Remember how I said I wasn’t going to bother with Lord of the Rings Online? I may have been ever so slightly economical with the truth. No Issue 9 in City of Heroes, no patch 2.10 in World of Warcraft, I was left without responsible adult supervision for five minutes, and, err, slightly bought LotRO.
I still don’t really see it as a long-term thing, but all the other cool (blogging) kids are doing it, so I figured I might as well succumb to peer pressure. I can’t match Melmoth’s epic, and occasionally disturbing journey through the class-selection process, but somewhat prompted by Zubon at Kill Ten Rats talking about Failure FTW, I thought I’d break out of my DPS comfort zone and try a Captain as a bit of a support/pet class.
There’s plenty of reviews/impressions out there, and having briefly played the beta there were no great surprises. There’s a narrative right away, similar to a traditional single player CRPG and using some instancing to give that feeling that *you* are the hero and saving the day, and that story moves you through the game in a more involving fashion than “You’re level (x), best go here to kill level (x) foozles“. The only thing is that it does make it even more jarring when you’re assigned something like a standard “kill this named mob” quest, and you toddle off and stand in line behind four other groups waiting for it to spawn, but that’s MMOG life until someone can find a better system. Just about everything’s familiar enough from other games that it’s very accessible, but different enough to make it interesting. For a while, at least. Like I said, I can’t see it being a long-term thing, but having already performed one vote-face in actually playing it after all, I’m not going to categorically state I won’t be sticking around.