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The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar

Big deeds for small traits

The most original bit in LOTRO involves deeds and traits; instead of WoW-style talent trees, each character has four types of trait slots to customize their characters - Virtue, Class, Race and Legendary. The number of available slots of each type increases as you gain levels and by level 50 you can slot about two dozen different traits to differentiate your character.

All classes can obtain all virtues - these are are minor traits that give slight bonuses to different attributes and you gain these by completing deeds, which work a bit like badges in City of Heroes - it may be "kill xxx monsters of this type" or "visit these landmarks in this area" or "complete xxx quests in this area" for a trait or a title that you can display with your character's name. While you can "grind" deeds, in most cases you tend to complete many of them almost automatically while playing normally. Perfectionists may want to go back and fill up the missing deeds to ensure they have access to every trait upgrade, but in practice it's up to you if you want to devote your time to chasing every one of them.

Class-based traits are slightly different though - they are awarded for using specific abilities repeatedly or from special class quests. Those that are gained from using your abilities are a bit like a use-based skill system that improves your abilities based on how often you use them. Class traits are far more important than Virtues, and you can customize your character in major ways with them. Then we have Race-based traits. They are awarded from specific activities similar to Virtues, but the rewards are usually unique abilities solely for your race. Legendary traits are reserved for the late game and apparently you gain access to them by collecting pages that drop from certain high level monsters.

As you have fewer available slots than possible traits, pretty soon you have to make hard choices and traits are actually the most important way to differentiate between one character of a certain class and another of the same.

Monster Madness

While LOTRO has no traditional PvP beyond basic duelling ("sparring"), there is a way to bash player-controlled skulls - Monster Play, or PvMP as it's also called. Ettenmoor is a whole zone sealed off for players to fight each other, except that one side is actually controlling orcs, wargs and other assorted level 50 monsters. You can play on the monster side as soon as you reach level 10, and you can improve your monster character using destiny points. These are available either by completing certain quests with your hero character, or by completing tasks for the bad guys as a monster in Ettenmoor.

To play as the good guys and hunt down these player-controlled monsters, your own character has to be at least level 40 (and most likely closer to 50 to survive), so it was impossible to properly test this feature before the publication of this review. The system looks fairly original and promising, but it's impossible to say anything about such things as balancing and actual fun factor without properly testing it out. We will return to Monster Play and rest of the endgame features later on with a separate story, once people start hitting the maximum level on the live servers.

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