I’ve been vaguely following the Lord of the Rings Online RPG. Generally favorable reviews so far. The Open Beta starts March 30. I may try it (its free).
One intersting thing is if you DO like it, but don’t want to fork over the monthly fee is to buy a lifetime memebership. This isn’t cheap ($199), but worth it if you thing the game will be fun (and in existance) for > 20 months.
http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/3/1174945732
Brian
I don’t play any MMPORGs, but this is awfully tempting to me.
Jim
Thanks for the link. Had no idea this game was in the pipeline. Gonna be checking the web to see what I can find out. Mayhaps Oakbrow Farwalker shall live again…
Double posting, but here’s the official homepage:
http://lotro.turbine.com/index.php?page_id=91&siid=1
Looking at the race/class combos, Oakie would prolly be an Elf Lore-master. They seem suitably druidic, with some ability to summon animals–but may be too healerish for my taste.
There doesn’t seem to be a DPS caster class like EQ1 Druids/Wizards or EQ2 Warlocks/Wizzards/Furies. A couple of melee dps classes + bards, rangers and rogues.
The Guardian class appears to be the traditional main tank type. If I decide to play, I’d prolly go with a tank, with a pseudo-druid as an alt.
Looks like there’s not much in the way of uber-guild stuff. Found some mention of “Fellowships” but that sounded more like an ongoing group. Gonna look around some more, maybe check system specs and stuff, but I’m liking what I see so far…
Fellowships seem to be guilds.
“Lifetime membership” for an MMORPG really screams to me “it sucks, give us your money up front”. I love LOTR but I’m going to have to wait and see.
It doesn’t suck, its actually the best non WoW mmorpg i’ve played. That said, its not as good as WoW, it has some interesting concepts but i got tired of it fairly fast. I can’t put my finger on anything thats outright bad in it, its more of a feeling that i’ve played it before. I played the beta for a few weeks, i felt kind of guilty about not being able to get into it as there really there was nothing specifically wrong with it, but eventually i just went back to playing WoW.
I’ll be playing the Beta, possibly with the same username. If there are multiple beta servers, I propose the SDMB chooses one to play in en masse 
Oh Elbereth Gilthoniel! Chaaarge!
Lemme guess…Hobbit Minstrel, right?
Open Beta starts on the 30th if you pre-ordered the game. Otherwise you need to wait a week (April 6th) for the general public open beta. Also, if you pre-order and thus become a “Founder”, your open beta characters will transfer to the actual game. Open beta is capped at lvl 15 so the game won’t start with a bunch of maxxed out characters or anything.
I played in the closed beta and found the game to be well done and exceptionally polished for a beta game. I’ve heard others say that the game didn’t grip them and they felt “meh” about gameplay itself but the mechanics are well done. I pre-ordered but I will probably take the $9.99/mth Founder’s offer rather than the $199 lifetime offer.
Minstrels are actually the healers in LoTRO. I haven’t played a Loremaster but my understanding is that they were more crowd control/utility oriented.
LoTRO uses “morale” in lieu of the standard “hit points” and so minstrels increase their group’s morale via their songs.
How is the game performance? I have all the reccomended specs except processer speed. They suggest 2.8 or better, and I only have 2.4…
What about game mechanics…is combat contant clicking, or can the main tank hit auto attack and macro-taunt while he gets another beverage? Is there a “Holy Trinity” of classes like in other games? (EQ1 = Tank, Healer, Crowd Control; EQ2=Tank, healer, DPS)
From the little I’ve read, it seems to have a unique approach to things. There will be crafting, but less flash/bang magic than I’m used to seeing. The emphasis seems to be on melee DPS. Also saw reference to a level cap at 50, but no reference to traditional end game raiding.
I played on a 1.8GHz Pentium 4, Radeon 9800 128meg card and 1 gig RAM. I played on the “Low” graphic setting although I lowered it from Medium during the stress tests and, to be honest, I don’t think much of anything would have helped during the stress tests for a lower end system. By in large though, the game was very playable.
I played the Minstrel and a little bit of the Hunter so I can’t speak for tanking. Minstrels look like they’ll require some level of Everquest Bard twisting to keep all of your effects up. A lvl 1 song will allow you to play a lvl 2 song which allows you to play a lvl 3 song, etc so you wind up doing a lot of “Play 1” “Play 2” “Play 3” “Play 1 again 'cause it faded”, “Play 2”… etc. I liked playing a bard in EQ so it was natural for me but I can see where it won’t be for everyone.
Playing the Hunter, I would auto-attack and pretty much mash special attacks as they refreshed (within reason). I never grouped with anyone to try the special combo attacks within groups so I don’t know how they play out. I’m not sure about a Trinity yet (I only played the newbie levels) but there’s only the six classes with two heavy armor types (Champion, Guardian), two DPS types (Hunter, Burgler) and the two utility types (Minstrel, Lorekeeper). Lorekeepers get a single slow heal other spell and you can buy potions so I’m not sure if Minstrels will be indispensible to the effect of “We can’t group, we don’t have a Minstrel”. I’d assume either heavy armor type can act as tank for grouping purposes. I don’t know anything about raiding in LoTRO.
The closest you see to magic is the potions the Lorekeeper can brew. No traditional wizards and mages and druids and the like. Again, I only reached lvl 13 or so on my minstrel so I’ve no idea what the game is like outside of the newbie zones.
One critique I heard was that you enter this epic world and start off my delivering mushrooms and stuff. But every MMORPG I’ve played starts you the same way. I’m at something of either an advantage or a disadvatange in that I know very little of Tolkien and never even saw the films. So I didn’t enter the game saying “How come I’m not fighting a Balrog?!” or anything like that. But a few people seemed turned off by the fact that their hobbit or elf had to perform the same level one courier quests that every other game has.
Not available for Macs. I’ll stick to WoW since I haven’t sprung for a Mac Book Pro yet.
Interesting. I’m a WoW addict (in a raid guild) and I’m a bit disappointed that there seems to be no “endgame” content, but it’s early yet.
I respect that there are not heavy magic classes, but, I really enjoy caster types (my main is a Warlock) so I’m not sure if I’d really enjoy the game that much.
It sounds like the open beta might be worth a try… but if it’s boring, it’s boring, there’s nothing to be guilty about. I was highly skeptical of WoW, as I never played MMORPGs, but it sucked me in in a serious way. If LOTRO doesn’t do that, then that’s a problem with the game, not you.
Any other specifics for a WoW player? Is crafting worthwhile? Does it still have that WoW aspect of being able to play for 15 minutes or 4 hours?
I have been meaning to start a thread about this. Played the closed beta. It persuaded me to fork over the cash to play when the open beta starts.
I’m not really into the fantasy genre. WOW has never had any appeal to me. I’ve never played it. Or really read about it either. I checked out LOTRO just because I was looking for something different than City of Heroes. And it was free to check out.
The graphics are pretty sweet, for someone coming from COH. I have a lower end system and turning off some of the fancy graphic settings improved the game play mightily without a huge quality loss.
The XP required to level isn’t prohibitive. The quests aren’t terribly dull (I only reached level 12 during the beta-no reason to concentrate on leveling when my character would be wiped). Some are kinda cute, actually. The rewards are pretty decent. A lot of quests have selectable rewards, so you can choose.
There are plenty of “accomplishments” to undertake to further customize your character. Kill a certain number of beasties to get a title. Finish a certain number of quests to get the character trait of “Virtue” which adds points to your armor class or might, or recovery time.
This is my first exposure to a crafting system. I like it. At first I was dismayed that I needed an incredible number of animal hides, for instance, to create a simple hat. I believe I needed to kill 20 bears for the raw materials to do that. But then I realized it only took me about 20-30 minutes to kill that many bears and it seemed a little more reasonable. 30 minutes of game time to create a useful ingame item.
All in all, it’s pretty neat. Neat enough that I pre-ordered the game and will be paying the monthly fee.
Also, you have an option of the lifetime membership or a monthly $9.99 fee. You can pick either one.
I can’t remember any of the server names, but whatever is agreed on here, you’ll see me on Friday.
A quick check reveals the servers are:
Brandywine
Elendilmir
Gladden
Landroval
Meneldor
Silverlode
Windfola
I nominate Brandywine. For no particular reason.
I won’t be able to do anything this weekend…got a camping trip planned. But will look into this more when I can…
Don’t go camping in WC. You could get squished by a random hill giant.
Not a problem, what with being a raid level druid, I’ll just quad kite giants for fun and profit
I STILL hate druids.
-Turek
(former) 65 Halfling Warrior
I’ll be going for the lifetime membership so I can play on & off without having to worry about any more fees. I’m already paying the annual fee for CoH/V and am not about to cancel my account there.
Edit: from what I understand, LOTRO was created by a group of guys who previously worked on WoW and GW. I liked GW enough to buy it but not enough to keep playing–too many little annoyances, like being attacked by mobs that would otherwise ignore me in CoH.