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/
Can the servers and the support take it?
Water effects are truly nice - you'd have to see this in motion to appreciate how nicely the stream is animated.
As the game seems to be squarely aimed to chomp off a piece of the huge World of Warcraft playerbase, there is a good chance that we will see a big landslide of players at launch. Or we may not. It's the age-old problem of MMO launches - if you set up a huge server farm for 100 000 players, and only 10 000 show up, all your servers will feel empty, you have lots of excess hardware on hand and you will be forced to do server merges very rapidly. On the other hand, if you end up with a million players and you have a few servers (LOTRO has pre-announced only seven US servers at launch), then there is the risk that a massive horde of players will stomp over the server farm like an army of rampaging orcs, leaving behind only the smoldering remains of the shiny new datacenter. Additionally, once the server farm blows up under the load, those players will descend on the support organization - phone support will implode and email/ingame support will be instantly overloaded with disgruntled players complaining that the game doesn't work. Based on how polished the game is in beta, there is a definite risk that players will be misquoting Burning Crusade's trailer to Turbine and Codemasters a month from now - "You were not prepared" - as the game sputters under the huge influx of players. I hope I'm just being a pessimist and both Turbine and Codemasters have plenty extra server hardware all ready to be booted up as needed... The Lord of the Rings brings out the fans - even the lore nerds
The small city of Bree. Impressive amount of detail for a MMO.
The Lord of the Rings license is a great base to build a game on, but it also brings a massive horde of fans - the rabid kind - the kind that was calling for Peter Jackson's head on a stake for leaving out Tom Bombadil from the movies (and yes, he's in the game). I'd call them "lore nerds" for the lack of a better term. While Turbine has been quite faithful to the LOTR lore, there will always be times where you have to choose - are you going to sacrifice the lore details or the gameplay? So far it looks to me that Turbine have walked the tightrope very well, but I'm sure the really rabid lore nerds will find numerous small things to whine about. Loudly. There are already some interesting design decisions due to the LOTR lore. For example, both Wizards and Rangers are not available for player characters, as they are supposed to be very rare in the Middle-Earth at the time of the game. You will meet both as NPCs, but you won't be playing them. Available player races are also limited to just four - Men, Dwarves, Hobbits and Elves. This is partially due to the limited area covered by the initial game at launch, and assuming my LOTR lore isn't too rusty, I think there is already some bending of LOTR lore going on to get dwarves into the game within the current available area. It's debatable if a license like this is worth it, considering the amount of baggage it brings, and the limitations it places on the actual gameplay. At least so far, it looks like Turbine are doing a good job in taking advantage of the positive aspects of the license.
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