submitted by lifebane on Apr 10th, 2007
Tags: blog, hobbit, lotr, middle earth, news, vanguard
Greetings my fellow necromancers. I have come to chatter about all things Middle Earthish and fuzzy footed. Yes I am talking about those beloved little cutesy and somewhat pudgy Halflings..err.. oops.. I mean Hobbits of Middle earth!! I have been hearing so much chatter about the upcoming release of LOTR Online (Lord of the Rings Online for you acronym challenged people) that I felt the need to Blog!! I was involved in a few phases of Beta, not the most recent one though since I tired of it back in the previous versions of beta play. What do I think about the game you ask? I thought it was okay and seeing the occasional movie character helped add to the feel of "OMG I AM IN MIDDLE EARTH WOOT! I WILL GO FORTH AND KICK ORC BUTT LIKE ARAGORN! RAWR!" Sadly, this novelty faded after a few weeks and returned to being just I am a lvl 14 Burglar,,, where do I go xp now! AKA the typical grind story. Not to mention.. I wanna be Gandolf! No real wizards of that caliber in game.. closest thing to him is a guy who plays with animals and casts some nukes. Was it a bad game? No. Was it better than Vanguard? Not Really. Was it Different than Vanguard? yep. The two games really can not be compared easily since they focus on two styles of play. Had they removed the LOTR association to the game it would not have the following it does right now. It would be another name in the ever growing list of MMO games. What it has going for it though that will make it competition is the Lord of The Rings Fan base. There are so many fans of the books and then later the movies that it is sure to lure in quite a few people.. much like SWG (aka Star Wars Galaxies) did and even DDO (Dungeons and Dragons Online) had a similar following. This type of game designing is risky business since the target audience has certain predefined conceptions of what the game "WORLD" should be. And any deviation from the stories that the game is based upon tends to annoy the heck out of the die hard fans playing. This one aspect of these games in particular has time and again proven to be one of the major causes of discontent with those games. To create a new word where you define what is correct versus having to build by guidelines and not deviate from them really puts dampeners on what can be done in game without ruining the "feel" of the story it is based upon. So what does Lifebane predict hrmm..... I think LOTR will initially draw quite a crowd, more so from the WOW player base than anything else since the games are to some extent graphically similar, hell the interface when last I was in Beta looked like a clone of WoW's default player / group windows hehe. However, people will not stay there long term, well the gamers won't. The fanboy types will stay indefinitely just like the Die Hard players are still lingering in SWG despite the bazillion combat revamps and total rewrites of the core game code. Guess I'll go toss some popcorn in the microwave and get ready to sit back and watch the show at release time. Bloggage done. Have an Opinion of your own? Check out the discussion in the forums! LOTR Discussion Thread Lifebane
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by keeperofstars 57 weeks ago
If you think your going to be overwhelmed with tolkien lore dont get your hopes, up. There is little of it represented in the game, and half the time they mess it up or create additions to it to fill in a game void.
Is it a bad game? NO its ok, just realize its light on the lore, current lore all comes from the movie series, and it plays very much like WoW actually its just a WoW mod. lol
by rook 57 weeks ago
by keeperofstars 57 weeks ago
Now if you have your brother try and play LOTR on medium-high settigns where the game looks decent then you will see he just about cannot run it.
So yes they did put in a low system option where vanguards is still pretty high maintance but anygame which has min require 20 gb you should be warned things are going to be mess at that point. :)