"While it is starting to show its age, no other video game has brought to life JRR Tolkiens' Middle Earth in the way The Lord of the Rings Online has for over 15 years."
While there are older MMORPGs on the market, such as World of Warcraft and EverQuest, unlike those games, The Lord of the Rings Online at times seems to be run on a shoestring, and as a result, it is not the best-looking game visually, despite the world builders doing wonders with what is essentially an obsolete engine and limited funds.
Fortunately for the developers, fans of The Lord of the Rings are just happy to be able to explore places they have read about for decades, and they do not overly care that the visuals are not cutting edge.
While SSG has spoken about upcoming visual updates, the engine is fast approaching 30 years old, and it is unlikely that much can be done without alienating the LOTRO community, many of which are running Windows XP machines or even older versions, something LOTRO itself officially supported until June 8th, 2021.
The Lord of the Rings Online has struggled performance-wise for over a decade, with players often experiencing rubberbanding that can result in being catapulted up to 800 metres in the wrong direction when riding a warsteed and around half of that while on foot.
Equestrian antics aside, large cities such as Minas Tirith can sometimes cause frame rates to drop to single digits, with some players on older hardware reporting that Minas Tirith caused their PC to shut down and, in a few rare instances, burn out their GPU.
While a few players have experienced hardware failure after playing The Lord of the Rings Online, this cannot be verified and is more likely the fault of ageing hardware or poor ventilation and not the result of the game’s admittedly abysmal optimisation.
Unlike many MMORPGs, players in The Lord of the Rings Online are required to pick a profession, which then gives them access to three somewhat related crafting or gathering abilities. Unfortunately, the way this is laid out means no player is fully able to support their crafting endeavours without having alts or relying on others.
While there is an auction house, even on the most populated EU server, there was not enough ore (including at highly inflated prices) to level a single metalsmith, let alone support multiple crafters and professions.
In theory, forcing players to depend on one another is a great way to encourage social interactions; however, in reality, it simply forces players to create more alts and spend more time rehashing old content to level them instead of enjoying the game, further weakening the already diminished endgame community.
For players with unlimited time (and patience) who do not mind repeating the same content multiple times on different alts, it is possible to farm enough premium currency to purchase almost every unlock in the game, including the latest expansion pack.
However, this is no easy task, and even with the vast majority of LOTRO content going free-to-play, you are still looking at around 250 hours of farming to unlock everything.
Despite having a relatively small player base, The Lord of the Rings Online has one of the most well-known roleplay communities in the MMORPG genre, which has been able to put on some truly unique events, including a yearly musical festival that can see over 700 people attend, an impressive feat for a server that normally hovers around 500 players online in total.
Large events aside, players have many opportunities to engage in small-group roleplay. Entire areas of capital cities exist purely to allow players to roleplay in peace without interruption from others going about their business.
While RP can happen anywhere, Laurelin (EU) and Landroval (NA) are the two largest roleplay servers, having served as the official roleplay servers for LOTRO since their inception.
The Lord of the Rings Online has an impressive music system that allows players to play various instruments solo or as part of a synchronised group. As a result, LOTRO has attracted many digital musicians who play the game solely to entertain others with music rather than engage with endgame or traditional group activities.
The Lord of the Rings Online is more about the journey than the destination, and as a result, while the developers continue to invest in endgame content, much of it is open-world content, with traditional instanced raids and dungeons releasing at a much slower rate.
As a result, the raiding community is almost nonexistent, having lost most of its better players to other games with more active endgame content, resulting in a deficit of talent and ability that ensures the developers are unlikely to invest heavily in raids without a drastic shake-up of the player base.
The Lord of the Rings Online has never been known for its support, and the pandemic and subsequent growth of the title resulted in wait times that are frankly unbelievable.
Players often wait up to six months to get a reply to their ticket, and in some cases, as long as 18 months. If EG7 Global wants to show they are committed to the game, ensuring that support tickets are dealt with in a reasonable time should be first on the list.
“A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to,” unlike SSG support reps, who are normally very late.
Levelling in The Lord of the Rings Online is very slow, and despite several balancing passes to speed up the process, almost everyone agrees that LOTRO is one of the slowest games to level in. That’s just as well, considering that beyond the world and its stories, LOTRO has very little to offer, with a nearly extinct PvP and raiding community.
It once took a multi-guild alliance of the most active guilds on my server almost a week to arrange a single raid.
While not every server is that quiet, LOTRO is still not a game for serious raiders. This has resulted in very few potential raiders joining and even fewer sticking around for more than a few weeks.
The Lord of the Rings Online has decent character customisation options for its age, and the developers occasionally add new options. However, compared to more modern MMORPGs, its character designer is rather bare-bones, and creating a unique-looking character is almost impossible.
The Lord of the Rings Online is unique in that you are more likely to encounter a retired English teacher than a no-life raider. Despite its broad market appeal, it attracts players of all ages and walks of life.
Toxicity-wise, The Lord of the Rings Online is one of the mildest MMORPGs online, and while there are trolls here and there, world chat is generally pleasant and welcoming to new players.
The game also has a larger than average number of Christian players due to J.R.R. Tolkien being a devout Christian, who wrote in detail about how The Lord of the Rings is a work of Catholic and Christian fiction, even if he did not originally set out to write it that way.
The Lord of the Rings Online is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online role playing game developed by Turbine and published by Daybreak Game Company, it released on 24 April 2007, and is available exclusively on PC.
The Lord of the Rings Online receives roughly one large and two medium-sized updates each year; however, even large updates are relatively content-lite for those interested in competitive endgame content, with the vast majority of development resources assigned to world-building and quest creation.
The Lord of the Rings Online offers the following matchmaking options:
While The Lord of the Rings Online has a group finder, almost no one uses it to actually find a group, instead opting to form groups in chat and then using the finder to teleport into the instance. A few players post custom grouping requests, but they often sit unnoticed for hours, and players who wish to get things done need to do so the old-fashioned way and advertise in chat.
The The Lord of the Rings Online in-game store sells:
The Lord of the Rings Online supports the following peripherals:
The Lord of the Rings Online is rated PEGI 12+ and contains:
The Lord of the Rings Online is an excellent window into Middle-earth as J.R.R. Tolkien envisioned. While there are better MMORPG experiences elsewhere, I recommend The Lord of the Rings Online to lovers of Tolkien’s works and classic MMORPGs.
We found The Lord of the Rings Online to be a good game, meaning it is likely to be enjoyable for most players, despite having a few areas that could be improved upon.
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