Review
The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (PC)
Free to Play Review - You get what you pay for?
I played LOTRO at launch and for a few months after. I was… underwhelmed. Perhaps it was unfair to judge such a massive game on its early state. Since last week, the game has gone free to play. So this seemed like a perfect opportunity to check it out again.
If you’ve seen the movies (I heard there was also a book) you’ll understand the backstory. In Middle-earth there’s this bad guy who wants to kill everyone. It’s up to a bizzaro-world Benetton ad to stop it.
You can play as elves, hobbits, dwarves and humans. There are seven varied classes to chose from, and as you’d expect, not all are available to every race. This is where you encounter the first difference from free-play to pay-play. If you purchase the Mines of Moria expansion there are two additional classes to chose from, a DPS/healer and a tank.
Character creation is similar to other MMOs. You get more customization options than, say, WoW, but less than others like the dreck Cryptic comes out with.
The initial experience with LOTRO, to me, is a mixed bag. The graphics are excellent, especially with the High Resolution option. The interface, though, bothered me from the start. Everything is either too small or too big. Text is hard to read, and buttons are minuscule.
Thankfully, every aspect of the UI is customizable. Everything can be moved around and sizes adjusted individually. After tweaking it for some time I got it to the point where I didn’t hate it, but couldn’t get it quite to the point where I actually liked it. This is probably just me. A friend who has played continuously since launch thinks I’m crazy. He also thinks my opinion of the UI is nuts.
Once you get everything set up, the game progresses much as you’d expect from a modern MMO. Quests lead you from one area to another, there’s a continuous story to keep you in the mood. The writing and voice acting is all very well done.
After a few levels, you get your first real intrusion of the real world. An optional quest awards you with Turbine Points, the currency of Turbine's always accessible in-game store. There's even a dedicated button for it in the UI. The currency conversion seems to be $0.10-$0.16 per point depending on sales and how many you buy at once. To be honest, I think Turbine has done an excellent job not making this too blatant. You don’t have to complete this quest if you don’t want to, and it seems like you could play for quite some time without every having to buy anything.
As a casual player it’s doubtful you’ll hit any of the restrictions on an FTP account. There are limits to how much gold you can have (2) and some chat and auction house limits. You only get two player slots, but additional slots can be purchased. The same is true with bag slots. You get three, but more can be purchased.
While it is possible to get to the free level cap of 50 without buying anything, from what I’ve been hearing and reading, it will be rather slow going. And honestly, if you’ve invested that much time playing the game, why not buy some things? Items like quest packs, which are exactly what they sound like, seem like a no brainer.
To me this is great. Say it takes me 2 months to get to a point where I feel I could use a bunch of quests. Spending a few dollars in the Turbine store for this would be a pretty good bargain. What I like about this is that I could spend money on just the things I wanted (in this case, the quest packs) without having a monthly fee that would get me things I don’t care about (like PvP, more character slots, and so on).
Once you purchase Turbine Points you immediately get bumped up from a Free Player to a Premium Player (Oooooo…). This opens up another character slot and bumps the gold cap to 5. You also get higher priority login.
What Turbine is counting on is that you’ll get so into the game that you’ll either spend a lot of money on Turbine Points or realize it’s cheaper to become a VIP Player and sign up for a monthly subscription ($14.99 a month, less in bulk). This gives you highest priority login, 5 character slots, more content, 5 bags, PvP, more than double the number of available Skirmishes, Rest XP, 500 Turbine Points a month, and more.
Even with a VIP account, you’ll still need to buy the expansion packs to have access to the Warden and Rune-keeper classes, as well as access to levels above 50 (65 at time of writing, following Mines of Moria and Siege of Mirkwood expansions)
So when you look at it, the FtP model is really a kind of long-term “try before you buy” type system. And in that, LOTRO works wonderfully.
One of the main questions I had was if those who had purchased the $200 lifetime subscriptions felt ripped off. That friend who'd been playing since launch is one of those who spent this money up front. He seemed fine with it, knowing that he gets 500 Turbine points a month, priority login, and other perks. So of the (1) people I surveyed for this review, 100% of them don’t mind the new free to play model. A larger sample size could produce a different result.
In the end what Turbine has succeeded in doing is opening their game up to a much wider audience, with all the pros and cons of that type of decision. Some of the core players in game are a little miffed, but I can’t believe there are many that don’t see the influx of new blood as a good thing.
The question is, will it be profitable for Turbine? For that, only time will tell. The servers have been incredibly busy in the week since freelaunch. For now, having this mostly free, open world available without the nagging pressure of a subscription is fantastic for someone who is only casually into LOTRO. It gives me something to play between games or when WoW starts annoying me. I can imagine getting to the point where I'd buy something, and that is more money than Turbine would have gotten out of me otherwise, so I guess it's win-win.
Seeing as “Buy It” would be a little bit of a misnomer here, I’ll enthusiastically say “Try It!”
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