for your character, taking into account level as well as the target’s special abilities.  In LOTRO, a white con is meaningless. What matters is the “class” of the mob – class being things like “normal,” “signature,” and “elite.” Normals actually con too high – an orange normal is really more like a match to you. Signature whites are a match to your character, while elite greens will frequently own you (or even, a few times, elite grays owned my character).  Because con is tied to level but difficulty is generally not, the con is meaningless.  So they basically have this whole system in the game that is non-functional. That’s sloppy, in my view, and I deducted heavily for this.

Next, there is the forced grouping. I hate forced grouping. I don’t hate it because I hate to group – I group up plenty of times. But I don’t like to be forced to group to complete a story part. Sometimes I am alone working on a quest line… The first 5 parts of the 6-part story will be soloable. Then, suddenly, part 6 requires a full group. Now I can’t finish the story until I find the time and people to help me. It might be hours… days… once it was literally weeks until I could get a group together to do it. Meanwhile, by the time I do it, I’ve forgotten completely what the story-line was about, and now I’m just trying to get the damn thing out of my quest queue so I can move on.

Finally, the crafting in the game is so shallow that it’s a joke.  If you are, say, a tailor, there’s only one type of item to collect over a broad level range. So from level 15-25, all animals will drop medium hides, and that’s all.  And you can only make a few types of armor from those medium hides.  This leads to everyone walking around looking basically the same over a range of levels, and it means there is no thinking involved in crafting – none, at all.  Because you can set your character up to craft multiple things, I have literally collected 150 hides, and then set my character to “boil” them into 75 “boiled hides” (which is the refined material tailors use) and then gone to take a shower while my character does this. How is this supposed to be engaging or fun game play? It isn’t.  There is nothing in crafting that requires any sort of brain power.  Like the rest of the game, it’s all just checking off boxes.

Clearly, the developers at Turbine set out to re-skin WOW with Middle-Earth. Assuming that was their goal, they succeeded admirably. And as you’ll be able to tell comparing the two reviews, I don’t like the stuff I hated about WOW any better in this game.  Their crafting system is laughable; their combat system is stale and clichéd; their quests (other than the epic storyline) are uninspired and typical.  There are, of course, occasional exceptions, such as the epic quests or delivering pies in the Shire while avoiding hungry hobbits. But these occasional bursts of inspiration are buried under such an enormous mountain of mediocrity that it is difficult to find them.

Performance 9/10
The performance of the game is quite solid.  I have a four-year-old computer and a laptop and it runs well on both.  Lag only occurs in very crowded areas, and I’ve not yet found a game where this was not the case.  They have had a lot of issues with people hitting rubberbanding regions and being unable to log in lately, but they seem to have fixed most of those. Overall the game performs quite well.

User Interface – 5/10
LOTRO’s interface is functional, but nothing to write home about.  Unlike WOW, they do allow you to move elements of the UI around without needing a mod to do it.  But still I find the interface mediocre at best.  Certain elements can’t be (easily) moved, and the map is annoyingly impossible to zoom in and out of dynamically.  There are “levels” of zoom in the map window, but I’d like to be able to select one section with the mouse and expand it the way one does on a Google or Yahoo! map.  The artwork for the interface is mediocre and very WOW-ish, as is the style of it.  As I say above, it’s functional, but nothing we haven’t seen a dozen times already.

Community – 8/10
The community of LOTRO is pretty good.  I like the “mylotro” site, where players get their own blogs to blog about the game, and there’s a lot of good stuff on the blogs.  The forum is typical of gaming forums – lots of flaming, lots of cases of people staking out a position and then trying to defend it against all comers. Within the game the community is fairly helpful but also fairly quiet in many zones. Overall it’s a community I like being a part of, so that earns it a lot of points in my book.

Role-Playing – 10/10
I took a lot of time in LOTRO looking for just the right RP-based guild, and I found one.  It took a while to be interviewed and to join, but it was well worth the wait.  They are excellent RPers, and a lot of people on my server also RP.  The world of Tolkien just inspires good rolepalying, perhaps because unlike most gaming worlds, we already knew about it before we started, and already had an idea of where our character’s place in the world is. Either way, I’ve not had RP this good in a long time, and I’ve really enjoyed it.

Fun – 7/10
LOTRO has a lot going for it, but it also has a lot of elements that I don’t find as much fun as, apparently, other folks do.  I have great fun exploring the world, because it is well done, and I have great fun role-playing with my Kinship and other friends in the game, again, because the world is so well-done and because it is based on a wonderful intellectual property (IP).  It has a good epic story-line that I enjoy following, especially when role-playing along the way (which I have done for most of it).  However, it also has an enormous “grind” component. Far too much of the game is mindless and repetitive.  Too many quests are boring repeats of the old pointless MMO stand-by quests such as “go deliver this thing to this guy 10 miles from here and then come back to me” (“FedEx” quests), or “Go kill a billion of these things and then come back to me” (kill quests). Crafting is such a boring and repetitive grind that they ended up automating it (wow, that makes it better!), and harvesting anything but hides is a bamboo-shoot-shoved-up-the-fingernails type of experience.  Far too much of the game was created with a work/grind mentality, rather than as unique and enjoyable experience, and this impression increases as you gain levels. I can only imagine what the kill quests will be like in the 50+ level range, given how bad they have become by 38.

On the other hand LOTRO has some fun elements, and it does provide a good world for us to play in.  It doesn’t do these boring/grinding things any worse than most other MMOs, so I rate it as about average in this category, and finally settled on giving it a 7/10.  This isn’t a great score, in my view, and it means I’m probably going to keep playing it over the summer break while I have less to do than normal, but once the fall arrives I’d be surprised if I keep subscribing.

Overall – 7.1/10
Overall, LOTRO is a decent MMORPG, but you won’t find much of any real originality here.  The biggest thing it has going for it is the world, which of course, Turbine did not create, but adapted from the incredibly well-made world of Tolkien. Their ability to convert the landscape and create a musical score for the world has really been staggering, and this gives the game its main strength.  These elements also improve the role-play potential for the game, which may be why I see more role-playing in LOTRO than I’ve ever seen in any other MMO that I’ve played.  On the other hand, the actual game-play is uninspired and unoriginal, being little more than a re-skin of WOW, and the scope of character design is claustrophobically limited.  In the end this game is little more than “WOW in Middle-Earth,” and it’s really only Middle-Earth that is keeping me around for the time being (because I love that world).  If this were a totally made-up world, I’d probably have canceled already.

In the end I consider LOTRO to be an average MMORPG, nothing special, but not terrible. If you like these sorts of games it’s worth giving a look. If you love Tolkien then it’s definitely worth it (as I say, that’s what is keeping me in the game right now). If you’re after something new, original, or different, I’d say, look elsewhere, because this game has nothing new of any significance. And if you object to mindless grind, or are looking for real depth to the game systems, definitely search elsewhere. LOTRO’s world may be deep (thanks to Tolkien, not Turbine, mind!), but the game systems (like crafting, character creation, combat) have all the depth of a sheet of paper.