Monday, April 30, 2007

LOTRO, or "Threat to Warcraft?"

The Lord of the Rings Online MMORPG is currently undergoing Beta testing. It does have a monthly fee (as of yet undetermined), but the graphics seem more detailed than Warcraft and if the fee is less and the creators more interested in player input (something Warcraft fans don't appreciate about Blizzard), WoW has some serious competition on its hands.

Drawbacks include a seeming lack of pvp, since players have only 4 races to choose from: Humans, Elves, Hobbits, and Dwarfs. But new, interesting classes may tempt players: champion (offensive warrior), guardian (defensive/tank warrior), captain (inspirational warrior), burglar (rogue), hunter (no-pet hunter), minstrel (story-teller, support class, maybe similar to priest), lore-master (knowledge keeper, support class, maybe similar to priest).


All in all, I think the lack of world pvp will hurt the game's chances to lure more Warcraft players away, but the Warcraft players who play an elf because it's like The Lord of the Rings, or who liked Warcraft for having the best graphics around, will be weak enough to leave. Still, if LOTRO doesn't live up to Tolkien's legacy and its own hype, we'll probably see players leaving to try the game and then a slightly smaller number of players coming back.

LOTRO Wikipedia

3 comments:

  1. Hi,

    I’m glad to inform you that I added your website to search-wow.com! And I'm also very sorry to post that here, but I wasn't able to find a contact form :(


    What is Search-WoW.com?
    Search-WoW.com is a search engine dedicated to World of Warcraft. Based on Google, it only searches on a specific list of websites selected for the quality of their content. Therefore, Search-WoW.com returns more relevant results than Google most of the time. And of course, it also filters all the crappy websites full of spam for who knows what (You know, the kind of websites that tends to appear in the 5 first results of Google :-)). In two words, it’s a kind of directory that uses the power of Google for the searches. Human selection with the power of Google!

    Of course, some very interesting websites are still missing from Search-WoW. Unfortunately, I’m sure that I don’t know all the good websites on WoW! That’s why I would be very thankful if you could check the list of the indexed websites at http://www.search-wow.com/about.html and tell me if you know some sites that should be included.

    I hope that you will like Search-WoW.com and I would be very pleased to have your feedback. So let me know what you think. And if you really like it, you can always digg it :-) (or reddit it, or delicious, or whatever you prefer !)

    Kind regards,

    Julien,
    Creator of Search-WoW.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. From the perspective of someone who was level 60 for a year and got slammed with an expansion full of pointless grinding and overly difficult raid dungeons in the massively uninteresting Outland, the grass is looking greener just about everywhere.

    ReplyDelete

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