The Lord of the Rings Online: The MMO That Made Me Not Hate MMOs

I've always had trouble getting into Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). It's not because I dislike the idea, in fact when I first heard about Ultima Online way back in the late 90s, I was quite intrigued. Unfortunately, I never got much further past intrigued. Since UO had a monthly subscription fee and I was a poor 20-something with no money, I thought it was ridiculous to spend $50 on a game and then pay even more money to actually play it. I tried playing Everquest on a friend's account a few times and while I had fun, I didn't enjoy it enough to buy the game and pay for a subscription. I didn't really think about MMOs again until 2006 or so, when I grudgingly signed up for a World of Warcraft account. I say grudgingly because I wasn't terribly interested in the game and I really only signed up for it because the people I hung around with played it religiously and I wanted to understated what the hell they were talking about. My experience with WoW was not a particularly pleasant one as I found the community toxic (including most of my "friends" that played it) and I thought Blizzard didn't so much create a living fantasy world as they did a giant collection of pop culture references clumsily inserted into a fantasy-type world. So, after a few months I canceled my account and moved on to greener pastures.

I didn't really think too much about MMOs again until sometime in early 2007, when I found out that some company was developing a MMO game based on J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. As a big fan of the seminal work of fantasy literature, I was more than intrigued. I did some research, looked at some screenshots of the game and decided that I was going to give it a shot. I pre-ordered my copy, along with a friend of mine (one of the few WoW players that I didn't dislike), and we prepared ourselves to wander the paths of Middle Earth together.

When the game's release date finally hit, I installed the game and set to making a character. It's fair to say I was pretty impressed. I had played lots of LoTR-related games in the past but LoTRO was the first one that actually made me feel as though I was in Middle-Earth. The landscapes, for the time, were quite beautiful and true to Tolkien's words. As simply a fan of the books, I was able to visit accurate representations of some notable ares found in the books, including Bag end and the Party Tree, The Prancing Pony Inn, The Old Forest and so many more. The devs even included old Bilbo's trolls hidden somewhere in the Trollshaws. Not only that but the game takes place during the books and many of the quests have the player run parallel missions or follow in the footsteps of Frodo and the Fellowship. There's even a quest which allows you to be present in Rivendell as the Fellowship departs, which I swear is ripped straight out of the books. Even the races and classes available as player characters were true to Tolkien's vision, so there weren't any wizards or clerics running around.

Mechanically, the game also appealed to me. Its interface was very similar to WoW, which was pretty common at the time but it kind of built and improved on it a bit. The game wanted to encourage players to group up, so it included a mechanic that would allow groups (called fellowships in the game) to complete group maneuvers in certain circumstances. The crafting system was also very improved and it was designed to ensure that the servers had a strong economy by making crafters reliant on other players with different crafting skills to complete certain recipes (for example, a weapon smith would need the help of a woodworker to craft the handle of a hand axe). Additionally, because they chose to stay true to Tolkien's work as much as they could, the devs had to be creative with player classes and their roles in the game. While classes like the Burglar and Guardian were very close to their WoW counterparts (Rogue and Warrior, respectively), LoTRO chose to go different routes with many other classes, such as making the Minstrel the healing class and made the Hunter a pure DPS/Glass cannon class, rather than a guy who runs around with pets. There was a lot of originality there and that made it appealing to me.

Unfortunately, as is the case with most MMOs, LoTRO went through many changes as the years rolled by. Some changes, like the addition of player housing or adding a massive new zone full of quests for free, I absolutely loved. However, there were a lot of changes that just didn't sit as well with me. I get why they were done, the MMO industry is all about the size of the player base and I guess the devs felt that pressure to expand on theirs. In an effort to make the game more accessible, the devs made leveling easier, dumbed down the crafting system, added in a new class that officially wasn't a "wizard" but was basically a wizard all in the name of trying to lure players away from WoW. I totally understand why they did it, in those days WoW was the undisputed king of the MMO genre and most games were trying to emulate it in some way and with the new former WoW players came a lot of the aforementioned toxic types that started to turn what was previously a fantastic, helpful community into WoW lite (granted, your experience may vary). True, the game still stuck to its mostly accurate portrayal of Middle Earth but the more changes that were made, the more the experience started to sour for me. In the end, I moved on, after all there were tons of other games out there and I only had so much free time. I still dabble in MMOs from time to time, but I've never really managed to find another one that duplicated the sheer sense of wonder I got when I first loaded up LoTRO and I probably never will. Still, those MMOs that I played subsequently provided me with a lot of good moments, which I never would have experienced were it not for LoTRO.

Is there a one game that changed your mind on a particular genre? Sound off in the comments.