The first to mention is the game's Lore, or actually the Lore from J.R.R. Tolkien, the books. Yes, there's story in this game. But the Lore doesn't just apply to the quests or storylines, it's more than that. The Lore, and the movies influence the scenery, armors and costumes, towns and cities, even monsters, and so on. If you're a fan of tLotR and want more, this game is highly recommended for you. Even though you will run into some contents that make you wonder 'I've never seen or even heard of THIS in the movies or in any book'. Well, yes, this is, after all, a game, an MMO game, to be specific. Some are changed, and some are added. (Do I need to give examples of how the Dune series got modified when it was made into RTS game? Hope not.)

However, if you're not that much of a tLotR fan, you might find the game.... lacking a bit. Forget about fancy and all shiny plate armors with particles and glowing objects around. In this game, there's none of it. Why? Because it's not tLotR-ish, probably. The game has Outfitting feature though. So if you happen to come across better equipment but uglier than what you have, you can still wear the new and better one and your character is still in that old and better looking armor.

Now we move on to the classes. To be honest, I don't really like how this is done. Each class seems to be for 1 purpose only, and can barely perform roles out-of-class, if any. My character was a Warden. What was my roles? Well, I deal damages, and I off-tank sometimes, and aggro monsters away from casters. Anything else? Nope, don't think so. Then what do you do when something goes wrong? Any skills for, let's say, 'oh shit' situations? Nope, just keep doing what I been doing, and hope the tank and the healer keep us alive. All I can do is use more skills that increase Defense and regenerate some HP back. No stune, more crowd-control than to aggro them to me, no AoE, nothing to turn the tide of the battle. Some other classes I have tried are kind of the same. Some with buffs and support skills, but that's because it's their roles. This is most likely to promote grouping, and not just soloing. I will talk about grouping later. There are also not many skills to use. After all, we can only do what's considered to be 'our roles'. We can learn new skills every other levels, and most of the times, it's only 1 or 2 skills, passive skills included. I can't remember how many times I was hoping for new cool skills, and I was like 'That's it?' when I see list of skill(s) I could learn.

As mentioned, grouping. Many quests are complete-able alone, but most quests at the end of the quest chains are not. You need a few people to do those. Especially quests involved elite monsters, or instanced dungeons which require full party. If you skip these, you will miss all the good equipments as rewards. But, when there are not many players around, this becomes more problematic. Without strong player base and keep-coming new players, existing mid-level players can't level further without new players catching up to them, new players can't find enough new players to group with, and so on.

Related topic, questing. There are many places to go level. Each race has its own starting area, and can travel to meet with other races, or continue leveling in their areas, and can branch off into a few more areas to level. That means not all level 25 are going to be in the exact same place, doing same quests, killing exact monsters. No.

The game has gathering and crafting systems as well. I'm not the Crafting type player, but from what I observed, by the time players can craft good items for their levels, they almost reach level requirement for next tier armors. Unless, of course, you completely stop questing and all leveling until you finish crafting the armors then you continue leveling again. When you craft, you can put in additional material and hope that you will get lucky and get a Critical from crafting a sword or a piece of armor, resulting in much better equipment crafted. Many times you will wish you could add in a few more critical material if it would raise the crafting critical rate higher.

Guild system: Players can form guilds, obviously. The guild, with enough members in, will keep leveling slowly. The higher level the guild becomes, the more features are available; such as Guild Auction, and Guild House. Even though each player can already rent a house by themselves, a Guild House is... obviously for all guild members. You can decorate it with stuff from crafting and such. And that's all I know about it... Oh, and you have to pay the house maintenance/rental fee or it's gone.

Title helps identifying other players easier. You will run across someone titled 'Artisan Woodworker' or 'Nemesis of the Wargs' and such often. But apart from the cooler tag attached to your name, you gain nothing from it, unlike some games that Titles increase stats and such.

Similar to Title, is the Deed/Virtue system. This isn't a tag to your name, it's like a skill to be equipped. Deeds / Virtues are unlocked after accomplishing some .... well, some deeds. The examples would be: Kill 50 Wargs; Explore 7 Ruins; use certain skills a few hundreds times, and so on. These Virtues / Deeds do affect your character statistics or skills' efficiency.

Before I stopped playing this game, they finally implemented map markers for quests! And it seemed to be working quite well. Not very detailed like in a certain game, but it's there and working nicely.

Reviewed Aug 09

RATING