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

MMO for life?

Both US and European versions also offer a cheaper monthly fee and/or lifetime memberships (effectively, play without monthly fees) for the "Founder Program" members. To take advantage of this offer, you need a special "Founder Program" CD-key, which is given to all who pre-order, and this key has to be inputted before inputting the retail version CD-key.

Confusingly these offers are different based on who is going to be the distributor. For Turbine/Midway and US players, the offer is either $9.99/month or $199 Lifetime Membership. In Europe, Codemasters offer is substantially different with either a six-month subscription for 94 (9 per month) or a lifetime membership for 99 (approximately $195). These prices are on top of the price of the boxed game and both special pricing offers are available only until the actual launch of the game, and expire on 23rd of April.

Normal subscription US prices will be $14.99/mo, $12.99/mo or $9.99/mo depending if you subscribe for 1, 3 or 6 months at a time.

Considering that we currently know just about nothing on the "endgame" part of the Lord of the Rings Online, evaluating the value of the Lifetime Membership offer at this stage is quite impossible. It looks to me that the distributors of the game are asking for the hardcore fans to place a bet on the quality and longevity of the game, with very small chance of solid return. It also raises a nasty bogeyman - if a lot of people take up on the lifetime membership offer, there is little incentive for the developers to put effort into expanding and improving the game. They already have your money, why spend more to keep you happy? To me, the whole deal looks very good for the publisher, but hardly worth considering for the player. How many other MMOs have you played without breaks for over an year? With the $199 lifetime membership, the game becomes "free to play" after 20 months. That's a long time to play a single game - even if it's a MMO. And to actually get a good deal - say, 50% off the six-month subscription plan - you would have to keep playing for over three years.

I'm also a bit worried of the US Open Beta scheme. Characters will be level-capped to 15 during it, and the Open Beta is open for 24 days until the game launches. This means that the hardcore players will have probably all five character slots of their preferred server filled with alts at level 15, as playing from start to 15 takes only 2-4 days, and during the last days of Open Beta there will be a mad rush to farm gold as there is no other way to progress in the game. I'm unsure if the planned system is good for the health of the game - many players might get bored, give up and go back to WoW or other similar games once they hit the Open Beta level cap, perhaps forgetting about the whole game by the time of the actual launch.

The European ten day Early Access is much better in this regard - according to clarification by Codemasters, there is no artificial level limitations like with the US launch Open Beta.

And so ends our preview of Lord of the Rings Online - Shadows of Angmar based on the current European public beta. Stay tuned for our complete review, including our unique hardware recommendations, when the game launches!

Addendum

On 27th of March, Turbine announced that they had reversed their decision on blocking game access based on your IP. This post on the LOTRO forums indicates that this is so far only affecting the US servers. Therefore, you will still need to actually live in the area served by Codemasters for European servers. For US servers ran by Turbine, as long as you can obtain the US copy of the game box, you can access the servers regardless of your IP address.

There is no word yet on any possible limitations based on billing address, but it would seem unlikely they would lift the IP block only to enforce region based on billing, and in any case if you want to, you can work around that with pre-paid game cards.