One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor

Today, I am going to talk about Lord of the Rings Online, an MMORPG developed by Turbine Inc.

After a long hard self debate whether or not should I adventure my journey into Middle Earth, had been haunted me since the release of this game in 2007, and now that I have finally downloaded the game, I gave myself in.


So start off, LOTRO is a Free 2 Play MMORPG with various of contents that you can purchase i.e. the campaign, expansions, and so forth in order to advance your characters and do endgame contents. Now, with that being said, one thing that pisses me off the most is that Turbine had turned the Cash Shop markets into a nick & dime mayhem, where literally 80% of the things that are essential to enjoy the game are practically needed to be purchased via Cash Shop store. That includes extra bags, stats, and so on.

Leveling in the game is pretty straight forward, it's practically a theme park where you follow the storyline, talk to the guy, kill this, turn in that, gather this, and do that. Not much of a difference, though, the only few things that truly had kept me immersed with the game was the immersion that was provided within the server I played. That includes the strong-headed roleplaying community and the beautiful scenery of the game. Despite being released in 2007, and the graphics looks dated, but I have to give credits to Turbine when it comes to the scenery textures of the game, it's amazing.





The weather in this game also puts up with the immersion as well, with the smooth day and night cycle transitioning one after the other.

Now, the combat system is a little bit irky, I mean, yeah, everyone uses "Energy" (Mana), and there's truly nothing special about it. It's practically hack and slash, time your combo, and so on. It was rather dull and uninspiring. The UI to me, personally would definitely need some retouch and update.



The community in that game are alive and kicking, during my tavern roleplaying session, we would have people gathering around playing musics (That also includes me playing the lute). There was one session where I sat in front of the cozy fire, and played the lute randomly in the tavern, people would gather together and listen to me pimping it out with my lute. One unique thing about LOTRO was that it has a system where you can write and compose your own music and import it via ingame, and all you do is just type /play (file name) and the instrument does the trick with the sound. I played some pre-composed Chrono Cross musics, and that attracted many adventurers all around me during my downtime.





I haven't made far with LOTRO, but the game itself with the serious nick and dime strategy throw out by Turbine had cost me and my interest upon playing it, therefore, it was time for me to say goodbye to LOTRO after a week of adventure into Middle Earth. And unfortunately, I have yet simply walk into Mordor. Which made me concludes the topic with this picture: