I recently tried an early beta version of what Turbine Inc. and Midway Games Inc. hope will be the next big thing in online role-playing games – Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. While this was a limited-access beta test meant to gauge server performance (the open beta test doesn’t start until the end of March), the platform was solid, the graphics were awesome and the overall gaming experience, while enjoyable, will be nothing new to the millions of players already addicted to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.

World of Ringcraft?

What is it about the big sci-fi and fantasy franchises? It seems when it comes to games, they can never get a break. Take Star Trek. You’d think a game based on such rich and varied source material would be equally rich and original when translated to an interactive medium. Yet most licensed Trek games have been mediocre, and some just plain awful.

The same seems to hold true for Lord of the Rings. While the franchise has yet to suffer anything as embarrassing as Star Trek: Shattered Universe, it has been subjected to a lot of “me too” genre games with only a thin Tolkien coating. A couple of these have been nicely done – like the real-time strategy game, Battle for Middle Earth (I & II). Others, like the horrible Lord of the Rings Tactics for the PSP, were a tragic waste of binary code.

The good news about Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) is, even at beta stage, the game is stable and engaging. The graphics engine is particularly good, and the quests are plentiful and offer a lot of variety – from straight-up bounty hunts to quests that seem more akin to a home-economics final. LOTRO borrows heavily from other MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), like a chat panel taken straight from Guild Wars or an experience system very similar to World of Warcraft (WOW).

Unfortunately, at least for Lord of the Rings fans like me, LOTRO seems a little too much like WOW with hobbits. After playing for 20-plus hours, I have yet to experience anything in LOTRO that feels uniquely Tolkien to me. Instead of conveying the richness of the source material, LOTRO comes across as a generic fantasy RPG that just happens to take place in Middle Earth, like Dungeons & Dragons with a change of scenery.

Let me give you an example: One of the things I love about Tolkien’s world is magic is far less commonplace than it is in most fantasy fiction. When you do encounter magic in Middle Earth, it is dark, dangerous and arcane with practitioners that are menacing and mysterious. In LOTRO, “lore-masters,” sort of a Gandalf-in-training profession players can assume, are common as dirt, and the practice of magic has been turned into something akin to the law. All it takes is the utterance of the right words in a dead language to get results.

The “too-many-Gandalfs” problem is very reminiscent of a similar issue with LucasArts‘ Star Wars Galaxies. A couple months after that MMORPG was introduced, you couldn’t swing a dead Ewok in the game world without hitting a Jedi. Jedi are supposed to have been hunted to extinction, and it really puts a strain on your suspension of disbelief to run into one (or several) on every street corner.

Same thing is true of elves and dwarves. Both races had all but vanished in the books, but in LOTRO you had to be careful where you tread lest you step on one. If Turbine wanted to give players the feeling they were really adventuring in Middle Earth, it should have made wizards an elite class which only a very few players could achieve. Turbine should also have limited players to human and hobbit races and reserved elves and dwarves for NPCs only.

And before you all start posting comments about how the main draw for a player is the opportunity to play Gandalf, I get that. And if LOTRO was a solo RPG, I’d be all for it. But it’s a shared adventure, which means some sacrifices need to be made to maintain the consensual illusion that you really are in Middle Earth. Like all role-playing games, MMORPGs are, first and foremost, about telling a story. If you’re taken out of the story because you keep bumping into your 55 clones, how’s that good for anyone?

A Man About Bree

Let’s talk a little about the game experience itself. Again, I want to remind readers that this was a beta and an early one at that. The final version may vary from what I describe here.

When you first start up the game, you’ll be asked to select a region of Middle Earth (Brandywine, for example) for your character to play in. These are not literal start locations, but instead are servers that the character you create will be tied to. In the beta, at least, there is no way to move an active character from one server to another.

Next step is to draft your character’s background. LOTRO follows the typical MMORPG approach of having you select your race, and then based on that selection, a hometown, a profession, etc. You can also customize your character’s look to some extent – skin, hair and eye color, facial structure – although the game puts limits on those variables. I chose to be a Captain of Bree, and as a Breelander, I couldn’t have blue eyes. If I had chosen to hail from Rohan, however, blue eyes would have been the default.

Professions in LOTRO sound uniquely Tolkienesque, but it doesn’t take long to figure out the generic fantasy archetypes they map to: Captain = Fighter, Champion = Berserker, Burglar = Thief, and so forth. I was surprised that you couldn’t choose to be a ranger, especially since the game starts in the Northlands where rangers are not uncommon. This was, after all, where Strider first hooked up with Frodo and company. But perhaps that was a limitation of the beta.

One of the areas where LOTRO does excel is the writing. Not only do the game’s descriptions show a deep understanding of Middle Earth lore, the writing is clear, concise and very helpful. When selecting a name for my Breelander, for example, the character backgrounder included a description of naming conventions in Bree, which differ completely than if I had chosen to hail from Gondor.

Will Quest for Traits

Once I finished framing my character, I was transported to a small town in Breeland which was in a spot of trouble. It seemed the town was beset by all manner of ruffians, from roving wolves to a shadowy group of brigands who you learn, rather quickly, serve a shadowy master. (Any guess at who that might be? Uh-huh.)

One of the challenges in building an adventure game in a world where all the big stories are so well known is surprising the player. LOTRO tries to address this problem by keeping the stories small at first, and even the game’s Big Bad is the head Nazgul, also known as the Witch King of Angmar (thus the game’s title), one of Dark Lord Sauron’s most trusted servants. All we really know about the Witch King is that he isn’t eliminated until the Battle of Pelennor Fields at the end of Return of the King. (He who cannot be undone by the hand of man is destroyed by Lady Eowyn in that battle. Who says Tolkien didn’t have a sense of humor?) His campaign in the Northlands of Angmar is only hinted at in the books, where it’s suggested he labored long on behalf of his master. Again, considering how well known Middle Earth’s saga is, Angmar is as good a place as any to have events in the game unfold.

Another very smart move on the developer’s part is a rather lengthy tutorial mode. It took me a good 15 hours just to work my way through all the quests therein, but it’s a great introduction to the game’s core mechanics and the trait system, which lets you customize your character by learning specific skills in your chosen profession. This bit reminded me of the guild system in Guild Wars, although LOTRO doesn’t severely limit your player level the way that game does.

Of course, it’s not enough to want knowledge, your teacher expects to be paid for their time. Also, the selection of traits you can learn grows as you level up, so adventure you must if you want to get ahead in this Middle Earth.

Luckily, there are lots of side quests you can take on, even in the intro section, that can help buff up and fill out your character for the adventure ahead.

Middle Earth Unchained

And what an adventure it is – at least visually. We tested the beta on a fairly powerful system, a custom-built PC with AMD Athlon X2 4800+ CPU and dual NVIDIA GeForce SLI mode. The graphics were fairly astounding for an online game. Long gone are the blocky polygons of Everquest – the granddaddy of MMORPGs. The visuals were so refined they reminded me, more than anything else, of Bethesda Softworks‘ Oblivion, pretty much the gold standard for RPG graphics.

The vistas of Middle Earth were beautifully rendered and a real effort was made to capture the unique architecture described in the books, complete with a landscape scattered with ancient ruins, brooding forests and dismal dungeons. In one sequence in the intro, you must delve into some spider caves. And even though the graphics failed to invoke the choking claustrophobia of Shelob’s lair, it was nonetheless an eerie experience navigating those dark caverns. No doubt the game designers are holding back their nastiest (read: best) stuff for later in the game, but even the intro landscapes were very promising.

One Game to Rule Them All?

In the short time I had to test this early beta, there was much I only touched on, and more I could only glance from a distance. For example, I didn’t have much time to play around with LOTRO’s cooperative questing capability, a tent pole of MMORPGs. In LOTRO, these co-op quests are called Fellowships and consist of several gamers joining together to complete a shared goal.

One problem I immediately faced in a Fellowship was difficulty in reading the chat panel used to communicate with teammates. This is partly due to the small font size and partly because the panel itself is semi-transparent. Obviously this was meant to minimize how much the chat panel obscures the action. However, considering how critical the social aspect of online gaming is supposed to be, I hope Midway and Turbine give users the option to make the chat panel solid and the font larger. If getting the panel out of the way quickly is concern, a minimize button should do the job.

Another part of the game I didn’t have time to test is what looks to be an extensive crafting system. Like other MMORPGs, you can collect raw materials and then train in certain crafts (this is separate from your profession.) As your skills increase, you’ll be able to create an assortment of useful items, including weapons, armor, even food. In keeping with the spirit of the source material, the culinary arts seem to be a major component of the crafting system. When the open beta starts in a few weeks, I might just need to set up a hobbit burglar chief and see how far that gets me.

And, after much consideration, I will return. I’ve tried like the devil to avoid MMORPGs, only because they tend to become enormous, swirling black holes that suck away your time and money. But, the early beta was more than enough to hook me. I need to get back to Middle Earth, if for no other reason than to be a tourist in one of my favorite imaginary countries.

Midway/Turbine have not yet announced final pricing, but “Founders” can sign up before March 31 to get special pricing – either $9.99 a month or $199 for a lifetime memberships, which is fairly modest in the world of MMORPGs.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 2:54 pm and is filed under HOME, ENTERTAINMENT, GAMES - PC, GAMES - ONLINE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.