Dwarves, Elves, Man, and tiny humanoids called Hobbits constitute the playable races in this game, available in male or female flavors. It turns out they're all good guys, all fighting for the same cause, eliminating the possibility of open-world player-versus-player (PvP) combat. Instead, such fighting is restricted it to The Ettenmoors, one of the game's nine spacious zones. After selecting a race, one of seven classes can be chosen, including a Champion, Hunter, Burglar, Captain, Guardian, Lore-Master, and Minstrel. Each class' function serves roles any MMO veteran is undoubtedly all-too-familiar with You've got the damage-absorbing tank, pure damage dealer, healer, group buffer, enemy debuffer, and crowd controller. To facilitate solo play, each class is also given skills from outside their traditional class role. A Champion, LotRO's dual-wielding, damage-dealing off-tank, has a few limited healing abilities, for instance. Minstrels, the main healing class, can wear medium armor for increased protection. Infusing each class with this kind of variety means you don't always have to be grouped up to progress, making the game more accessible and forgiving for newcomers to the genre or those who generally like to play alone.
Classes can be further tweaked with traits that can be equipped on your character to alter their ability focus. These aren't immediately available, instead requiring you to execute a certain number of specific kinds of enemies, complete quests in a zone, or discover a series of landmarks to unlock. Such tasks, called deeds, are given to you as new areas are entered, and work to make it seem like you're making additional progress, bonus headway, while questing. For instance, if you wander into the North Downs and hack apart a Troll, you'll get a notice indicating you've unlocked the Troll-slayer deed. Eighty dead trolls later you get a title, Troll-hewer, which can be displayed over your character's head, and unlock the advanced version of the deed. After another canyon full of Trolls go down, you get a trait, which can be equipped to your character to buff resistances, augment vital statistics, or alter damage output.
The trick is to find the deeds that unlock versions of the same trait, allowing you to power it up. So if Barghest-slayer (Advanced) in Bree-land and Warg-slayer (Advanced) in the North Downs reward you with the Determination trait, completing both deeds will net you the more powerful Rank 2 version of Determination. While the whole point of the deed system was to offer a mechanic that operates and rewards you as you're doing quests, it also adds to the amount of work you need to do to keep your character up-to-date. If you're running around at level 30 with Rank 1 traits, you're not going to notice their effects. So, while deeds are completed as you quest and you are rewarded for things you didn't directly set out to do, you still need to fill sizable kill quotas to keep your traits relevant with respect to your character level. The discovery and quest-completion traits work well to keep you active and exploring for tangible reward, but the kill deeds can get tiresome, particularly because you can't see what the trait reward actually is until you unlock the advanced version.
Aside from the zone-specific traits, you also access race and class traits that can't be leveled and are always useful. These things can change your character's performance in significant ways, and switching them around is a great way to keep your character fresh should the experience be rendered stale by exhaustive hours of play. After level 41 you can slot legendary traits that provide new skills to further diversify your character's possibilities on the battlefield.
If you're a hardcore MMO fan the amount of grinding here will seem like a laughable trifle. Turbine has done a great job in making the play experience in this game more fluid, keeping you moving and discovering new things, instead of requiring you to sit in one spot and beat on the same kind of enemy for a horrifying number of hours. There are always quests to do, they generally offer great rewards, often a nice selection as well, meaning there'll be a reward item tailored for each class. That being said, the side quests are still quite standard. Go kill 24 bears in the old forest, the NPCs tell you. Go harvest 10 harrow weeds in Nan Amlug East, they say. Though they may seem generic, they are worth doing and not only for the rewards. A majority of LotRO's side-quests are prerequisites for the tasks that require a group, or fellowship as it's called in this game.
Up to six can band together to plunge into the game's more challenging content, which is split up into three general types. First, you've got the world group quests, usually involving beating up elite enemies wandering the countryside or huddled in camps. Next are the main narrative instanced group quests, which we'll get into a little later. Then you get the more time-consuming content designed to appeal to hardcore gamers, the group instances, which Turbine calls adventure instances. There are five in the game right now, from the Great Barrows in the Barrow-Downs around Bree to Carn Dum, a high level sprawling dungeon in Angmar. These experiences will be familiar to anyone who's ever played an MMO before. For the uninitiated, the instanced dungeons are usually the source of an MMO's most powerful items, dropped form bosses and elite mobs within. Breaking down the mobs is simply a matter of having a balanced group and slamming hot keys until the target buckles to the floor.
It's not all ho-hum hotkey bashing in LotRO, however. Conjunction attacks, only possible with a fellowship, make playing with others a much more effective, enjoyable experience than in other games. Anyone who's played Final Fantasy XI will be familiar with the mechanic at work here, though LotRO's version is largely simplified. By stunning an enemy during battle, members of the fellowship, regardless of whether it's the full six, are prompted to enter red, green, blue, or yellow attacks. Depending on the order of the colors hit, different effects and attacks are enacted. For instance, if you're in a three person fellowship and all hit green, you get healed. If you all hit red, you do a direct-damage special attack.
The system gets more rewarding with if your fellowship decides to get organized. In a full group, you'd ideally want to pull off an attack like Wings of the Windlord, which needs blue, red, green, yellow, blue, and red to be triggered in that order. When successful, the attack puts on a fancy light show as well as summoning two Oathbreaker spirits to help out with the fight. There's a good amount of variety to these attacks, and they're a lot of fun to toy around with to discover new ways of dismantling enemies while recharging your power and morale stock. The system itself seems a little hit or miss right now, sometimes failing to register party members' color inputs, but in general coordinating to perform these kinds of attacks was one of the most entertaining aspects of the game.
Such an emphasis on successful conjunction maneuvers vaults the Burglar class, capable of regularly triggering their use, into nearly as high a value as a Minstrel. Should a Minstrel be unavailable, your fellowship is going to be at a significant disadvantage as the other classes can't fill in as reliable healers. Captains and Lore-Masters do have healing abilities, but they're nowhere close to as effective as a Minstrel. There's also a slight issue with Champions' effectiveness. While it's nice to gather a balanced group, with a hunter setting traps, pulling, and dealing ranged damage, the Lore-Master on crowd control, and guardians amassing threat on the target, if you gather together five Champions and a Minstrel, you can rapidly and utterly decimate the opposition. Of course in higher level areas packed with high damage output enemies, you'll need the skills provided only by other classes. Ultimately these class issues we saw aren't that big of a deal, since every class is useful in a fellowship and entertaining to play. It's just that other classes may not be as useful as adding another Champion to the fellowship, unless they're a Burglar or a Minstrel.
Aside from the traits and conjunction attacks, the other feature that really makes this game stand out is the story, and not just because it's The Lord of the Rings. Of course you want to run quests for Strider. Of course you want to talk to Radagast the Brown. They're all here, Gandalf and Frodo too, as well as many other characters like Old Man Willow, the Sackville-Bagginses, Farmer Maggot, and on and on. The simple fact about most MMOs is that their storylines stink, and generally the storytelling mechanics are even worse. Here you get dynamic quests full of NPC interaction and narrative revelations during the course of the quest, making trudging through the story instances much more engaging than simply clicking to assist the main tank every time. You're actually there to find out what happens, not just get an end reward or hope for loot drops.
Here's where the power of The Lord of the Rings comes into play, since the game lets you play concurrently with the One Ring's journey eastward. The eight books of main narrative released at launch, only spanning Middle-earth's western area of Eriador, are all split into numerous chapters and focused on pushing back the Nazgul and the dark forces pouring out of Angmar. You'll start out questing rather close alongside the events of the books and gradually move away into areas not covered by fantasy epic you likely know so well. The fact that there are characters, both evil and good, that continue to make appearances in the storyline goes a long way towards making the main narrative feel more like a cohesive whole, a comprehensive tale, than a series of fractured quest lines against seemingly random bosses.
Aside from the core gameplay, Turbine has implemented the standard range of gameplay distractions, chiefly professions. You can harvest ore and chop wood, recover artifacts, farm, and cook, as well as craft weapons, armor, bows, spears, potions and everything else you might expect in an MMO. Accessible recipes are broken into tiers, and to access more powerful crafting methods you need to first become proficient in a tier by repeatedly cobbling together the items it offers. After you've become proficient, you can continue crafting the same items to gain mastery giving you a chance to create more powerful versions of the base items. Unfortunately some of the professions aren't as useful as others. Weaponsmiths, woodworkers, and armorers all yield valuable items that can sell for considerable sums, whereas farming and cooking aren't as handy. Farming is the supply craft for cooking, and though some interesting things can be made to eat that provide decent statistic boosts, you're going to have way more fun time making armor or swords. Some work definitely needs to be done in the realm of professions to bring all production crafts closer to level footing.
Like the incentive to join fellowships for better rewards and the ability to unleash conjunction attacks, all professions do require products or services from others. Weaponsmiths need to make Etched Steel Emblems for a few Tier 3 recipes, something only possible with a polished sapphire. While you can find the sapphires at auction in major city centers or in mining nodes, you'll need to get them polished by another player. While this kind of profession interdependence certainly isn't anything new in the MMO realm, it's successful in LotRO because it spotlights social interaction, which is the entire point of playing this genre of game in the first place.
Then there's the Ettenmoors, the only zone for PvP in the game. Starting at level 10, anyone can go in and create a level 50 monster, all variations of which can be augmented with skills, traits, and differing visual appearances. Hero characters can only enter at high levels, so since the game has only been out a short while there isn't much happening in the zone. We did get to get a brief glimpse of what full scale PvP would be like by joining a group of max level Turbine employees who'd alerted the community of their presence. Quite a few people decided to bring their monsters out for the battle, resulting in a rather one-sided conflict. Strongholds are set up at various spots in the zone, affiliated with either heroes or monsters. By heading out with a group of others, it's possible to assault the strongholds and flip them to your side if you manage to take out the commanding officer. The few hours we spent smacking around other players, we certainly had fun, mostly because there were so many targets for our Champion to slice with area-of-effect strikes, but there's really no telling what kind of chaos will ensue once hundreds and thousands of players swarm the zone in a month or so.
Even though the true nature of LotRO's PvP gameplay has yet to emerge, it's still worth heading into the Ettenmoors to check out all the player-versus-environment content. Completing quests and dispatching AI opponents in the zone earns you destiny points, used for upgrading your monster or bestowing temporary boons on your hero character. Whenever you wind up doing actual PvP, you'll also be able to earn infamy and renown, boosting your ranks, as well as earn special items.
Complementing the gameplay are gorgeous graphics, which serve to drastically boost LotRO's immersion factor. Vast expanses of plains, snowy hills, detailed forests and swaying grasslands make for a Middle-earth you want to explore not only to nab new items, but also to see the sights. Little details are packed in as well, like flocks of birds that randomly flutter off into the atmosphere, spectacular sunsets and some great architectural designs that give each zone an organic, believable feel. Armor and weapon designs excel as well. Though the beginning items looks rather boring, they're supposed to. By the time you hit level 30 you'll be wearing intricately detailed armor pieces that shimmer in the sunlight, adding more of a sense of satisfaction to acquiring fancy purple and teal items. Enemy animations are generally good, particularly the larger Trolls and giants we've seen, who lumber and swing their weapons with a distinct sense of weight. The music tracks are absolutely stellar, leaving little reason to turn on iTunes unless you really, really need to hear another Mastodon song while running an instance. Sound effects are more inconsistent, however. For instance, we found ourselves wishing the sounds of various class skills were more distinct.
Beyond all these polished large scale elements, Turbine has done so many of the little things right with LotRO, likely a result of their extensive experience developing MMOs. There's an excellent Looking for Group menu, a personal light for nighttime, a hilarious player-made music system, easy to find and use click-to-assist buttons, and some of the most specific quest descriptions we've seen in a game. Now, many RPG fans who consider themselves hardcore or enjoyed Gothic 3 may argue that too specific a quest description ruins a game's immersion factor. After all, how could the quest-giver know exactly where everything talked about for the task is located? Well, we don't care. We greatly appreciate the detailed quest descriptions that tell you with a good deal of precision where to go and how to turn the quest back in. This way, if you walk away from the game for a few days or weeks, you're never at a loss regarding how to pick things back up. You don't spend unnecessary hours just searching for the person you're supposed to meet to start the quest. You jump in, easily make progress, and log off with no regrets.
Normally this is where we'd harp on the instability of this MMO and how many amazingly aggravating bugs we've found. Though we have run into a few issues, LotRO is impressively stable, which says a lot considering the dreadful conditions of other MMOs at launch.