
This is a long post. Brace yourself. Go get a glass of soda. Maybe some Cheetos. This could be viewed as an important post for some of you guys, so I don’t want to withhold anything. Many pictures can be clicked for full-sized versions, and most of my links are the same. With all that all out of the way, let’s get this bad boy rolling…
First and foremost, Lord of the Rings Online is NOT World of Warcraft. Maybe that's a Good Thing. Maybe it's What You're Looking For. For me, personally, these last few days spent with LotRO felt like I had just broke up with my girlfriend, and was still in full blown “you're-not-her-mode” with my new steady. The problem is that I was still living with WoW, and just having a weekend fling with the (barely legal, gasp!) new girl on the block. She had a pretty face, and some fancy bump map lighting things, but the way she walked and swung a sword made me wonder...
There are a few things WoW does (and doesn't do) that all of us along for the ride take for granted. WoW doesn't try to have real time reflections in each puddle you pass on the ground. WoW doesn't try to have terribly realistic looking models. WoW has a graphical style that it sticks to, and it pulls it off pretty well. Some people felt like the Wind Walker version of Zelda was a copout, since the graphics were 'simple'... but within the scope of those simple graphics was a common theme, and a certain beauty that the overall world adhered to. WoW tries, and succeeds, to look like you’re playing Warcraft III with the camera zoomed way in.
LotRO has very nice looking areas. Indoor areas have light streaming in through the windows, and outdoor areas are full of fluff and frill as far as your (video card’s) eye can see. If you have a powerful machine, this game looks great. If your machine is not so powerful, it looks a little bit like ass. Mid-range machines will do okay with a few options turned down, but you get that annoying ‘the grass stops exactly 12 feet from me, then as I walk forward, it grows’ effect happening. Click the thumbnails for full blown versions. These are Low, Medium, and Very High ambient frill settings.



The highest one really gives a nice meadow look, but the illusion is hopelessly shattered as you walk around in the low one, with flowers appearing at your feet and fading out again.
An indoor area. Note the textures on the floor, and my character. Overall, though, even the low-fi version is passable.



On the other hand, you could have a fancy looking million dollar sports car, but without responsive controls it’d just look good collecting dust out in your driveway. WoW has a very solid, responsive (and extensible!) UI. My UI has been cut, hacked, butchered, and replaced to be about 90% different from the default one that comes when you buy the game. That said, even without all my Addons, the WoW UI just feels tight. You click a button and you get an appropriate response from the game. Your character does a little flip spin thing, the weapon glows, the enemy is Gouged, and you know that you’ve ‘pulled off a move’. All the while, the button has a cooldown animation happening, and you know right when you can do that move again.

The cooldown indicator on the button does a little sweeping clock motion, but then it does some other kind of cloud puff thing, then blinks, then re-lights up… it’s hard to describe. I’m not sure exactly when the skill is ready again. Combat feels a little bit clunky… it just doesn’t feel as ‘crisp’. I’m sure it has to do with just getting used to the timing of combat. I’ve played a lot of other MMO demos, and LotRO has easily the 2nd best system, WoW being the best. I don’t want to go off on a tangent, but within the first ten minutes of playing WoW I kind of had the concept down. Stunlocking and stance dancing come later, but the basic ‘flow’ of combat was easy to pick up. Maybe I just need to unlearn WoW before I can appreciate another game. Overall, the more time I spent with it, the better it felt. At first it was just a change.



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Some of the animations get a little weird... my eye drifting... |
Hunters are straight up ranged nukers, no questions asked, with Lore Masters and Captains handling the pets (I saw a crow or two). There are a few different variations on the warrior class, and the rogue class has an interesting twist in that it isn’t the melee DPS class, as much as a traditional debuffing class. It also uses a sort of combo system, but is party based. I (as the burglar) can begin to set up moves that allow other classes to build off such ‘openings’ (called conjunctions in the game). Sadly, as everyone I came across flatly refused to party with me, I never got a chance to try these moves out.
The basic feel of the UI, besides what I’ve mentioned, is good. The front end ‘dashboard’ could use a little polish, but there’s a lot to discover once you start opening windows up. You can write a little bio of your toon, check your family tree (?), and see any feats you’ve achieved and titles you’ve earned. I managed the feat of making it to level 5 without dying once, earning me the title of ‘Isobelle the Wary’. This can be displayed as I walk around town, I could opt for ‘Isobelle of Rohan’, or just plain Isobelle. The quest window and quest tracker are strightforward, and NPC questgivers show up as a golden ring on the minimap. A ring also appears above their heads, replacing WoW’s question and exclamation marks.
The Lore Book is a new addition, giving overall bonus objectives to complete for each zone, as well as for your race and class. I discovered (and examined) a Dunedain Cairn, with added an entry to ‘Research the History of the Dunedain’. There are six other alters or obelisks to find around the world, and once I’ve examined them all, I gain a +1 Idealism bonus (additional fate, increased will and resistance to fear). Cool. There’s even a gauge showing how ‘done’ I am with a certain zone. By level 6, I was about one third of the way done with all the quests the Bree area had to offer. Completing them all grants me another bonus stat, etcetera. Kind of like a rep grind, I guess, but just presented in a different manner.
Guilds are known as Kinships, and can be formed by creating a charter in town. I would imagine they operate in a pretty similar fashion to any other guild system, but I didn’t get a chance to get in one during the weekend.
There’s also a crafting window, but I couldn’t find a trainer to acquire a skill.

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This move is most certainly NOT "Preparation", OK? |
I have no idea what that means for PvP. Sorry to be so brief on this topic, but I just didn’t encounter any. I saw a duel in town between two level 2 characters, but that was the extent of my exposure to PvP. The official PvP forums are crawling with people saying LotRO should be strictly PvE to follow the lore (play a good guy, fighting evil), but I imagine those same people will break down and die on the inside when they see five hundred elves named 'Legolollerskates' running around naked, sending each other tells asking for cyb0rz.
The website claims you can ‘Play as a Monster!’, but the option wasn’t available to me. The ramifications of ‘playing as a monster(!)’ are intriguing (what class are you? do you earn new skills as you level?), but it’s all speculation at this point. I did notice the mysterious crafting window mentioned earlier explicity stated ‘Monster Classes cannot train a crafting profession’. Hm.
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NOT "Evasion", OK? |
There are a few more pictures I didn't include, but if you're hungry for more screenshots, jump right in the folder at http://notaddicted.com/images/isobelle/LotROstress and check 'em out! Keep in mind I took a few on my laptop with all textures at bare minimum, so if something looks horribly bad, it was probably one of those ones.
So… who’s doing a serious write up on Vanguard for me? Runned…?
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