Game Review: Lord of the Rings Online

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.