So I've gotten back into LotrO which I did not expect at all. My Aion guild was talking about
finding a game to play together and Lord of the Rings was brought up, I had heard a lot of good things about the game lately especially from the Virgin Worlds and GAX podcasts and blogs. So what the heck I figured it would be nice to start a new character as one of the new classes available in Moria.
I went with an elf rune-keeper, which at first I thought looked odd with the fire animation. I feel like I'm squatting down and letting out farts of hell. Which as a dwarf works pretty great. :D But my dainty little elf I don't know.. Fortunately the class is fun enough that I am forgetting about the ungraceful animations.
I had forgotten how truly beautiful the environment of the game is, I can't say it's at the level of Conan but it has it's own charm that it doesn't have to be. My main gripe with the looks has always and will continue to be with the models. The NPC's are wooden and stiff and the only character they have is they are race appropriate and some of them depict aged characters. But the PC characters are vastly different then the NPCs even the 'epic' ones like Aragorn that you feel much more solid and fluid then they are. I don't know why Turbine went this way, it seems they had two different teams working on the models and it shows, painfully. To me it takes away from the immersion and atmostphere, and my other lesser complaint is the ommision of children anywhere. And don't tell me the hobbits playing hide and seek or listening to a story in the shire are children, they are not. Maybe they are tweens (teens), but you won't see any hobbit or humans younger then that. The LotrO devs have stated they simply ran out of time to create child models and don't think they are worth spending the time when there's other things they could add. I'm sure many will agree with them.
The gameplay is just great though and what makes this game to me very fun to spend time in. Had a great time last night and killed a few goblins with a guild mate, she helped me set up my mic which I forgot how to do or where to do it amongst other things and got the chance to chat awaywith voice. It's actually really simple to enable the voice chat feature, a simple matter of check a box and pushing Z to talk. And the quality was really great, not sure what to praise but I did not experience any distracting grrrshhshh noise at all. I'm sure there's a term for that...
So yeah that's pretty much it for now, I'll be able to enjoy this for the next 3 months until Aion releases, if it doesn't I may play more. ^_^;;
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