Lord of the Rings Online

I played LoTRO when it first came out and I enjoyed it but somewhere mid-game it kind of went blah on me.  Combined with RL events that were sucking up all my time I decided to stop playing.  Eventually RL sorted itself out and I tried to come back to MMORPG's.  I tried AOC and wish I had my money back, I tried the Open Beta of WAR and it was ok but not what I was looking for.  So I decided to give LOTR a try again.

It took me some time to get back in but once I did all I can say is WHOA!  They have added tons of free content since release, including plenty of soloable content so you can now do those upper levels without spamming LFG all day long.  This was probably my biggest gripe about the game,  i enjoy groups don;t get me wrong but not if I have to spend hours looking for one.  The LFG feature is still a joke but at least now I don't have to do groups.

Of course the existing things that made the game great are still there.  The world is beautiful, gameplay is pretty good.  It could be faster paced and the delay between skills is often annoying, but overall gameplay is still enjoyable. the sound and music in this game is great, I usually play with headphones so the voice chat doesn't disturb my kids while they are sleeping and I hear all kind of nuances of sound that make the atmosphere great.

The endgame raiding is enjoyable, maybe not as sophisticated as WOW but they had a lot longer to perfect it (or beat it into the ground depending on your viewpoint) so it is still good.  All around I would say LOTRO is the best pve game out there.  There is still room for lots of imrovement but again, compared to the rest of the drivel out there LOTR beats them all.  if you lft or never tried it I seriously suggest you give it another go.

A lot of people have bashed the no pvp but the monster play is great.  You have a wide open zone to have large battles and you can capture keeps.  This is pretty fun but it does seem shallow at first glance.  But when you look at all the other pvp oriented games that f-ed up it actually works better than most of them hwhen it comes to world pvp. Sure you cant pvp anywhere but the one place you can it is pretty fun.  With a little work and some decent pvp guilds that would be willing to give it a chance the pvp/MP in LOTR would be top notch.  Again this is just in comparision to the broke ass world pvp in AOC and WAR. <awaits the flames this comment will eleicit>

LOTRO is a pretty game, but Vanguard SOH is the king of PvE.  It has tons of content, HUGE open world, deep crafting, harvesting, diplomacy, and adventuring. 

I definitely preferred Vanguard's crafting to LotRO's, no question about it. The large world made playing alts a better experience as well. Even so, I tend to enjoy the actual gameplay more in LotRO. It really is a subjective thing. Vanguard is a much better game today than it's really given credit for, but I think the same is true of LotRO. I tend to find the whole "one game is better than another" discussion to be counter-productive, anyway, since such discussions, by their very nature, diminish one of the two games based entirely on personal taste.

Originally posted by Deathstrike2

LOTRO is a pretty game, but Vanguard SOH is the king of PvE.  It has tons of content, HUGE open world, deep crafting, harvesting, diplomacy, and adventuring. 

 

and LoTRO has tons of content, a huge open world, deep crafting, harvesting, a player generated music system, lots of special events, plenty of adventuring and about 50 times VSoH's population. They blew their chance at ever being more than a also ran with their crap release just like AoC did.

I've not played Vanguard so deinately can't compare there, however as far as gameplay in LOTRO goes it's outstanding.  The PvE is spectacular and I agree about the PvP -- highly underrated outside of LOTRO.   Even I enjoy it and I"M not your typical PvP person.  YOu can pop in to the zone join a raid stay as long as you want -- there are some benefits to it as well --  you can get gems from the dungeon in the pvp zone that you can go in to when your side has 3 keeps and use those gems to buy epic level gear, and also at rank 4 you get a port back to near the stable in that zone which facilitates world travel a LOT.   So yah -- the whole system works extremely well.

I would actually make the claim that at release LOTRO had fewer bugs than any MMO ever.  I'd also make the claim that LOTRO has failed to add many bugs in to the game whatsoever -- yes there have been some but they have been extremely minor and not very plentiful.   This is also amazing since they had 6 major content updates since release that added 2 new zones, several new 6 man instances, a 24 man instance and a 12 man instance.    The implementation of new concepts and ideas has been amazing -- on top of the content they added a rep system, housing, a hobby system that allows fishing and crafting actually yields useful gear.

The raid play in the PvE side has allowed some of the funnest content I"ve played in any game -- one fight in particular (Thrang the 2nd last boss in the Rift) is the most fun I've ever had on an encounter.   Even once you have that fight down every fight can be very very different and everyone has to be totally on top of their game.   The balrog at the end of the Rift is also quite difficult and fun but the script is actually a bit better countered IMO but still can get pretty chaotic even on a good run hehe.   

My direct comparison is actually based on years of raiding nightly in Everquest -- I did a lot of different raids and styles of raids in that game, and I just feel LOTRO has max'd out the *fun* factor.   I never got far enough in WoW to compare, and I've never played Vanguard (althougH I do want to try it out).  

I tried VG when they did that thing to get back old players.  It was still broke and parts of the world were empty and unfinished.  Sorry but taking a year or two just to fix it to the state less than LOTR was when it first release = epic fail in my book.

LOTRO was perhaps the least buggy game on release WAR gives it a run for its money, however I feel WAR has fundamental game play flaws that will become more and more apparent as time goes on.  Such as two sided RVR where 90% of people want to play one side. 

LOTRO is not a perfect game but compared to all the other broke ass games I think it is the best overall.  That is just my opinion of course.

Hmm, I may have to give lotro another try. I only played it in beta and found it a bit boring. its possible I wasn't in the mood to play a MMO also lol.

War is only ok for me so far. The RvR just isn't as fun as daoc was, as well as a few other things. I think they really botched it when they put in scenarios instead of keeping a BG system like in daoc. Defeats the purpose of totally constant action to purely level up in RvR.  The open areas rarely have people, so doing it there is pointless.

How is the pvp in lotro? From what I read there is 2 sides it seems, so is it in only special "frontier" zones or everywhere? If it is special zones, probably be best to start there even if one didn't want to pvp much, just to have the option.

Originally posted by Vynt

Hmm, I may have to give lotro another try. I only played it in beta and found it a bit boring. its possible I wasn't in the mood to play a MMO also lol.

War is only ok for me so far. The RvR just isn't as fun as daoc was, as well as a few other things. I think they really botched it when they put in scenarios instead of keeping a BG system like in daoc. Defeats the purpose of totally constant action to purely level up in RvR.  The open areas rarely have people, so doing it there is pointless.

How is the pvp in lotro? From what I read there is 2 sides it seems, so is it in only special "frontier" zones or everywhere? If it is special zones, probably be best to start there even if one didn't want to pvp much, just to have the option.

PvMP is not what you would really think it is, you basically roll a lvl 50 monster toon and hope that some 1 is there to PK or else you just run around doing quest to unlock traits, skills and such but not lvl's you roll a lvl 50 and that is where you stay, good for a change when you get bored questing in the mainland.

Originally posted by charlizd

 

PvMP is not what you would really think it is, you basically roll a lvl 50 monster toon and hope that some 1 is there to PK or else you just run around doing quest to unlock traits, skills and such but not lvl's you roll a lvl 50 and that is where you stay, goo