The newest expansion The Lord of the Rings: Mines of Moria
has been out for a couple weeks. It’s addictive, well built, and extraordinarily deep. It has everything you could want in an MMO with intricate crafting, and extensive character enhancements. It is set in a mirror – world that reflects the source material religiously. You do need a character that is at least level 50 to play The Mines of Moria.
You’ll need to complete all the epic quests leading up to this chapter in order to get the bestowal quest that will take you to Moria. If you buy the expansion, your new or existing characters will have to reach level 50 before you can see the new real estate that you pay for when you buy the expansion. Even the two new character classes, Rune Keeper and Warden land in existing starter regions.
For new features there are plenty such as housing. Perhaps the most elaborate and beautiful crafting system in an MMO. For metal smiting consider the possibilities when mithril and barrow silver are at your disposal to just mine. The gems and armour that you can find and loot are mouth watering. If looting is your lust, LOTRO has it in spades. Full Review and Updated Slide here…
Some might say that it was the Lord of the Rings that was the seminal work of sword and sorcery fiction that spawned Dungeons & Dragons Online: StormReach
and practically everything else. So the heritage of this game has been taken very seriously. It has few flaws, some quirks but there is an earnestness in it that can charm you if you are a Tolkien fan or perhaps draw you into it if you are an MMO fan.
At first look I gave this game a fairly low score when it was released about a year and a half ago. The improvements overall have been handled very well. The navigation through the world has been fairly free of bugs. Taking a horse ride is one way to test how well your set up is going to manage the game. The riding went pretty well on my machine and offered a pretty good view of the scenery. I had a lot of lag but only in some heavily populated common areas, mainly because the old laptop I played on is below the recommended specs. Naturally some of the major towns or large party battles would bog it down considerably on any machine. On the whole it ran great considering. It is a plus in a rough economy to have a game that will run on an older machine.
The user interface is user friendly enough. It would do better with more point and click navigation. With little trouble I was able to map all the motion controls to the mouse. It works well enough, but there has yet to be a game that has more elegant point and click navigation than Lineage 2 or easier world travel than Guild Wars. Right now the PC MMO phenomenon is going to grind down a bit. It is expected that some of the MMO’s will sing their swan song. New MMOs will be moving to the consoles. I for one welcome that eventuality. One of my complaints was that I wished this game was on PS3 not PC. That’s a hell of a lot to ask for, but with the scope of a game like this, I want to see it on the biggest monitor in the house. If you have a monitor/TV setup, you’ll be in heaven with this game.
The characters that I used were a level ten Elven Lore Master and a level 51 Dwarf Hunter. Try as I might there was no way to skirt the level requirements and enter Moria. Even when I did manage to get close, the game sent me back telling me that I needed to be at least level 35 to enter the area.
They became stuck only infrequently. There are many high cliffs, bridges and buildings in this game, and my characters have fallen off of all of them. I skittered off a bridge with my pony. I fell down several levels inside Moria. In the starter elven area the pale mauve round – roofed buildings look really great, but there is a deadly lack of railings around these structures.
I found that the Hunter class was especially good to use because of the travel abilities. You will have to keep your eyes open in LOTRO when you create your character and attempt to travel in the world. It is fairly large. It doesn’t seem as big as World of Warcraft – yet. But this game doesn’t hand anything to you. If you are going to want fast travel around the world you have to plan for that carefully. There are many guides to LOTRO available online including a through Wiki on it too.
The leveling up or the grind in the game isn’t tremendously hard. It isn’t significantly annoying either. I found that by finishing the epic quests and some of the slayer missions, that it would be a quicker route to getting enough XP to advance through the story – line. “Stay on the path” was never truer than in this game. If you go off the roads, and sometimes even if you are on them rabid beasts or creatures may attack you. All the nasty critters like to sneak up on you from behind in this game. So you’ll have to be continually watchful. The creatures are diverse. Everything from dragons, drakes, snakes, wolves, wargs and orcs are there for you to take on. And goddess help us, the spiders of every sort yeesh. There are signature creatures roaming around that give extra points if you kill them. There are also some extremely high level characters here and there that you won’t want to aggro alone.
The solo content is also plentiful. By taking advantage of every resource available in the game, you can feasibly play most if not all of it solo. Within the Tolkien literature you have various characters who historically can survive in the wild, and take out several enemies at a time on their own. This is a welcome contrast to games that force the issue of teaming up. In this game a party is called a Fellowship, and with similar over the top style as the other systems in this game their party system is complex and feature rich. It has both text and voice chat applications if you are so inclined. The Guilds as you can imagine are myriad and there are throngs of websites dedicated to alliances of all sorts who play it.
The loot and crafting are extraordinary. The expansion brings the Legendary Weapons which can be named, reforged and leveled up along with you. The weapons each earn their own XP points and can be blingged up with settings and gems that give them a vast array of powers. There are enriching opportunities for making your own weapons and powerful jewels by becoming a metal smith.
The auctions are run neatly through a mailbox system that seems to work well. There are many alternative solutions in the game that keeps down the number of people screaming in the chat box about items for sale. The game is very tight and it runs reliably. It is has an awe inspired epic feel to it.
This game and the original starter game Lord of the Rings Online : Shadows of Angmar are a good choice for a new or young gamer interested in PC MMO’s. The language in the chat is tame compared to other online games. Chat boxes are customizable so it can be hidden entirely. It is a fairly safe online environment. Some of the servers are role – play dedicated so chat is expected to stay in character.
The graphics are good but not exceptional. The color palette could be less subdued. Perhaps the decision to keep it consistent with the sources was what made them choose such muted tones, but I think that they could have gotten away with cranking the color hue up a notch. It’s a fantasy after all. There are many stunning views and vistas. The inside of Moria is dark and beautiful. It is on a massive scale. Sorry to say I haven’t made it all the way through Moria to Lothlorien yet. Hopefully some of those millions of colors have been saved for there. With Bioshock out there the generous color palette it has ranks graphics expectations up a notch.
There is one rub though, an it could be crucial to an individuals choice to purchase the game and the expansion. It does look like every renaissance fair you’ve ever seen. There are the Tudor – esque buildings in every seedy medieval festival that opens up on the outskirts of town once a year. If you are tired of ‘same old’ then this isn’t for you because this is olde old. There is lots of reading and back story involved. This game draws not only from the movies, but also the Silmarillion, the Trilogy and the Lost Books too. Every scrap of Tolkien related manuscripts and art has been tapped to put this world together. If you don’t want to be laughed off the server, don’t ask “Where is Barliman Butterbur in Bree?” Because you should know the answer. There is a ton of history backing all this. If pompous high elves irritate you, and random musical outbursts coming from what you’d expect to be battle seems too ridiculous then don’t go there.
Guild Wars: Eye Of The North – Expansion Pack
was the last expansion in that series and it isn’t a viable world to get started in now since it is finite, and the characters won’t be moved to Guild Wars 2. That was a great MMO which was perfect for new gamers. But that place now goes to LOTRO.
Lord of the Rings Online : The Mines of Moria is a top of the line MMO, and a worthy rival to World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack
, or Age of Conan. Where it’s strengths are with it’s appeal to a young audience, MMO purists, and fans of LOTR who are of all walks of life. It is a polite gamer atmosphere with everything an advanced MMO player could want. Whatever they have done, they done well. Well enough to take the place of Geek Woman’s Best MMO Expansion of ’08. I give LOTRO : Mines of Moria 9.5 blessed adamant gems out of 10.
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