malkav11

Since the NDA has been lifted, I will now brag that I am in the Lord of the Rings Online closed beta. That's all, really. Well, okay, a little about the game. It's probably the prettiest MMO I've played. Lots of gorgeous high-system-req rendering. Game-wise...well, for one thing, I think basing it on Tolkien's work kinda holds it back. I'm not really getting a huge cool-factor from powers or equipment. Also, you have to be pretty fricking well-read to get a charge from a lot of the early game content. Right now I can't even place the chronological period the game's supposed to be set in. Am I after the War of the Ring? Before it? How much after or before? I don't fucking know. The crafting is also borked - it's too hard to find crafting materials and they have what they call "vocations" which force sets of three professions on you in a way that means with rare exceptions you can't gather the crafting materials *and* do the actual crafting on the same character. I don't mind having to group, but I do mind having to interact with the player economy to do crafting. They do have some good ideas, though. For one thing, many of the key story quests are instanced and highly scripted full of coolness, often in areas you can reach in the course of normal exploration, only altered to fit the conditions of the quest. Towns burning. Midnight raids to rescue captives. That sort of thing. For another, they've got a pretty decent quest-tracker system that allows you to have the objectives of something like five or six quests up at once and refer to the whole quest text (including dialogue history) with a click or two. And although most of their Accomplishment system isn't really that different from badges in CoH/V or Auto Assault, it's certainly a rewarding prospect, especially as they add new titles or what are called Virtues that can be slotted to alter your character in some important way. The big part of that system for me, though, is that using some of your class skills often enough will also complete accomplishments...these ones substantially boost the effectiveness of the skill in question and simultaneously give other bonuses. Pretty neat.