The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar

User Rating:

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

Game index

System Requirements

Review

Preview

Screenshots

Downloads

By: Jarno Kokko Mar 24, 2007

It's based on the books but we also have this movie trilogy...

A Hobbit village at night - and remember, this is with medium resolution textures.

The movie trilogy is definitely good entertainment and there is a large fan-base that has seen the movies but has little interest for the books. But then we have the True Fans of the LOTR, who consider these movie-inspired masses to be uneducated twits who have no clue about the "real" Lord of the Rings - the books. When you mix these two groups and put them into a MMO, it's going to be very messy [but massively entertaining - Ed].

Turbine have clearly delved deep into the books as far as backstory and lore details go, and while many visual design pieces are faithful to the movies, LOTRO is definitely not based exclusively on the movies. So, when a movie-inspired player hits level 50 and asks "Okay, where's Mordor, I want to go whack Sauron for some phat lewt", we have a problem. The game is currently limited to a small portion of Middle-Earth - if it's from the areas covered in the first book/movie, from Shire to Rivendell - it is probably in the game. I'm sure Turbine has many plans for expansions and incorporating epic events and locations from the other two books and movies, but there will be many players who will be disappointed by the fairly limited scope of the game at launch.

Things look promising

Regardless of these potential pitfalls, so far everything looks to be on track for a launch in late April. YouGamers will definitely be there at launch to check out the final version, and we will give a more definite word on the performance at that point. The Beta client is already scaling exceptionally well while still looking very good, and it's missing the high resolution textures that will be available with the final game. As an early guidance though, we can already say that the game likes memory. A lot. While the game does run with 1GB, having 2GB is probably a good idea, just like with World of Warcraft. Beyond that, a Shader Model 2.0-compatible graphics card is good to have if you want all of the eye candy. We are also happy to report that the client appears to actually use both cores of a dual core CPU.

Quest system is very similar to WoW - down to the early pig-hunting expeditions.

User interface is quite familiar, and actually incorporates couple of features that you'd have to obtain as player-made addons for WoW.

US and Europe, forcibly separated

The Lord of the Rings Online will be launched simultaneously in US and Europe, and the game versions will not be compatible across regions, with strong enforcement - you will need to actually register your game from an IP address that is in a country designated for each distributor of the game to play, and your billing address must match that, so you will not be able to import US copies to Europe to play on US server. There are currently huge threads going on in both the US and European forums on this subject, and in my opinion splitting up existing MMO guilds with artificial barriers between continents, just so it's easier for Turbine and Codemasters to divide up the profits is just silly. In reality only a very tiny minority would bother to import copies, so the best way in my opinion would be just to have two versions of the game box but no further limitations based on your IP address, billing address or anything else - a bit like how DAOC handled the US and European versions. It remains to be seen if Turbine and Codemasters back down on their current policy, but since these things are decided by people far away from the front lines of customer support, it's highly unlikely that this regional scheme will change.

Funnily, some places very close to Europe are served by Turbine and US servers - for example, players in Russia cannot subscribe to the Codemasters European servers, and instead have to play on US servers. Effectively, Codemasters has made a deal for a piece of the globe, and that deal is exclusive - down to the point that both Turbine and Codemasters will do whatever they can to prevent players crossing over this invisible border.

Edit: After publication of this preview, Turbine has reversed their decision on region enforcing, see details at the end of this article

Preparing for launch

For details on the launch timeline and how the complex preorder system is going to work, we will try to offer a complete breakdown on the next pages based on how things stand on 23rd of March. This is all still subject to change, but the plans look pretty final to me.