Originally posted by Papadam

MEO is probably the worst idea for a MMO ever. Only delusional fans still cling on to the dream of "living in middle earth". 

Make a sandbox MMO out of the most restrictive IP seems like great idea... 

 

Turbine was smart when they made a great STORY driven MMO out of a great STORY. 

Rohan is evidence on how much love Turbine puts into LotrO and I feel sorry for the ones living in the past! 

I think this poster is delusional. Do you know what a LOTR title mmo is supose to be like? Should be at least second or third leading in the MMO industry. Instead it failed and resorted to a F2P, which is a failure. People left because of the crazy long grind, turning into a WoW clone , terrible and old combat mechanic, terrible GM's, and last of all F2P. 

Just look at the expansions, it went from great to terrible.  Moria was great, loth was a good patch, Mirkwood was a lol, RoI probably put a nail to the coffin to LOTRO; it was terrible, RoR well lets just say people got level 85 in a day.

The end.

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by Papadam

MEO is probably the worst idea for a MMO ever. Only delusional fans still cling on to the dream of "living in middle earth". 

Make a sandbox MMO out of the most restrictive IP seems like great idea... 

 

Turbine was smart when they made a great STORY driven MMO out of a great STORY. 

Rohan is evidence on how much love Turbine puts into LotrO and I feel sorry for the ones living in the past! 

Rohan? That expansion that has tons of threads talking about how small/disappointing it is?

People made a sandbox out of SWG, a far more restrictive IP, and it turned out great.

Turbine was pretty dumb when they made a poorly shlocked together WoW clone, considering that they haven't been turning a profit in years, despite having the biggest IP in the world. I feel sorry for Warner Brothers!

Please direct me to the "tons of threads", Rohan is pretty huge and is probably the most well made zones created in a MMO.

SWG is the opposit to a restrictive IP, huge universe with alot of freedom. But even that didnt work out very well so they had to change it to a themepark.

Funny that all the old school guys have s "WoW-clone this and WoW clone that". 

Originally posted by Papadam

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by Papadam

MEO is probably the worst idea for a MMO ever. Only delusional fans still cling on to the dream of "living in middle earth". 

Make a sandbox MMO out of the most restrictive IP seems like great idea... 

 

Turbine was smart when they made a great STORY driven MMO out of a great STORY. 

Rohan is evidence on how much love Turbine puts into LotrO and I feel sorry for the ones living in the past! 

Rohan? That expansion that has tons of threads talking about how small/disappointing it is?

People made a sandbox out of SWG, a far more restrictive IP, and it turned out great.

Turbine was pretty dumb when they made a poorly shlocked together WoW clone, considering that they haven't been turning a profit in years, despite having the biggest IP in the world. I feel sorry for Warner Brothers!

Please direct me to the "tons of threads", Rohan is pretty huge and is probably the most well made zones created in a MMO.

SWG is the opposit to a restrictive IP, huge universe with alot of freedom. But even that didnt work out very well so they had to change it to a themepark.

Funny that all the old school guys have s "WoW-clone this and WoW clone that". 

Most well made zone? Oh boy... try playing pretty much any other MMO first.

SWG isjust as restrictive as Middle Earth, and it was working quite well (the second most popular pre WoW MMO) until it became a themepark and then died.

And we say WoW clone because it is very clearly, very obviously, a WoW clone. Almost everything about it stinks of WoW.

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Vivendi and Turbine began developing a game called Middle Earth Online in about 2003 , and continued to develop it until it launched as Lord of the Rings Online.

In Alpha, LotRO was a sandbox game being made by veteran Turbine devs. It's tag line was "live in Middle Earth". The game was very community based, sandbox and book accuracy focus. The devs hosted events once a year called Turbine Nation where people came together and got to see the game as it came along, play in various events and raffles, essentially a big party.

 Well, about a year before LotRO's launch, Vivendi lost the rights to Lord of the Rings, and Turbine gained entire control over the MMO. Turbine changed Middle Earth Online's name to LotRO, shuffled most of the veteran staff to other projects, and put new developers at the helm of LotRO. They quickly scrapped most of the old work and restructured the game to be a quest based WoW clone. There were no more yearly Turbine Nation gathering, the community disintegrated. The game tag line was changed to "Fight through Middle Earth!".

That's actually... a really sad story. It's sad to hear that what could have been an actually interesting game was stomped all over.

Originally posted by Cranktrain

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Vivendi and Turbine began developing a game called Middle Earth Online in about 2003 , and continued to develop it until it launched as Lord of the Rings Online.

In Alpha, LotRO was a sandbox game being made by veteran Turbine devs. It's tag line was "live in Middle Earth". The game was very community based, sandbox and book accuracy focus. The devs hosted events once a year called Turbine Nation where people came together and got to see the game as it came along, play in various events and raffles, essentially a big party.

 Well, about a year before LotRO's launch, Vivendi lost the rights to Lord of the Rings, and Turbine gained entire control over the MMO. Turbine changed Middle Earth Online's name to LotRO, shuffled most of the veteran staff to other projects, and put new developers at the helm of LotRO. They quickly scrapped most of the old work and restructured the game to be a quest based WoW clone. There were no more yearly Turbine Nation gathering, the community disintegrated. The game tag line was changed to "Fight through Middle Earth!".

That's actually... a really sad story. It's sad to hear that what could have been an actually interesting game was stomped all over.

Will probably never know why they didnt continue with MEO, but one thing is clear, LOTRO is not the game people wanted, and its utter failure in the MMO market is a clear indication of that, MEO might have failed too, but i think it would have had more of a chance of success than LOTRO did, when you look back at things now, its no wonder that LOTRO went F2P, its probably only a matter of time really before the plug is pulled on it altogether, and after playing the game before it went F2P, and after, i can't really say thats a bad thing.

A Lord of the Rings MMO should just focus on creating a huge, living world for players to play in, like EVE for example. I also would allow players to pick Evil races and have the game evolve around territory control.

Sandbox is the way to go for Lord of the Rings, and anything less is doomed to fail.

Originally posted by Galadourn

A Lord of the Rings MMO should just focus on creating a huge, living world for players to play in, like EVE for example. I also would allow players to pick Evil races and have the game evolve around territory control.

Sandbox is the way to go for Lord of the Rings, and anything less is doomed to fail.

which is pretty much what happened by the sound of it

Originally posted by Galadourn

A Lord of the Rings MMO should just focus on creating a huge, living world for players to play in, like EVE for example. I also would allow players to pick Evil races and have the game evolve around territory control.

Sandbox is the way to go for Lord of the Rings, and anything less is doomed to fail.

Wasn't MEO set after the events of the ring being destroyed in Mount Doom (4th age)? All dark forces had been eradicated so you couldn't really be an orc, goblin etc.

Honestly, I wouldn't have a clue how MEO would work.

Originally posted by Galadourn

A Lord of the Rings MMO should just focus on creating a huge, living world for players to play in, like EVE for example. I also would allow players to pick Evil races and have the game evolve around territory control.

Sandbox is the way to go for Lord of the Rings, and anything less is doomed to fail.

I don't know.  The world, as Tolkein wrote it, was pretty sparsly populated, with vast swaths of nothing between settlements.  If you read through most of the history, it's a little on the bland side.  In fact, the most interesting stuff that happened were obviously in The Hobbit and the trilogy which, if anything, sort of lend themselves to a themepark experience.

I love sandbox, but I just don't think it works really well for very established IP's, because the sandbox will always have to be heavily restricted so that players aren't breaking lore left and right just by building a town here, or killing a guy there.

LotRO was a fun game for it's time.  It was just unfortunately developed and released during the height of WoW, which really limited the audience.

it would work with minimal turbine-generated content, and plenty of tools to give players the option to make their own content. And a strict ruleset to regulate the player-generated content (i.e. alignment penalties, Security Levels, etc).

You cannot imagine what players are capable of doing, if you give them the tools and make it fun. A living, breathing world without any lines of code required for public quests and other similar crap.

The fact that the world was sparsely populated would be an excellent incentive to focus on terittory control, player city-building, local economies, etc.

Originally posted by Galadourn

it would work with minimal turbine-generated content, and plenty of tools to give players the option to make their own content. And a strict ruleset to regulate the player-generated content (i.e. alignment penalties, Security Levels, etc).

A sandbox, in other words.

I think that would ruin Middle Earth in my eyes. They would have to be so restrictive to what players can do to not broke lore/immersion.

For example NO new building of towns.

Originally posted by Galadourn

it would work with minimal turbine-generated content, and plenty of tools to give players the option to make their own content. And a strict ruleset to regulate the player-generated content (i.e. alignment penalties, Security Levels, etc).

You cannot imagine what players are capable of doing, if you give them the tools and make it fun. A living, breathing world without any lines of code required for public quests and other similar crap.

The fact that the world was sparsely populated would be an excellent incentive to focus on terittory control, player city-building, local economies, etc.

That's the problem though.  If the vast wilderness of middle earth became this populated hub of player activity, then it sort of stops being middle earth.  Maybe they could get away with it by setting it in the past or in the future, but the further from the triligoy they go, the less connection there is to the IP for most people.  If set in the future, you'd have next to no elves, or evil races.  Just humans and hobits which, to my knowledge, are hinted at starting to grow into men as time goes on.

If it was set in the past, it could work based on the assumption that any player cities or activities just get burried in time anyway.  The world is full of ruins, so it wouldn't be a tough sell on the lore side of things.  Unfortunately, it would feel like middle earth in geography only.

Not saying it couldnt' be done, just that a themepark design seems to make more sense.  Themepark isn't bad, despite what a lot of people here claim.  Like anything, it just has to be done well.  We all know there are a ton of crappy sandbox games out there.

well, i played lotro for quite some time, and after now having some serious "meh...i wanna play something with a great community again" moments am currently patching up-to-date.

i think it is a fine game. it is a themepark, yes. but the story of the books is so well immersed, you can see stuff and go like "aah...wow, here i am" and "oh look, i read about that in..."

also anti-social is not quite what i would say. sure you can't go in every dungeon if you haven't got the quest. but the social options and emotes make a fine social game of it.

if you don't want to "fight through middle earth" then don't do it, go to bree or rivendell and sit with friends around a fire (that would then be "live in middle earth" and there are quite a few folks who do that)

surely i got some points that i find a bit negative. and of course a totally sandboxed MEO could be an awesome game with exploration and such. but it could also go horribly wrong in case of community matters ("you heard about that elven raider guild that practically burned down the shire and killed everyone there and then made their player city there? - yeah, i heard the hobbits went to settle down around Amon Sûl now")

fact is, i was quite happy with lotro (not so the case with swg nge) and hope when patching is finally done i get to live and fight in middle earth again because to live the most deciding factor is the community and not the game itself.

It does have, hands down, the greatest community out of any MMO I've played.  People are respectful, polite, willing to help out, and offer advice.  It feels like walking into my local gaming club, surrounded by good people that I may or may not actually know.

I played on Landroval, so can only vouch for that server, but I rarely hear someone complain about the community on any server.

well, Darkfall uses a pre-set city-building plan (you can only build in specific areas), and also NPC cities are non-attackable, so that wouldn't be a problem.

It would be a great idea, if only a company were brave enough to try it.

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by FrodoFragins

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by trancejeremy
Yup, that was a completely different game from another company that never materialized.

Wrong.

 

I don't understand why people keep making this mistake.

 

 

Middle Earth Online was in development by Sierra in 1999. It got shut down.

 

Vivendi and Turbine began developing a game called Middle Earth Online in about 2003 , and continued to develop it until it launched as Lord of the Rings Online.

In Alpha, LotRO was a sandbox game being made by veteran Turbine devs. It's tag line was "live in Middle Earth". The game was very community based, sandbox and book accuracy focus. The devs hosted events once a year called Turbine Nation where people came together and got to see the game as it came along, play in various events and raffles, essentially a big party.

 

Well, about a year before LotRO's launch, Vivendi lost the rights to Lord of the Rings, and Turbine gained entire control over the MMO. Turbine changed Middle Earth Online's name to LotRO, shuffled most of the veteran staff to other projects, and put new developers at the helm of LotRO. They quickly scrapped most of the old work and restructured the game to be a quest based WoW clone. There were no more yearly Turbine Nation gathering, the community disintegrated. The game tag line was changed to "Fight through Middle Earth!".

 

It was essentially the NGE, but because it happened in beta, people don't talk about it nearly as much. But for those that were there, we felt betrayed. It splintered the community, kinships fell apart. Then they announced there wouldn't be any international servers, after promising the opposite, and the remaining kinships fractured again.

 

Don't believe that Turbine was working on it? Here's the pre alpha trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk0ogD_HMn0

 

Also, in before "hurp derp that looks like crap, glad they changed it".

 

OMG. herp derp.  y u no realize that Turbine work on Middle Earth Online with Sierra?

 

Overreact much? geesh.

No. They didn't. Turbine worked with VIVENDI on Middle Earth Online.

The Sierra MEO was an entirely different project that never saw the light of day.

Erm, you do know that vivendi's parent company (Vivendi Interactive Studios) was the holding company for Siera Entertainment (and Blizzard). The Siera MEO was never dropped fully, Siera's development got dropped and shifted to the parent company, much of Siera's work was used to create the Vivendi/Turbine version of MEO. 

There was also a little bit of juicy conspiracy theorism going on around the time that Vivendi got dropped and Turbine took full control. The conspiracy hinged on the fact that around that time Vivendi Interactive Studios bought out Universal Studios, one of Warber Brothers rivals, and became Vivendi Universal Games, which they say explains why they were dropped and why their work was trashed. Or on the other hand you could view it that after acquiring Universal Studios they decided that working for a rival was a bad idea and pulled out taking their work with them and refusing to allow turbine to use any of it. I doubt we will ever know.

For me the great thing about lotro is that the social aspect of the game isn't restricted to dungeons and instances and finding groups to quest with. In most other mmos if you don't do group quests you won't interact with anyone apart from through general chat or your mates in /tell.

At least in lotro there are lots of social things going on. I play on Laurelin and there is random RP pretty much everywhere, plenty of organised roleplaying events (Hobbit night in the Green Dragon every Friday for example). So if the levelling gets grindy there are other things to do even if you aren't in a good fellowship.

I liked solo questing, so I get my mmo fix by roleplaying with other PCs in the game. To be honest it's the only game since UO where this happens regularly and successfully. I was thinking the other day as well that the Rohirrim in Great River, even though they don't have voice acting, have more depth and feel much more real and alive than the NPCs in ToR ever felt.

Having said all that a few more sandbox elements would be good. More interactivity with objects in the open world and not just in player houses would be interesting. They introduced the abilty to sit on some chairs in taverns a while back, stuff like that.

Originally posted by Phry

Originally posted by Cranktrain

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Vivendi and Turbine began developing a game called Middle Earth Online in about 2003 , and continued to develop it until it launched as Lord of the Rings Online.

In Alpha, LotRO was a sandbox game being made by veteran Turbine devs. It's tag line was "live in Middle Earth". The game was very community based, sandbox and book accuracy focus. The devs hosted events once a year called Turbine Nation where people came together and got to see the game as it came along, play in various events and raffles, essentially a big party.

 Well, about a year before LotRO's launch, Vivendi lost the rights to Lord of the Rings, and Turbine gained entire control over the MMO. Turbine changed Middle Earth Online's name to LotRO, shuffled most of the veteran staff to other projects, and put new developers at the helm of LotRO. They quickly scrapped most of the old work and restructured the game to be a quest based WoW clone. There were no more yearly Turbine Nation gathering, the community disintegrated. The game tag line was changed to "Fight through Middle Earth!".

That's actually... a really sad story. It's sad to hear that what could have been an actually interesting game was stomped all over.

Will probably never know why they didnt continue with MEO, but one thing is clear, LOTRO is not the game people wanted, and its utter failure in the MMO market is a clear indication of that, MEO might have failed too, but i think it would have had more of a chance of success than LOTRO did, when you look back at things now, its no wonder that LOTRO went F2P, its probably only a matter of time really before the plug is pulled on it altogether, and after playing the game before it went F2P, and after, i can't really say thats a bad thing.

LotrO is one of the most succsefull post-wow MMOs released and still going strong for over five years. 

Changing to a superior buisnes model doesnt mean failure its called being smart. 

You haters dont need Middle earth online. You already live in a fantasy world :)

Originally posted by immodium

Originally posted by Galadourn

A Lord of the Rings MMO should just focus on creating a huge, living world for players to play in, like EVE for example. I also would allow players to pick Evil races and have the game evolve around territory control.

Sandbox is the way to go for Lord of the Rings, and anything less is doomed to fail.

Wasn't MEO set after the events of the ring being destroyed in Mount Doom (4th age)? All dark forces had been eradicated so you couldn't really be an orc, goblin etc.

Honestly, I wouldn't have a clue how MEO would work.

It was set right after the Fellowship escaped Moria. Each expansion would advance the Fellowship further ahead. You'd hear whispers of their journey but never meet them. It was a very explicit goal for you not to just get quests from a stationary Fellowship.

Originally posted by Phry

Originally posted by Cranktrain

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Vivendi and Turbine began developing a game called Middle Earth Online in about 2003 , and continued to develop it until it launched as Lord of the Rings Online.

In Alpha, LotRO was a sandbox game being made by veteran Turbine devs. It's tag line was "live in Middle Earth". The game was very community based, sandbox and book accuracy focus. The devs hosted events once a year called Turbine Nation where people came together and got to see the game as it came along, play in various events and raffles, essentially a big party.

 Well, about a year before LotRO's launch, Vivendi lost the rights to Lord of the Rings, and Turbine gained entire control over the MMO. Turbine changed Middle Earth Online's name to LotRO, shuffled most of the veteran staff to other projects, and put new developers at the helm of LotRO. They quickly scrapped most of the old work and restructured the game to be a quest based WoW clone. There were no more yearly Turbine Nation gathering, the community disintegrated. The game tag line was changed to "Fight through Middle Earth!".

That's actually... a really sad story. It's sad to hear that what could have been an actually interesting game was stomped all over.

Will probably never know why they didnt continue with MEO, but one thing is clear, LOTRO is not the game people wanted, and its utter failure in the MMO market is a clear indication of that, MEO might have failed too, but i think it would have had more of a chance of success than LOTRO did, when you look back at things now, its no wonder that LOTRO went F2P, its probably only a matter of time really before the plug is pulled on it altogether, and after playing the game before it went F2P, and after, i can't really say thats a bad thing.

All the trade reports say that LotRO is bleeding WB (LotRO's publishers) dry and barely making enough money to stay afloat.

Middle Earth Online may not have lasted long term, but it would have been a bit more prolific I think, considering LotRO is so bland and unoriginal there's not a ton you can really say about it. If it wasn't for the Lord of the Rings brand it would have faded away long ago.