And of all companies in the US to have it, Acclaim is it. Jeez I remember when they put out Nintendo games....

Entered every contest for Runes of Magic to get in, and no email. Of course the contest is limited to 25 keys per....which is moronic in the first place, but w/e. Tried putting a serious entry in, and the ones that get approved are the "L33T, cool, I can write in internet speak" kids, go figure.

But yeah, the CBs are a pain to get into.

Sounds great, so can I have a key now?

I think I'd rather play a nice game of chess than re-subscribe to that funcom mess. Nice graphics and boobs do not make a great game.

Bah, too little and much too late. They still wont address the major bugs in the game like the frequent d/c's and latency issues. Nothing like red lining in the middle of a fight and coming back and your dead. Too much concentration on razzle and dazzle and not enough actually fixing the mess. Instead looks like they are just adding to it. History repeats itself as Anarchy Online is also quite buggy and free.

Most MMO's are the same. They are either have Quests that are linear based (WoW, LOTRO), a pure grind (go kill x of y), or just don't have that many quests and you just have to muddle your own way through. Very few games these days leave it up to the player to make their own way through the game. Only game I ever saw that did this to great effect was the Elder Scrolls series.

Until the next generation of games comes out like AoC, WAR and even Bethesda's Fallout Online, I won't pass judgement.

Until a game has been out for at least a year, long enough to get all the bugs out and figure out what style they are going for, its little use bashing the game. TR has not been out for a year officially. Frankly, besides Anarchy Online, its only other Sci Fi MMO out that doesn't rely soley on flying ships around. Its a viable option for now, until the other games coming out get stable enough to warrant an actual review.

Well actually, there is a US server (sort of). www.gamehaze.com is a private server that has the game. Still allows asians, so you will still see chinese named characters, but everything else is in english.

Its basically just like every other Korean MMO out there, go kill 25 of this, 15 of that. Pure grind. Although the crafting system is pretty nice. Still its a cheap version of Aion. Yeah you can fly, but so can everyone else. Elven priests can do it from lvl 1. And its hardly perfect.

Well tbh, I don't like the game. Very clunky controls, the graphics are not well done, and the sound is a joke. I just don't understand where 4.5 gigs goes. For 4.5 gigs I would expect a lot more, this is just shoddy programming at best. Can't understand the hype over it either. Even Mythos is better than this crap.

Kinda looks like Mythos a bit. I assume you can scroll in and out depending on what you want to seer. Looks interesting though. At 88% currently...

If the game is 4 gigs, then how does it play on a PDA? Eh, whatever. After spending the day trying to get Rappelz to work with vista, hopefully this will be different.

I liked DAoC (pre-atlantis). Very well done game, although I think the minotaur boxer class was a mistake. Still, the classes were very diverse and each had its own strengths and weaknesses. Of course, now the game has degraded down to people crying NERF! I fully enjoyed my experiences both before atlantis and after (on classic servers), tons of options of playing the various classes, each with different specs that could be done. If they ever do a retro server (Just SI), I'd play it again, but I don't see that occurring.

I think it will depend on how the skill system works in WAR to see how it will compare. Too soon to tell yet with no one speaking about whats happening in Beta. Having played the tabletop version of Warhammer, it will be interesting to see it come alive on the PC. Hopefully everything promised will be there (collision detection, instanced scenarios, custom trophies, etc.) although for some reason the game Fable comes to mind....

Bah, the UK. I really find it annoying when games are IP blocked. And it looks to be fun to boot. The NA version can't come soon enough. I'm all for keeping things local and stuff, but you can't depend on just EU IPs to make your money. Oi veh.

Its not the evil races as playing that would help the game. Truly the game is a dream in bringing the tolkien world to life, its that it would provide more variety than what is already there.

To touch on it a bit better. It would have been more interesting if each race started in their own beginner instance instead of grouping the humans and hobbits together and the elves with the dwarves. I understand why it was done from a story standpoint, but it looked to need a bit more polish. I also do not understand that after the beginner parts, why all the races start in the same areas regardless of heritage. Why give the option if it does little to affect where you start? I would think that a rowan human would start in the south rather than near Bree. Little thing like that tend to disuade me from the overall experience.

The class choices seem to be a little limited, if you look at other successful MMO's out there, DAoC, WoW (cough), even AO for example, there are a great variety of classes to choose from. I understand in keeping with the mythos that no wizards exist, but your making a game, not writing a book. Having no staple wizard in the game is not a plus. The Loremaster is hardly a wizard, you get 1 fireball thing and pets. Now I didn't play the game to 50, but I did look at the wiki to see the skill progression and it doesn't look to get much better down the road. No way to improve skills, you just get the main ones and thats it (not counting passive).

I would have expected more racial varieties of classes, the pen & paper RPG of LOTR is by far more in-depth. With classes that really sit well with the various races. Rangers with humans and elves, although elves have the distinct archery skill, hobbits with thievery and maybe some sort of riding paladin on a pony, even a battlerager for the dwarves. Sharing the various classes with the races with the exact same skills and only the only difference being traits (perks?), is not much of a variety.

Yes, you can't have everything in a game, but I would have liked to see some more interesting variety for a game of this magnitude. At the very least classes based on the races, not just on the environment. As for adding the evil races, well, from their standpoint, do they really consider themselves evil? You would not have to have monsters as classes, just the intelligent ones, evil humans and dwarves, and the goblins/orcs with the Urak-Kai (sp). You could even have the same sort of classes with a few others added in like a tinkerer or alchemist (as they had explosives), and the other classes would translate equally well.

But yeah, realm vs. realm is where the meat of most MMO's is at. Everyone likes to give it a try every once in a while. Humans are much more unpredictable than computer opponents. And everyone on one side all fighting for the same thing really does give a sense of worth to your character and your standing in the world. Having played DAoC (pre-atlantis), having all your characters in one realm stood for something (b4 servers were merged). I don't see why they could not have done something equal in LOTRO.

Still, for PvE, its a great game. Tons of content, Very pretty at parts. Frustrating quests (hobbit post), and very deep storyline. Very few bugs as the settings are all adjustable. And plus the community is pretty nice, I only got spammed to duel someone 3x in a week, instead of 5x in 5 minutes as I experienced in WoW. I just blame that lil fact on no real PvP. The monster version is nice in theory, but really just amounts to a gimic than anything important.

As for the "lore" of the books, I disagree on it would ruin the game. It would build on the game instead. Creating stories in MMO's is what people want to experience. I'm pretty sure that taking the LOTR saga from the other side's viewpoint would prove to be enlightening. The humans and other races intruding on goblin lands, killing their young, burning their villages to the ground? Little things like this would only serve to build upon the game and the books.

Perfect example is Gollum. His story was pivotal to the books. He was evil and insane. Yet it was an important fact that his side be told. I'm sure it would be quite easy to write similiar stories from that POV, which would only serve to enrich the story even more.

All I'm trying to say is that the "lore" of the story in the books is fine, but you have to grow upon that to bring that story to a new media. Tolkien never envisioned his story would be played out in a MMO, let alone a PC game. New ideas call for new progress to be made. If lore was all that mattered, I doubt we would even have computers in our own world (i.e. the dark ages of europe).

So I tried the game for a week. And everything worked fine in vista which is a nice plus imo. I went through several characters fully immersed in the lore and how the mechanics of the game went. I must admit that the game was very pretty and I fully enjoyed running through the forests and mountains that I had imagined when I read the books. I tried all the classes that interested me, and all the races. And then I slowly got bored with it all.

I felt that the game was highly polished, and fully supported the mythos of LoTR universe. Maybe a bit too much was the problem. Yes there were quests a plenty, and stories rich in content, not to mention the sights and sounds appropriate to the game. But it seemed kind of stale.

I'm not trying to put down the game, but there were some issues I did have with the game. For one, I can understand trying to make an online game in the LoTR period can be a hard thing, and I'm not one to go against the way it was done, I just feel that based on everything else out there, a bit more could have been added to make it more open to others.

I for one would have liked to see more classes and races. Yes this includes the evil races. Now I know that a lot of people would complain about that, seeing how the monsters outnumbered the good races 100 to 1. But it still could have been an option as there were tons of little skirmishes all over the place and it would have been very creative to see the lands beyond mordor and the sights and sounds of the evil races. Not much would had to been added. I distinctly remember that there were evil hobbits, evil humans even evil dwarves. All this could have been incorporated into the game to give it a more Good vs. Evil theme, which is what the books were about to begin with.

There was no need to have major battles going on, as every player knows in MMORPGs there is never that amount of people all willing to do the same thing UNLESS the content is there. And it would not be that hard to include a major battle instance regardless. But getting back to the point, they could have taken a lesson from other titles where some people like to PvE, but others like to PvP. Playing a lvl 50 monster is interesting, but it hardly counts for someone trying to test the character they spent months building the right way and to test it out against an enemy realm. Not dueling, or sparring, but actually fighting someone from the other side in a united front. That is what the MMOs are about.

I totally agree that it would spoil the LOTR mythos, but in terms of making a successful game that grabs all types of people, you have to make some sacrifices and change things to actually make a game worth it. WoW, and I hate to use this as an excuse as I can't stand the game like anyone else, did things correctly. They allowed both good and evil to be in the game. They did not make huge battles where 100s of monsters went against 100s of people like in the books of warcraft or previous games, no, they accepted that this is not needed and concentrated on the game itself. Now I'm not supporting WoW as they have other issues that ruined the game, but it does stan to reason out a general point that you must have 2 sides to a game. Just like a coin.

The graphics, the quests, the story, the rewards, crafting, etc all add up to a grand experience, but not having PvP in a true sense, no realm vs. realm play, no way to fight for your honor as a monster or as a good race, this all adds up to a game that is sorely lacking. I'm pretty sure that is the nail on the head of the main issue most of the gamers have with the game.

I'll come back to it in a few years to see if anything has changed, yes it may be popular, but only with so many people, and staying true to the story does not always make a great game for everyone.

My two cents.