The Lord Of The Rings: Shadows Of Angmar

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Game has little to do with Tolkien

These are some of the reasons why I regret I bought this game:

1. It has very little to do with Tolkien. For a long-time Tolkien fan such as myself, it was the biggest disappointment. Most quests are not even slightly related to the LOTR storyline, and are typically not very imaginative. Other aspects are even less Tolkienish, see below.

2. Tolkien's world is all about unqiue, one of a kind adventure. LOTRO is all about mindless, repetitive, mechanical grinding or, as some people call it, farming. For example, you need to kill 300 of the same respawning NPC trolls to increase your morale (i.e. hit points), or you need to run the same dungeon with a group of people, dozens of times, for several months, and kill the same NPC monsters over and over again, hoping your turn will come to win a single item dropped by the monster, which you can exchange for a legendary piece of armour. The farming focus of LOTRO is no doubt a very cost-effective way to increase revenue for LOTRO developers since it encourages people to re-use the same game content again and again, but in the end it makes for a disappointing experience.

3. In-game support is virtually non-exsistent: More often than not, support staff will not know the answer to your question and ask you to just browse the Internet for it. But when it comes to enforcing in-game rules, you may find that game masters are running LOTRO as a dictatorship. Not all rules are obvious, and you can be easily banned from the game by doing something that LOTRO will let anyone do, yet which is considered a violation by the game masters. I know it seems wierd, but there are numerous flaws in the game, and instead of fixing them, game masters often choose to ban people who use them to their advantage, whether knowingly or not. In my case, I was not even able to get a definitive answer from the support staff regarding what I did wrong to justify my ban.

In summary, the game has some very nice landscapes and a big online community, where you may find a lot of new friends, but the game content is lacking. If after reading this, you still decide to buy the game, at least do not buy the lifetime subscription, go month to month instead. This way, you can always stop playing (and paying) when you are bored with the game, or banned from it for no reason.

Just a few thoughts...

Alright, so recently I got fed up with World of Warcraft and I cast my copy away and decided to head out to find a new MMORPG to play. I've been playing WoW for two years or so, and I just can't take it anymore. Though after playing LOTRO, World of Warcraft is definitely looking fun right about now.

In this review I'll be comparing both games somewhat, but I'll try not to overdo it. I'm doing this because most people who will read this, (if any do at all) will be basing their own thoughts and opinions towards this game, or have already based them off of World of Warcraft.

I guess you could say that I was somewhat excited to play this game. It's Lord of the Rings - come on now. I go to the store, and lay down $80.00 and get the game and a gamecard. Not too bad, I guess. I run a fairly common system that a lot of my friend's have. Basically 2.2GHz Intel P4, with an X1650 PRO Radeon card, and a gig of RAM. Seems pretty standard. I'd assume the average player would have what I have, possibly more. Highly considering upgrading myself, but that's beyond the point.

I put in the discs, and start installing. Installation takes about 45 minutes to complete. Same as World of Warcraft's installation. Now to the fun part. A massive patch. The patch took about 2-4 hours. I can't remember how long exactly. At least twice to three times as longer as any World of Warcraft patch or patch(es), that I have ever had to download. I bought the game a couple hours before my shift, and ended up going to work before I could even play the game.

Anyways, needless to say I was pumped to get home from work and log on into Middle Earth. I loved the books, and I loved the movies. I was really excited by this point.

So I get into the game. Pick a random server, and then make my character. A Human Champion. Something of Aragorn's role, I guess. Good appearance, seemingly a good class. I enter Middle-Earth with high expectations. I get into the tutorial-like area, I guess. I have to free a Hobbit and some woman from the grasp of some diabolical Black-something-or-another fellows. So the game is running okay. I'm on Medium settings, getting about 30-35 frames. The game looks great. My character looks very real, and so far the combat seems very real. It sort of reminded me of The Legend of Zelda and Diablo II combined, but in the classical MMO form.

I notice my interface. A complete rip off of any other MMORPG, but then again, it is an MMORPG in and of itself, so that's expected. But nevertheless, the interface is probably the worst one that I've ever seen, but it works, so I guess that's all that counts here. The icons look very rushed, as if they were made in 2 hours on paint. One has a real life man screaming on it, which kind of ruined the game for me to be honest. That one little aspect of the game made me go - "Why?"... Come on now, Turbine.

So here I am. Talking to some sage-like guy who got injured. We take him to Archet. Nice looking town, but jesus, the lag! Worse than the old IF days of WoW, worse than Shatt. At least for me. I haven't had any problems running any games before, but my judgment is probably a little obscured at this point. CSS runs at 50 FPS, WoW at 40-60, and even Oblivion at 25 or so, which does the game no huge harm, but this is just madness. I can hardly move. The game seems to "hitch" lag me all around the town, as if the surroundings are loading at a retarded pace.

I leave town and the hitch continues. It's like the trees in the distance and such can't load at all. Props to Blizzard for Terrain Distance, cause Turbine, this is just retarded. I can hardly move unless I just walk around a couple feet and keep that my main area. That way everything loads fine, but when walking into the distance, from or away from towns, or anywhere, the lag is unbelievable. Turning down all of my settings hardly makes a difference. The "hitch-like" lag is still there. I guess it's built into the game? It's not just me because before I even got the game I was told to "BEWARE THE HITCH" from countless ex- and currently playing players of the game, but I didn't know that it could be so annoying.

Now, the combat system. The combat system seems pretty good. I've heard a lot of complaints about it, but it seems more real than any other MMO that I've played where the fictional aspects are lined up in bright numbers for you to spot, but this just seems more real. Blade twirls that strike all enemies nearby, lunges and stabs. I liked the combat, personally, though I didn't overly enjoy what I was fighting. Enemies and players walking and running, and attacking in the distance take on the same graphics as Runescape offered back in the day. It just looked really bad. Enemies have poor animations, as well.

I know this because I had my settings on Ultra High for a short period of the time, and these things that I'm mentioning we're still all spot on.

Needles to say I reformatted my computer last night and I'm going to give the game another go. It is the LOTR, and the quests, and the lore is what appeals to me most. The environment is beautiful, and the characters look fairly good, so that's no discouragement. Hopefully I got the kinks out.

But as back-up, I currently have World of Warcraft downloading right now, just in case.

A Mage or Druid is looking good right about now.

That's all I have to say.

Best of luck to all.

And if you plan on getting this game, just make sure you have a good system. Mine isn't really good by any means, but I never thought that I'd get the outcome that I did.

Systemrequirementslab.com is very helpful for determining on how well your PC can run the game.