Ever since the release of the Lord of the Rings movies, there has been a steady stream of video games based on the Tolkien's classic books. About half of these have been action games, letting players fight their way through the events of the books on a personal level. The other half have been real-time strategy games that let players command the armies that battled in the books. Now comes the release of a LotR massively multiplayer online role-playing game so that players are not so much modeling the books as they are moving into Middle-earth itself.
There is plenty of room for adventure, even on this less epic scale.
Players begin the game by choosing a race and a profession. The possible races are human, elf, dwarf and hobbit, and the possible professions are minstrel, captain, guardian, hunter, lore master, burglar and champion, basically all the choices of the classic Fellowship. Once those two choices are made, the player is dropped into an instanced tutorial level ("instanced" means that the map is private to the player's character) that introduces the game's mechanics while including in-game set pieces such as named characters from the books battling giant monsters. When the tutorial is done, players are sent off to a newbie zone, where they learn the ways of doing quests, gaining loot, managing inventory and interacting with other players.
The transition from the newbie zone to the full game is done via another instanced zone with in-game set pieces. The plots of these programmed adventures set the stage for the metaplot of the game, which is the rise of Sauron and his minions in the years before the events of the books. Once in the full game, players are free to roam as they will. They can walk the roads or buy rides on postal-style horses that run from stable to stable. Players can also get off the roads and explore, but monsters live everywhere in the game, and players won't get far if they aren't at least at the level of the monsters dwelling in that part of the world.
Middle-earth molded to human scale
For players whose memories of the books revolve around how long it took for the characters to get anywhere, it is best to know going in that the designers at Turbine have (wisely) not tried to model Middle-earth at full scale. Weeks of travel from Shire to Mines can make for good fiction, but it makes for very lonely gameplay. In this version of Middle-earth, the run from the city where the elven players start to the town in the Shire where the hobbit players start can be done in under half an hour, which is a good thing if friends with characters of different races want to team up in the game. There is plenty of room for adventure, even on this less epic scale.
Similarly, there are players who, after reading the books and/or watching the films, find some sympathy with Sauron and his minions, just as a lot of people play the Empire side in Star Wars games. Rather than make orcs and wargs and goblins into player races, the designers at Turbine put in a special zone of Middle-earth dedicated to monster play. After 10th level, players can transport themselves via scrying pools to the monster zone, where they can choose a high-level monster to play. The other way into the monster zone is with a regular character at a high enough level. Thus, inside the monster zone, players can fight players, and players can fight computer monsters either as normal characters or as monsters themselves. Essentially, monster play is a second game inside LotRO, and it differentiates PvP in the game from other MMOs.
MMO design and play is now in the post-World of Warcraft ... well, world. Big-budget games like LotRO have to be compared to WoW, and LotRO is certainly on par with that game in size, features, art and interface. LotRO contains everything WoW does, but dresses it all up in Tolkien clothes. At the same time, it does some big things (like monster play) and some small things (like crafting) differently. Players who have enjoyed WoW will find nothing to complain about in LotRO.
I spent most of my time in LotRO playing a lore master, which was interesting because the only classic "wizards" in the books are the Istari, but it isn't possible to have a fantasy role-playing game where the only wizards are nonplayer characters. Thus, the Turbine designers have done a lot of clever writing and design to give lore masters the powers of RPG wizards without making them ones in name.
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