OK, the event is almost over, just a few hours till morning remain, so i guess I won’t miss much if I skip them and start my review just now. Actually, I can end it right here with that - “you don’t miss much if you skip it. all of it”.

There. I’ve said it. Now a little more elaborate:

I logged in on Friday and rolled a human hunter. I have a slight sentiment towards female rangers dating back to the days of Diablo I, when i died many violent deaths as one. :)

The character customization generally covers the standards - hairstyles, a few faces, hair color and eye color. The graphics seem quite nice, but there’s something that I just can’t put my finger on, that leaves the feeling of poor design both for characters and environment.

The landscape - as seen in the screenshots before - is very lavish, very colorful. The sky is exceptional - with moving clouds, good colors, blurred contours, etc. But there are much clipping bugs that make polygons disappear when you look from a certain angle and the movement is a little weird.

A few bad things that popped from the very start: first, you are spawned in an instance that is something between a tutorial and cinematic, but neither really. After you complete your first objectives you are transfered in the newbie zone, which i guess is also an instance, but random people are gathered in it (much like a Guild Wars district). Here you’re given your first quests, and - lo and behold! - they’re of the “fedex” and “kill X rats” persuasion. Only slightly easier and sadly - more pointless. It was a bit surreal - I walked through a beautiful mead covered with hip-high flowers just to be surrounded with the sound of fellow newbies killing innocent npc wolves for an errand. After which - they send you to kill spiders. And then brigands. Enter-tain-ing! Yeah, right…

My second gripe here is with the instance nature of that starter area. After i got around in the humans starter grounds an hour or two, my boyfriend got home and we decided to roll same-race characters, so we can group from the very start. We made elves this time, and went through the intro-instance (you see Rivendell attacked by goblins and in the end Elrond kills a mountain troll or something) after which you get transfered to the elven start area, somewhere snowy (?!), where you kill lynxes instead of wolves, and odd little creatures Tolkien has never dreamed of instead of spiders. Fun-ney! :)

The problem? When we tried to find each other and group - we couldn’t. We stayed on the same spot on the map and still - couldn’t see each other. My guess - the starter area is an instance, but unlike Guild Wars’s Pre-Searing Ascalon you can’t change districts to find your friends, because of course districts are not implemented as a concept - the game just throws you mindlessly in some instance and looks the other way pretending to be high and mighty “persistent world”.

We didn’t play much after that. Couldn’t see any point. Basically, the game is a total WoW clone, done bad. I’ve just logged in for a while today (Sunday), to make a few screenshots and see if there’s going to be a closing event, but the chat interface is really an eye-sore, so i didn’t put much effort in the latter.

Actually, I did have some fun after all. And of course that was when i discovered the horsieeees! ^_^
First time a saw a player on horseback I was a bit surprised, because I knew form the interviews with the devs that player housing and mounts won’t make it to the release date, but may come with the first expansion (supposedly “Rohan”).
It turned out that horses in LotRO are just means of public transportation - exactly like griffins and wyverns in WoW, the only difference being that you see even the “locked” destinations listed in the options, before you’ve been to them to unlock them. But you can’t use them still, so big deal!

Anyway, I made a few rounds with my horsey :) You can’t change directions, but you can jump (slightly crappy animated), and your avatar prances on the saddle rather realistically. So overall - that was fun.

My main complaint is with the interface. The game itself is absolutely identical with WoW in terms of gameplay. You have a few “innovative” mechanics like the traits system where you get titles and attribute-modifiers by completing achievements (like you kill some number of spiders and you get the title “spider slayer”, or you find some topics on the map and you get like +1 Lore or something relevant.) but overall the game is the same. You go about killing stuff and delivering messages. You get into instanced encounters (the more challenging ones) or normal, “persistent” dungeons - the easier ones. Even the crafting system is similar.

So, what makes the difference in the end is the “polish” part, in which, we all know, there’s no one like Blizzard, although it’s mindboggling why. Why can’t all games have decent animations, normal poses for the models, readable interface that scales smartly with the resolution that you’ve chosen, less irritating small bugs and all that stuff? Is it really that hard? It’s like the MMOs are bad websites from 1994 or something - when everyone’s doing everything wrong, and no good practices are established yet. Of course, maybe I’m just spoiled by the good examples of GW and WoW. And EVE actually. Lineage maybe?

So, at least there are some, but for all the others - it’s just totally disappointing and discouraging to deal with those little irritations that prevent you from moving on to the substance, which may be good in fact, but you’ll never know, cause you can’t see the forest from all those damn crooked trees that poke you in the eyes.

And that questionable moral concludes our broadcast day ;)

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