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g_brayshay
Reviews
The Lord of the Rings Online (2007)
some nice ideas, but gets boring quickly
I've been playing this for about a week now, and to be honest it's not quite as good as I expected it to be.
There are plenty of reviews around saying how great this MMORPG is and this may give you the impression that this is a WoW beater. Afraid to say, quite simply, it's not.
The first ten levels can be completed relatively quickly, and the way it works it's exp rewards is wonderful, with a much much higher exp increase from quest rewards than grinding. This works great for those 'go there and talk to that person' type of quests.
It's a pity that much of the quests you complete will at some stage invariably see you grinding your way to your target.
It's also currently riddled with some rough edges. The auction house is a nightmare to use, with a very unreliable search function and no way of searching through all the item categories at once, ,leading to pretty much having to search for items yourself. It's also poorly categorised.
The quests themselves are also absolutely no different from standard mmorpg fare either, go here, kill that, talk to him, fetch that, get 20 of them..... it's a massive pity that the game cannot keep up the pace of the intro levels throughout. There are times when it does, but these are far too infrequent.
Furthermore, a massive difference between Lotro, WoW and say, guild wars, is the kind of game play that it tries to force upon you. Lotro from early on tries to force players into playing in groups. Not just for instances but for general quests too. This is fine in Asian communities (all the mmorpgs in Korea for example,) but this system doesn't work too well in western culture. so it's again a pity that Lotro didn't learn from guild wars example of being able to buy a group for instances, and keeping group quests confined to those instances as well. It doesn't help either that the chat system is a very clumsy version of Warcraft's.
Items, one of the good things about WoW, is that whilst it may seem like a rare occurrence, often something shiny and of value will drop from a mob, this is akin to fishing, and it's these little sparks of excitement that tells you 'just a few monsters more, something might drop'. which encourages further play, Lotro's drop rate of such items is frankly terrible, and makes the player just want to finish the quests as fast as possible as there really isn't any point to killing those mobs. Which just adds to the frustration when you get attacked. Although a point where Lotro scores over WoW is that at least every pig you kill will have a liver. These type of quests are made so much more relaxing because of that.
Walking...there is a huuuuge amount of walking involved in this game. Far too much at times. yes it's possible to get a ride from a mount vendor to various places, such as like in WoW. The big difference is the crippling price this game charges for it so early on. 110 silver to travel across the map, which is pretty much guaranteed to wipe all your saved money by level 14 is a bit much.
Couple all this together and you find yourself generally wandering around for long periods of time looking for something exiting to do. It often feels like a computer game version of wandering to the shops, and frankly, I'd rather do that in real life and keep my gaming life for escapism to something exciting.