Lord of the Rings Online First Beta Impressions

Posted by Stropp on February 24, 2007

Wow! What can I say about this game? I spent way more time today playing the Lord of the Rings Online beta than I originally intended. It’s that good. When the game is released in two months, people are going to stop talking about World of Warcraft addiction and start talking about LotRO addiction.

First Steps

As I mentioned yesterday, I downloaded the beta last night and got it installed without any problems. It was a snap to get the game up and running and I created a character, a Dwarf Champion named Klarm. LotRO gives you four races to choose from, Human, Elf, Hobbit, and Dwarf. All of the races except for the Dwarves have both male and female to choose from. The Dwarves only have male models.

Frankly I’m a little disappointed at that. There should be Dwarf women. It’s just that they should look very similar to Dwarf men. Especially the beards.

Other than that the character generation is pretty much stock standard for modern MMOs. The player gets to change details like hair, skin colour, stuff like that. However picking a different region, for example the Blue Mountains or the Gray Mountains will give slightly different feature or hair colours to choose from.

Once you’ve picked your race, you get to choose a class. There are seven to choose from: Champion, Guardian, Captain, Burglar, Hunter, Minstrel, and Lore-Master. I picked Champion for Klarm, which is a damage dealing melee class. The Guardian is a tank. The Captain is a melee class that has the ability to buff the party using banners. The Burglar is a sneaky class akin to a Rogue in other games. The Minstrel is a bardlike class that provides buffs, and I understand has some healing abilities. The Lore-Master is a magic class. The Hunter is… well, a hunter. All in all a good selection of classes to choose from.

Gameplay

I truely enjoyed the gameplay that I experienced today. There was no need for me to grind XP. I leveled up to level seven solely doing quests without having to do the grind. There was a strong quest sequence that presented an introductory storyline that had a sense of urgency. This has continued into a new series of quests, and I’m hoping this goes all the way through the levels.

I did quite a bit of exploring too. The game is gorgeous which makes it easy for me to just look around. I know that’s not everyones cup of tea, but I spent several hours once swimming around Kalimdor at level 35ish. It looks like I have a lot more to see of Middle Earth, since I’ve barely scratched the surface of Ered Luin.

That’s not the only thing where I’ve just scratched the surface. Character development looks like it goes quite deep with earning and developing traits. Titles are available at an early stage. And there is a screen with parent and children attributes that intrigues me, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it in depth yet.

I also want to have a good look at the crafting. I picked an armorer vocation, which gave me three crafting ‘threads’ which included prospecting, metal work, and tailoring. So far, though, I’ve only done a bit of prospecting.

Impressed Impressions

For a game that still has two months before it is released, I am very impressed. Lord of the Rings Online is well polished, even at this stage. Sure there are some issues. A couple of times today things got laggy, and the game crashed once, and restarted my machine another time, but this wouldn’t be a beta if everything was working properly. Other than that, all the quests I tried were complete and worked properly, and there were no graphical anomalies that I noticed.

Normally, when I start a new RPG, I create a new character and then within a couple of levels try another class, and then another before I finally settle on something I like. Today with Klarm I felt no need to do that. Oh, I expect I will experiment with the different classes at some point, but the Champion at least seems nicely balanced. It’s been fun to play.

As I progress through the beta, I’ll continue to post my impressions here.

 

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