The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar

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ESRB: Blood and Gore,Use of Alcohol,Use of Tobacco,Violence
Publisher: Codemasters
Genre(s): MMORPG
Home Page: http://lotro.turbine.com/

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By: Jarno Kokko Mar 24, 2007

PVMP? Player versus...?

Playing as an orc in PVMP. That sure looks like a juicy fort to ransack.

Another novel idea presented in Lord of the Rings Online is PVMP: a Player vs Monster Player system. As soon as you reach level 10 (quite possible in 1-2 evenings of play), you can visit a special scrying pool and switch from playing your hero character to playing a level 50 monster in the high level areas of the game. The main idea is naturally to provide slightly smarter targets for players to fight at the maximum level, and what better way to do that than to make them player-controlled. As a monster you can also do tasks for the Sauron's underlings for destiny points, and then use these points to improve your monster character. Not exactly a full-blown levelling grind, but something to do for those dull moments when there are no player-controlled hobbits and elves to smash.

I fully expect that a few months after launch almost every player will have their own "monster alt" to play with, but as there are no maximum-level heroes in the current European beta, it's impossible to say how well monster play will work in reality. At least the system looks reasonably well designed, and it gives everyone the opportunity to participate in high-level player vs player combat - as "cannon fodder".

What could possibly go wrong?

Nice enviromental shadows bring tons of atmosphere, even if they are just "fake" light maps.

Launching MMOs is tricky business, and as a long-time player of the genre it's easy to see a pile of problems the size of Saurons' army ahead for Turbine. While we wish all the best for Turbine at launch, and hope to see LOTRO to become a big hit, some things are a cause for concern for a veteran MMO player.

There is going to be lots of negative words about the quality of animation

Lets face it, while the game otherwise looks very pretty, even on a mid-range system, there is one piece of the puzzle that looks like it's from another game: character animation. While some movement, notably many of the animals, look quite fine, the bulk of the animation of player characters just look stiff and unnatural. For example, a human character hit with a Cripple effect looks like he's moving around with a load of ... something .. in his pants and even the most basic animation of running around with your character just looks wrong. At the same time, many combat sequences are pretty good, so it's not that the animation is universally bad - it's just that there are some cases where major re-working is definitely called for. Model animation is tricky business and game character animation even more so, as it has to respond to player input fluidly and rapidly to look good. This is something Blizzard got right but, unfortunately, Turbine (at least so far) didn't. It remains to be seen how big a deal this is in the long term. I must admit that animations are just eye candy; it's just that they stand out badly from the otherwise very pretty game.

Online games live and die by their network code

There is already talk on the forums about chat server problems. Asheron's Call 2 died a fiery death due to (among other things) malfunctioning chat server code which made it impossible to, well .. you know, talk to anyone else in the game via the in-game chat for several months. AC2 was also a Turbine game, and while I have not seen any chat issues myself, even the slightest whisper of a potential issue in this portion of the game definitely raises my eyebrows. Let's hope our fears are completely unfounded and everything works fine.

The European beta servers have also exhibited some shortcomings in the network prediction code of LOTRO. While this seems to be something that is currently visible only when the server is laggy due to high amount of players, it is also a cause for some concern. Nothing destroys the immersion in MMO faster than players and monsters rubber-banding around randomly when you are trying to keep a group together. The best offerings of the genre have polished their network code so far that the game stays perfectly playable even with 300-500ms latency, and it's easy to forget that same player group may have players from all around the world. Right now, LOTRO looks like it's missing some polish in this department, but the final test won't be seen until the game actually launches and hundreds of players pile into the starter zones at the same time.