MMO musings..

December 19th, 2007 · No Comments

I have played and subscribed to a lot of MMOs over the years including Earth & Beyond, Eve-Online, World of Warcraft, Tabula Rasa, Lord of the Rings Online, Asheron’s Call 2, The Matrix Online, EverQuest 2, Dungeons and Dragons Online and several others I can’t even remember. Out of all of those the only ones I ever stuck with were Eve-Online off and on and also since launch Lord of the Rings Online. Lord of the Rings online has a free trial that I think is well worth checking out.

What makes it different for me is the focus on storyline. Other MMOs have story of course, but in LOTRO the story is the primary focus since it is of course modeled after the books written by J.R.R. Tolkien. Story instances take part throughout the game during the “Epic” book quests. These quests are my favorite as they really get to showcase some good environmental scripting as well as NPC (non player character) interactions such as going on a quest to help out Aragon or fighting your way through hordes of mobs with Legolas at your side. The music, environments, and graphics are also done extremely well. I used to always say that World of Warcraft was technically average - poor but artistically extremely high. There were other games that had more “technical” quality in graphics in terms of polygons and texture resolutions but they lost the art style that WoW pulls off so well. LOTRO is a game that both has a definitive art style and ALSO has very high technical quality. They recently added a bunch of DX10 only effects that i’m looking forward to using when I upgrade my computer next year.