Are you a Lord of the Rings fan? Did you ever wish you could live the lore of Middle-Earth? Have you dreamed of fighting alongside Gandalf and Legolas? Well jump on Shadowfax and hold on tight because we’re riding into Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, the open beta
INSTALLATION:
I’ll start out by saying this: If you’re running Windows Vista on your pc then you’re in for an aggravating, but still enjoyable, experience. Ninjasistah talked about her plight getting the beta installed on Windows Vista on March 25, 2007 podcast so I’ll just sum up her troubles. Due to the fact that Vista is so paranoid, you won’t be able to install the patches without running the launcher as the administrator. You do this by right-clicking on the game’s launcher and selecting “Run as administrator”. Once that’s done you should be in business after about thirty minutes of installation and another hour and a half of patches. The beta weighs in at a bit over 6gigs. So put on some anime or grab your favorite manga and make yourself comfortable because you won’t be playing immediately.
CHARACTER CREATION:
The character creation is decent but not detailed enough in my opinion. You’re able to choose between humans, elves, dwarves, and hobbits. You can tweak the appearance but it doesn’t really matter. The options are few so it’s not uncommon to see another toon that looks like yours in the game. You can change the facial features such as the eyes, mouth, and hair. It’s not as detailed as I would’ve liked it to be, but I wasn’t too disappointed. You can also adjust the build of your character giving you a built toon or thin one. Once you name your character, you’ll begin your journey into Middle-Earth.
The classes to pick from are great. You have the option of being a Captain or Guardian which are your standard paladins and tanks. The Champion class is your all-out damage dealers. If you prefer sneaking around and using trickery and stealth to get the job done, then the Burglar class will suit you. Hunters are your beastmasters and archery experts. Minstrels use the power of song to increase or decrease stats as well as heal comrades. Last but not least are the Lore-masters. Spell-casting is their specialty. So all you Gandalf and Harry Potter fans can get your Hogwarts on.
GAMEPLAY:
I was sold on the game as soon as I was given control of my character. Each race has its own continuous storylines. The initial tutorial wasn’t, “Hey you, go kill 10 pigs and come back to me.” The game started out with my elvan city being attacked by invaders seeking some sort of stone that I just finished hiding. A comrade tells me pick up a weapon from a dead body and head to the front gates to help hold the lines. When I get there, there’s this huge creature with a club beating on the gate. I’m not sure what it is but, I’ve seen it on one of the LOTOR movies. I’m ordered to cut through town to another area in order to flank the invaders. There are orcs and rogue dwarves in my path which are to be used to demonstrate the combat system. Once I battle my way to the other side of the gate then…I won’t spoil the intro for you, but keep in mind that all of this action is taking place in the tutorial!
The majority of the quests are chained meaning that one quest may lead to another. So you may start out killing wolves in the forest and end up raiding a goblin-infested cave to complete the chain. The quests and combat styles are similar to World of Warcraft, but more interesting and engrossing in my opinion. The battle animations are detailed and wonderful and the battle cries and grunts your toon makes while fighting can be hilarious at times. There’s a level cap of 15 for the beta but you can still build your crafting skills, such as weaponscrafting and armorcrafting. The best part is that all pre-order beta testers can roll their characters over to the final release on April 26th.
GRAPHICS:
The game’s environment is extremely gorgeous, but I’d expect nothing less from anything dealing with Lord of the Rings. Flowing grass, rippling water, and weather effects will blow your mind as you run through the Shire. I’m running the beta on a low-end Nvidia PCI-E graphics card. That’s another good thing about this game. It doesn’t require a beefed-up system. The system requirements aren’t as demanding as other games such as Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.
CONS:
It’s only fair that I mention the cons of the game, but the one gripe that I have is not really the game’s fault. Although the developers of the game, Turbine, claim it to be Vista-friendly, the beta isn’t even close to that, unless you’re operating with at least 1.5gigs of RAM. I was running a Vista machine with 1gig of RAM and I got occasional and aggravating lag and long load times because Vista is such a resource hog. I thought it might have been the unstable beta servers that couldn’t handle the swarm of testers, but after some research on the game’s message boards, I found out Vista takes up 512mb of my RAM for itself, leaving the remaining 512mb to handle the game. Trust me when I say that as of the beta stage, that’s not enough. If I get into a crowded town, the lag is almost unbearable with just a 1gig system. Turbine has been working on this and hopefully it will be fixed by the final release. A friend of mine is running the beta on XP and it runs smoothly because XP doesn’t require as much resources as Vista. I upgraded my system to 2gigs of RAM and now the game is almost flawless. There is very minimal lag if any at all and loading times are almost non-existent now
THE WRAP-UP:
The game still has a few bugs that need to be worked out before the full release, but as far as I can tell from the beta, they won’t have much to fix. Other then the slight memory leak and a few quests needing some fixes, this game is awesome in all aspects. It was so good that I decided to suspend my World of Warcraft account to focus on LOTRO. Keep checking here for my full review of the game in May. Seeing as how I’m a big Lord of the Rings fan, I’ll try not to be biased.
INSTALLATION:
I’ll start out by saying this: If you’re running Windows Vista on your pc then you’re in for an aggravating, but still enjoyable, experience. Ninjasistah talked about her plight getting the beta installed on Windows Vista on March 25, 2007 podcast so I’ll just sum up her troubles. Due to the fact that Vista is so paranoid, you won’t be able to install the patches without running the launcher as the administrator. You do this by right-clicking on the game’s launcher and selecting “Run as administrator”. Once that’s done you should be in business after about thirty minutes of installation and another hour and a half of patches. The beta weighs in at a bit over 6gigs. So put on some anime or grab your favorite manga and make yourself comfortable because you won’t be playing immediately.
CHARACTER CREATION:
The character creation is decent but not detailed enough in my opinion. You’re able to choose between humans, elves, dwarves, and hobbits. You can tweak the appearance but it doesn’t really matter. The options are few so it’s not uncommon to see another toon that looks like yours in the game. You can change the facial features such as the eyes, mouth, and hair. It’s not as detailed as I would’ve liked it to be, but I wasn’t too disappointed. You can also adjust the build of your character giving you a built toon or thin one. Once you name your character, you’ll begin your journey into Middle-Earth.
The classes to pick from are great. You have the option of being a Captain or Guardian which are your standard paladins and tanks. The Champion class is your all-out damage dealers. If you prefer sneaking around and using trickery and stealth to get the job done, then the Burglar class will suit you. Hunters are your beastmasters and archery experts. Minstrels use the power of song to increase or decrease stats as well as heal comrades. Last but not least are the Lore-masters. Spell-casting is their specialty. So all you Gandalf and Harry Potter fans can get your Hogwarts on.
GAMEPLAY:
I was sold on the game as soon as I was given control of my character. Each race has its own continuous storylines. The initial tutorial wasn’t, “Hey you, go kill 10 pigs and come back to me.” The game started out with my elvan city being attacked by invaders seeking some sort of stone that I just finished hiding. A comrade tells me pick up a weapon from a dead body and head to the front gates to help hold the lines. When I get there, there’s this huge creature with a club beating on the gate. I’m not sure what it is but, I’ve seen it on one of the LOTOR movies. I’m ordered to cut through town to another area in order to flank the invaders. There are orcs and rogue dwarves in my path which are to be used to demonstrate the combat system. Once I battle my way to the other side of the gate then…I won’t spoil the intro for you, but keep in mind that all of this action is taking place in the tutorial!
The majority of the quests are chained meaning that one quest may lead to another. So you may start out killing wolves in the forest and end up raiding a goblin-infested cave to complete the chain. The quests and combat styles are similar to World of Warcraft, but more interesting and engrossing in my opinion. The battle animations are detailed and wonderful and the battle cries and grunts your toon makes while fighting can be hilarious at times. There’s a level cap of 15 for the beta but you can still build your crafting skills, such as weaponscrafting and armorcrafting. The best part is that all pre-order beta testers can roll their characters over to the final release on April 26th.
GRAPHICS:
The game’s environment is extremely gorgeous, but I’d expect nothing less from anything dealing with Lord of the Rings. Flowing grass, rippling water, and weather effects will blow your mind as you run through the Shire. I’m running the beta on a low-end Nvidia PCI-E graphics card. That’s another good thing about this game. It doesn’t require a beefed-up system. The system requirements aren’t as demanding as other games such as Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.
CONS:
It’s only fair that I mention the cons of the game, but the one gripe that I have is not really the game’s fault. Although the developers of the game, Turbine, claim it to be Vista-friendly, the beta isn’t even close to that, unless you’re operating with at least 1.5gigs of RAM. I was running a Vista machine with 1gig of RAM and I got occasional and aggravating lag and long load times because Vista is such a resource hog. I thought it might have been the unstable beta servers that couldn’t handle the swarm of testers, but after some research on the game’s message boards, I found out Vista takes up 512mb of my RAM for itself, leaving the remaining 512mb to handle the game. Trust me when I say that as of the beta stage, that’s not enough. If I get into a crowded town, the lag is almost unbearable with just a 1gig system. Turbine has been working on this and hopefully it will be fixed by the final release. A friend of mine is running the beta on XP and it runs smoothly because XP doesn’t require as much resources as Vista. I upgraded my system to 2gigs of RAM and now the game is almost flawless. There is very minimal lag if any at all and loading times are almost non-existent now
THE WRAP-UP:
The game still has a few bugs that need to be worked out before the full release, but as far as I can tell from the beta, they won’t have much to fix. Other then the slight memory leak and a few quests needing some fixes, this game is awesome in all aspects. It was so good that I decided to suspend my World of Warcraft account to focus on LOTRO. Keep checking here for my full review of the game in May. Seeing as how I’m a big Lord of the Rings fan, I’ll try not to be biased.
Labels: Beta, Lord-of-the-Rings
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