Turbine Announces Lord of the Rings Online Preorders

Posted by Stropp on January 26, 2007

Turbine and Midway have announced the pre-order program for Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar today. By pre-ordering, the customer is made a part of the Founders Program.

When a player joins the Founders Program he receivies the following benefits:

• Two different membership options, a standard monthly fee of $9.99, or a lifetime membership for $199.
• Guaranteed access to the open beta planned for 30th of March, 2007.
• Rollover of characters created during the beta to the live servers when the game is released.
• Two special in-game items that are only available to pre-order customers. These are the Enchanted Cloak of Regeneration, and the Ring of Agility.

Turbine have come up with a nice set of incentives here. Most of the time pre-order programs don’t actually offer much above what a player gets when they simply buy the game off the shelf. Unique items are nice, but usually superseded once the player gains a few levels. What Turbine is offering here is a guarantee to play the beta, and not to lose those efforts when the game goes live. There will be a huge number of pre-orders simply for this feature alone.

The low monthly fee and lifetime membership is nice too. I suspect though most players will save more by taking the $9.99 monthly fee. Most MMO players don’t stay in a game for more than a year before cancelling their account, and $199 is almost twenty months of play at $9.99 per month. If you know you are going to stick with the game for at least twenty-one months go for the $199, otherwise stick with the low monthly fee.

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