Thursday, September 09, 2010

Lord of the Rings Online

Right.  So yeah.  As if I need another MMO in my life.  Not really.  But anyway!

I wouldn't call myself a Blizzard fanboy.  Yes, I play their games, and yes I enjoy their games.  I enjoy them immensely, and I think they make good ones.  But I'm not one of those individuals who gets all butthurt when someone bad mouths them, either.  I have my own beefs with some of the things they do.  (I can't have friends in Europe?  Really?  In this day and age when the world is smaller than ever because of the vastly advanced ways with which we can communicate with people all across the world, you can't make a system that allows me to chat and play with my friends in Europe?  You fail.)



ANYway.  The Lord of the Rings Online went Free-to-Play on Tuesday.  It was a pretty big event.  Servers went down all day long so they could implement the changes and also patch in the new content they've released for us.  And you could tell that people were interested in it.  When I went to log-in around midnight on Tuesday, my server, Brandywine, was full and I had to wait in a queue for about five minutes to get into the game.  That's *never* happened before (in the whole 6 days I've had the game!).  Naturally, part of this could be due to the new content they've released, and not simply because the game has changed their subscription methods.  I mean, the same thing happens to WoW.  Right now the population of WoW players is down pretty low.  When Cataclysm hits, it'll shoot back up again.  That's the natural progression of an MMO.  If you wait too long to give people new things to do, they're going to lose interest and leave. 

But it will be interesting to keep an eye on LOTRO and see just how much of an effect, if any, this new subscription format will make on their subscriber base.  I know that for me, the only reason I finally decided to try out the game was because of this change.  Then again, that simply means that I didn't think the game was good enough to look at before this, so already in my mind it's an inferior game.  



I'll probably save my thoughts about the actual game for a later post when I can also provide a few screenshots.  But the one thing I will mention right now is my love/hate relationship with the graphics engine.  Simply put, the world looks BEAUTIFUL.  There are places in this Middle-Earth that are simply breath-taking.  And these gorgeous landscapes are UTTERLY RUINED by the abhorrent animation renderings on the player characters.  My toon looks like he's walking with a stick shoved so far up his ass that he's poking his tonsils. 

No comments:

Hello!

Holy smokes.  The last post I wrote for this blog was on October 18, 2017.  Through the little more than  two years since, this blog has be...