Member Preview Continued...
This week on the forums, user zaxtor99 showed us a glimpse into the Lord of the Rings Online stress test beta weekend. Comparing it to the popular World of Warcraft, zaxtor99's review is well done, and MMORPG.com is proud to present it, in its entirety, as our Spotlight of the Week!
Sound / Game Ambiance
Sound/Music/Game ambience: LOTRO online scores well here too, and just a tad higher then where I would rate WOW, the reason is because of two things. When talking to NPCS, especially during quests, you here real speech scripts. Also the music in LOTRO blows away the music effects in WOW. I just really like the music I heard in LOTRO. Very Tolkien and unboring music effects. LOTRO scores a 9.0 here. WOW gets a 7.0.
Crafting
Crafting looks and feels very similar to WOW here. I didn't spend a lot of time with crafting so I cannot honestly score this area. From what I did see and do with it, it seems on pace with what WOW offers. This is just an unknown to me because honestly I had so much fun leveling in the game I never spent enough time with the crafting mechanisms. For scoring sakes, I will go ahead and call it a draw here just to help come up with a final score, and this score comes from very limited crafting as I only tried it about 12 times. 8.0 for WOW. 8.0 here just from what I know about it.
Combat
Combat/Fighting: This area is nicely done with smooth animations that are a little prettier to look at then in WOW, but also a little behind wow in animation smoothness. I give the combat/fighting an equal score to WOW here at an 8.5. It is fun and is very similar to WOW. hotbar skills and actions just like WOW. If you like the combat in WOW, You will very likely like this just the same. 8.5.
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Interface
Interface Unit is very well laid out, and very easily managed. Windows and icons can be moved, sized, and dragged to their desired locations with ease. Help windows pop up if needed. Everything here feels right at home and is easily navigated. 9.0. WoW gets a 9.5 here just because WOW has a little more solid feel in this department, but not much. It may just be more familiarity with WOWs interface for me, but I will give WOW a slight edge here.
Community
Community: I liked the community I witnessed during my stress test. I read a lot about how during such a stress test before I started Friday to expect a lot of people to be jerks and rude behavior. Not once did I have someone steal a kill of mine. Not once did I hear some kid call me names or spam with senseless words all over my screen. And in 12 hours on WOW, I know for sure that I would have rated the community aspect just a little lower because of so much inmature player behavior in that game. My LOTRO time had almost everyone that was talking about something besides the game with an OOC before the chat (Out Of Character) and in WOW I almost never see OOC before ridiculous out of game chat. LOTRO beats wow here if only from this very limited experience. It certainly might chance, especially if a lot of WOW players migrate to the Lord Of The Rings virtual world. LoTRO gets a 8.5 here. WoW scores a 7.5.
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Fun
And last but certainly not least... FUN. I'm not gonna lie. World is Warcraft is fun. It's smooth and its fast. It's ease lets you focus on the fun to be had in the game. LOTRO is no different and scores just a little higher then WOW here again based only on my game time here. Maybe it's because it's new. And maybe it's because my first whole week that I had WOW, I put in about 5 hours into it. I spent over 12 in LoTRO when I really only wanted to spend about 4-6 hours. It's addicting, and it's a lot of fun. The beautiful graphics, the soothing music and ambiance as well as well constructed quests make this game a blast to play. After being so let down with the very LOW fun I had with D&DO last year, I was pleasantly surprised with Turbines offering in this game. LoTRO gets a 9.0 in the fun department. WOW is a strong 8.0 so I'll give WOW an 8.5 in the fun department.
Some will surely disagree with me, but without a doubt, Turbine has made a VERY fluid and smooth mmo with Lord of The Rings Online. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking this is another disappointing D&DO type of game. This game just oozes with fun, quality, and with insanely pretty graphics that do not require a $3,000 computer to experience. You could get a computer like mine for about $700 to $800 and be setting your graphics settings very close to maximum for sure. Better computer, you're in graphics heaven here with this game and a little lower computer.. you'll still be more then fine with the graphics settings just a little lower.
Lord of The Rings Online will do very, very well. I'm calling over a million subs EASILY a month after release day. 2+ million subs by Christmas time. I can easily see those numbers coming for this game. And with those predictions, I will hold a toast up for Turbine for FINALLY getting a game together that will catapult them into huge financial success and more importantly, should also catapult them into a helluva lot more respect then they had after AC2 and last years pretty disappointing Dungeons & Dragons game.
If each area I rated the games on gets a 10% of the overall score... then that would mean that Lord of the Rings Online would score an overall 86.5% (out of 100) By comparison, WOW in my books would score an 81.0%. (That translates to about an 8.6 score rating here on mmorpg.com and an 8.1 for WOW) Pretty easy math, no doubt.
Preview written by MMORPG.com Member, Zaxor99
