Lord of the Rings Online uses the same graphics engine as Ahseron’s Call 2, which was revamped for the release of Dungeons and Dragons Online. D&D gamers will also note the recycled sound effects in Middle Earth when attacking any mob or opening doors. The character models for Shadows of Angmar are also the same as the ones for SC2 and D&DO, which leads to a lot of semi-identical characters with the same clothing running around for the first 20 levels. And despite an obvious amount of effort spent on the maps and loading screen displays, the UI really does look and work just like any other MMO interface. Gamers will be pleased to see, instead, that the world of Middle Earth itself looks stunning, even if the recycled character models still don’t this second time around. The reason for this is the Turbine Engine which is played up as the godsend which takes the labor of world creation out of the hands of programmers and into the hands of artists and designers. The engine generates world environments on a large scale, cutting back on the amount of time a programmer needs to spend adding content and mapping geography. Ideally, designers and artists would use this extra time to jump in and optimize character models and settings—but as we’ve already said, Shadows of Angmar got pushed by 3 years mostly due to the need for more content (hey, Middle Earth is a big place) and the bloody character models are cookie cutters of AC2 and D&DO. Lord of the Rings Online stays true to Tolkien’s descriptions; this however, is more likely to be the result of Tolkien nerd programmers as opposed to extra work on the part of artists and designers—but as long as the end result looks as good as it does in Beta, who cares?
The real appeal here is the instancing technology which creates an evolving world for gamers. In D&D Online, players each got identical dungeon instances and as with all MMOs, not much really changed in the world no matter how much grinding or questing was done. In Lord of the Rings Online, however, everything from simple fetch quests to hit-and-run raids on NPC brigands has an effect on the environment. Taking one action leads you to an NPC who warns you about a plot to take over a city. A fetch quest shows you the weakness in that city’s defense. Later, you get back from the quest and the city’s been sacked and burned. And it stays sacked and burned from that point on—the environment has changed permanently (you can go back and replay the time period before the major event happened in most cases, though, with the use of a scrying pool). Before Middle Earth Online got sacked, similar revolutionary gameplay mechanics had been spoken of (such as permanent character death). And while killing off an NPC and burning down a city aren’t nearly as edgy as killing off a character that you paid for, pored over, and tweaked out—this is still a big step for MMOs.
Sadly, Shadows of Angmar does nothing new with A.I., as far as we’ve seen. You quest; you encounter a monster, you hack-and-slash and sometimes the thing runs away if its HP drops below ¼. Boss A.I. is a little more robust, but detractors will definitely point to this lack of imagination when it comes to critiquing Lord of the Rings Online. We had a few temporary freezes during gameplay, but no queuing for servers, and no major crashing. The hardware for the game is par for the course. System requirements call for Windows XP (Vista is listed as preferred), but a word to Vista users: most hardware lacks a decent driver for 64 bit, so check the hardware’s website before you install Lord of the Rings Online, or else revert to 32 bit for the time being. Otherwise, even with 56k dial-up, you should be good to go provided you’ve got the memory space, DirectX 9.0c sound, and 7 GB to spare in disk space.
Where Shadows Lie