Been playing a lot of LotR:O these days.  Honestly did not expect to like it much…  But it was free…  And now I’m hooked.

The visuals are absolutely stunning.

I’m not sure if it’s just because I played WoW for so long…  Or because I don’t generally play games with any semblance to reality…  But I’m very impressed with LotR:O’s graphics.

Sure, there’s a limit to how realistic dwarves and orcs and trolls can look…  But, aside from that, it all looks gorgeous.  Weapons, armor, clothing all looks realistic.  The cities look like you could stroll right into them.  The night sky is stunning.  The daylit sky is beautiful.  It’s truly amazing to watch fish swimming in a river, or see the wind sweep across a field.

I’m also thoroughly enjoying the less-fantastic setting.  It’s a little grittier, a little more realistic.

Yes, you’ve still got orcs and elves and dwarves…  But you don’t have the same kind of gratuitous magick as in WoW.  You don’t have random floating chunks of rock for no good reason…  Demons are relatively few and far-between…  Not everything crackles with energy or glows with power…

For the first time ever, the game mechanics actually make sense.  Most MMOGs never really explain why players can die and then be resurrected.  They just can.

In LotR:O you don’t have health, you’ve got morale.  As you fight, you aren’t really getting physically injured, you’re getting discouraged.  If you run out of morale, you give up.  The monsters win.  You just collapse on the ground and sigh in defeat.  And if somebody restores your morale with some rousing words of encouragement, you can get back up and keep fighting.

Accompanying that is a very cool dread mechanic.  Some monsters or places are downright scary.  They afflict you with dread.  Dread takes a chunk out of your morale, and also makes you do less damage.  There’s a great visual that accompanies the dread effect…  The world gets darker, the color bleeds out, the shadows close in, you get a kind of tunnel-vision.  It is genuinely creepy.

I will say, however, that the whole Lord of the Rings thing is a little heavy-handed.

Yes, of course, it’s a branded/themed game.  So you want people to know what they’re playing.  I think it would have been plenty obvious with all the attention to detail…  But they decided to make it really obvious.

There’s rings everywhere.  NPCs with a quest for you have a ring over their head.  Quest objectives are marked with a ring, too.  And to show or hide a quest on the tracker you have to click on a ring.

It’d make sense to highlight the epic quests with a ring, since they roughly parallel the events of the books…  But a random quest to go pick up some oatmeal for someone?  Hardly ring-worthy.

And the ring icons themselves are a little too decorative and elaborate to be terribly clear.  Sometimes it’s hard to pick them out of a crowd.

Then you’ve got the Eye of Sauron on any monster that’s elite or tougher.  Which would make sense on things like orcs that are actually working for Sauron.  But when you’re just fighting a very tough Auroch it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

And then you’ve got fellowships, instead of groups.  Which makes as much sense, I guess, as calling them groups or parties…  But it doesn’t really roll off the tongue the same way.  And it leads to plenty of confusion for the new people.

I have complained, on numerous occasions, about the inflated sense of entitlement folks seem to have these days.  Nowhere is that more glaringly obvious than in Lord of the Rings: Online.

LotR:O is “free to play” – this means that you don’t need an active subscription to log in and play.

You’re given the barest essentials necessary to play the game.  You get a character, some basic classes to play, a few zones to explore, and a few bags to keep things in.  That’s about it.  Pretty much everything else is purchased with Turbine Points.

You can earn TP through in-game actions.  Primarily by completing Deeds.  But it’s a slow process.  You kill 40 or something, and earn just 5 TP.

In theory, you could play the entire game – start to finish – unlocking absolutely everything available simply by earning TP in-game.

In practice, however, this would take half of eternity.  Turbine is counting on people being impatient and simply purchasing TP with real money.

I have absolutely no problem with this.

Servers aren’t free.  Electricity isn’t free.  Bandwidth isn’t free.  It costs money to run the game.  If nobody paid a single cent for it, they’d close down the servers and I wouldn’t be able to play.

I understand this.

And I have absolutely no problem paying for stuff.

I like that if there’s nothing new I need, and I just want to log in and go fishing now and again, I don’t need to maintain a monthly subscription.  That’s very cool.  That’s a huge advantage over something like World of Warcraft where I have to pay $15/month even if I only want t log in twice to check my mail.

But I have absolutely no problem paying for a game that I’m thoroughly enjoying playing.

There are, however, an awful lot of people who feel entitled to absolutely everything completely free of charge.

They’ve been playing the game for a good couple of weeks now, just like I have.  And they’re finally getting to the point where they’re running into the need to pay cash for things.  They want a horse, or they want to do some quests in the Lonely Lands, or whatever.

And they’re absolutely irate that they’re being asked to pay real money for this game.

After playing for free for a couple weeks they’re absolutely furious that it might cost them another $5 to keep playing for a few more weeks.

If you’re enjoying the game enough that you want to keep playing, pay for it.

If you don’t like the game enough to spend $5 to buy some Turbine Points, why the hell are you still playing?

I’ve never really liked the whole Lord of the Rings thing.

Yes, I know, it’s basically the foundation that everything D&D was built upon.  And I suppose I should be grateful.  And I’m supposed to turn in my geek card if I don’t absolutely love Tolkein…

But I’ve never been a big fan.

So I wasn’t especially eager to see the movies – even though they turned out to be pretty good.  And I wasn’t especially eager to try the MMOG either…  But it is turning out to be pretty good, too.

I’m getting a very strong Dark Age of Camelot vibe from the game.

Mechanically, there are a good number of similarities.  You’ve got style chains in combat, and the ability to follow monsters.  You’ve got horses-on-rails that act as taxis from one location to another.  You’ve got housing, and shared dungeon instances.

But there are also some thematic similarities as well…  The races are less comical, more gritty and realistic.  The setting feels more mundane, and less fantastic.  I’m running around with my dwarf defender, and it feels like I could be in Midgard.  And the elven areas could easily be Hibernia.

So far, I’m thoroughly enjoying myself.  And the fact that I don’t have to pay to play is just icing on the cake.

I’ve been thinking very nostalgically lately of the days when I played Dark Age of Camelot.  I miss the fantasy setting.  I miss huge dungeons filled with nasty monsters.  I miss raids consisting of 200+ people.

And, while I’m not yet ready to re-subscribe…  I do want to play some kind of fantasy MMOG.

I’ve been playing Oblivion again, which has kind of an MMOG-ish feel to it…  But it isn’t quite the same.  I’ve gotten to level 30 very quickly, I’ve got more money than I can spend, and I’m basically an unstoppable killing machine.  There’s none of the you need 200 people to kill this thing feeling.

Then I saw that Lord of the Rings Online has gone “free to play”.

I played LotR:O a while back…  Tried one of the trial accounts…  And it was fun, but it wasn’t good enough to pay $15/month to keep playing.

There are plenty of restrictions on the free account.  Plenty of reasons to upgrade to a paid account.  But I’m thinking this might just get me my fantasy MMOG fix that I’ve been hankering for.

If not…  There’s always the Warhammmer Online “endless trial”…