Noen Online spill som har / matcher detta?

[RamGuy]

Sier meg enig med Xantir. Blir nok sikkert et bra spill, men ikke noe superdupert. Har spilt litt i betaen, og inntrykket jeg fikk var dårlig. Såvidt jeg har fått med meg har de ikke introdusert noe nytt og fantastisk, imotsetning har de tatt et steg tilbake; instancing.

 

Det blir nok bra, men ikke helt mitt spill.

8209777[/snapback]

 

Hvor mye spilte du da?

Skal si meg enig at starten er litt så-som-så..

De første 5-6levlene har ikke noe med spillet å gjøre egentlig.. På sånn måte, en slags lett intro del.. Først etter det kommer du jo ut i den "virkelige" verden, hvor alle andre er..

 

Ville anbefale å spille til level 15 eller noe, ting starter ikke å skje før du har nådd level 10 egentlig.. Hvert fall ikke i BETA'en

[RamGuy]

Link til IGN test

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Lord of the Rings Online Beta Impressions

Would Tolkien approve? Will you?

by Bennett Ring, IGN AU

 

Australia, February 19, 2007 - Turbine really knows how to make things hard for itself. Its latest title, Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, has more challenges ahead of it than poor Frodo did when he was asked to get rid of that annoying ring. Sure, it's the genre the company has cut been cutting its teeth on for years, with mixed results, but developing an MMORPG is the Apollo program of game development. These games are easily the hardest to develop from a technology perspective, and the truckloads of content necessary to fill a decent-sized world requires an army of poorly paid designers in Chinese 3D sweatshops.

 

Then there's the small fact that the game is set in one of the most beloved universes known to the western world. Screw it up and Turbine will be dealing with angry Hobbits for the rest of their careers. Even the wraith of Sauron can't compare to an angry LOTR fan. Finally, there's the small matter of that other game. You know the one; every third person on the planet is addicted to it, turning over more money in subscription fees per year than the global heroin trade. With World of Warcraft sucking up so much of the MMORPG market, is there room for another fantasy-based virtual world? Turbine seems to think so, and after playing the beta of Shadows of Angmar, we have to agree. You see, we're relating to the world of Middle Earth in a way that never clicked when exploring Azeroth - and while we certainly enjoy some Gandalf goodness every now and then, we're by no means Ring-lickers (a phrase we coined seven seconds ago to describe fanatical LOTR supporters).

 

The explanation is quite simple. LOTR lore is infinitely more accessible to people who haven't read the biographies of the founders at Blizzard. There's no doubt that Blizzard's Warcraft series has built up an epic, detailed and loveable back-story - but it's only known by players of former Warcraft games. Ask your dad if he thinks the Lich King Ner'zhul's plan to infect humankind with the undead plague was just a misguided attempt at regaining the love of his long-lost nanny, and he'll slowly start backing away from you, reaching for the family therapist's phone number.

 

However, ask anybody whether they think Hobbits are cute yet a little annoying, or whether the Elves are really the pretentious prats they first appear to be, and you'll get an answer. Yes, even your mum will have an opinion on the matter.

 

LOTR is massive - the book was already widely loved before Peter Jackson's triumphant celluloid recreation made it the Star Wars of the early 21st century. Thanks to its penetration into the collective consciousness, when playing LOTRO you immediately recognise everything around you. It's comfortable and familiar and it all makes sense.

 

The virtual Middle Earth feels just the way the book and movies have led us to expect. Environmental design is a key feature in this regard, recreating each of the various race's starting areas perfectly. In particular, the developers have nailed the various types of architecture. The human starting area looks just like an Elizabethan village, while the Elven structures are based on Rivendell, with their flowing white lines and cliff-hugging locations. Hobbit-holes are just as cozy and welcoming as we'd always imagined them to be, from the cute flowerbeds decorating the front yard to the warm fireplace crackling within.

 

Tolkien spent a great deal of time describing the landscape in his books (a little too much time if you ask us), and this has provided the perfect blueprint for the landscape designers of the game. When combined with Tolkien's meticulous descriptions, the extremely capable engine helps to deliver the most stunning natural vistas we've ever seen in the MMORPG genre. Scratch that- they deliver some of the must stunning natural vistas we've seen in a game, period.

 

With all settings cranked up to the "melt your CPU" option, the detail is astonishing. Grass blows in the wind and stretches into the distance, with very little of the obvious pop up seen in games like Oblivion. The water reflections are stunning, making lakes and rivers some of the prettiest areas of the game. Draw distance is massive, with more subtle pop-in of detailed assets than most games of this type. This draw distance extends to players and NPCs - you'll spot them much further away than in competing titles. A lovely bloom effect is employed around lights and certain areas, but it's not overdone. And the trees… oh, the trees. We could spend a full page about how lovely the forests are to wander through, but a screenshot is as good as a thousand words. Performance was silky smooth, although we were testing on a ninja fast Core 2 Duo/8800GTX/2GB memory system.

 

So the game looks just like the book and the films - but does it feel like it? Staying true to the source goes well beyond whether the correct bricks were used in the well in Bree. Does the dialogue fit with the style of Tolkien's writing, and are the quests the kinds of tasks that are believable?

 

Let's focus on the quests first. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of quests available at the start of the game. At last count, our Hobbit Minstrel had over fifteen quests on the go. None of these involved slaying Orcs or raiding dungeons. He's a level seven Hobbit Minstrel for god's sake - not a level thirty Human Guardian.

 

Instead we were sent on our way to look for kids playing hide and seek, to create pie crusts for a hobbit fearing his angry wife, to deliver mail within set times and to try to find a hidden recipe for beer in the Great Smials. Sounds boring, eh? But for a player who chooses the laid-back characteristics of the Hobbit, this focus on exploration and helping your fellow Hobbits is a perfect fit. It's a great character type for those lazy Sunday arvos with a glass of red by your side. That's not to say there wasn't a fair share of spider-slashing and pig-grinding involved - there was - but we could do more Hobbity things if we felt like it.

 

On the other hand, our level eleven Elf Hunter spent more of his time doing more serious Elfy things, like saving a burning town and rescuing people in distress. Think of him as our mid-week, burn-off-work-frustration, character. The difference in quest types between our two characters was vast, and should help alleviate concerns that the batch of starting races is too small.

 

As for the dialogue, we're quite surprised at the overall high quality of the writing within the game. Whether it reaches the lofty heights of Tolkien is another question, but it does seem true to the character stereotypes. LOTRO leans towards a more serious RPG experience than WoW, as we didn't notice as many pop-culture references, but it's still got a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour. It's not laugh out load funny like WoW is at times, but every now and then a cute line, usually delivered by a whinging Hobbit, managed to elicit a grin.

 

We keep referring to WoW, and it's impossible not to. You see, LOTRO is so closely modelled on WoW that it's almost embarrassing. Yet what did WoW ever do that was so revolutionary? At its core WoW is still based on the fundamentals that Ultima Online and Everquest helped establish. And in that regard, LOTRO is based on the exact same principles. Turbine has borrowed everything (and we mean everything from WoW's PVE game, taken a good hard look at how it could be done better, and implemented its own polished version.

 

From the way our characters started with plenty of space in their inventory's five separate bags, to the easy to follow quest system, to the more detailed waypoints on the map, and it's apparent that LOTRO uses the same systems as WoW, but gets rid of some of the major annoyances associated with them.

 

If there's one issue with following WoW's recipe so closely, it's that players who didn't like WoW probably won't like LOTRO either. Unless their home is a papier mached Hobbit-hole mock up, and they spend hours hand-sewing their Gandalf robe, that is. If you didn't enjoy wandering around the landscape of Azeroth for hours at a time, trying to find a water nymph hidden up a tree behind a waterfall, you'll find the same style of quests in LOTRO just as hair-pullingly mundane.

 

But on the positive side, we're sure there are a lot of WoW players who will vomit at the sight of another night elf, and The Burning Crusade will only keep their need for fresh content satisfied for so long. LOTRO gives these players the opportunity to stick within a game mechanic that they know and love, yet gives them an entirely new universe to explore, filled with thousands of new quests, creatures and breathtaking areas. Whether LOTRO's end-game is anywhere near as strong as WoW's is something we're not even going to guess at, given that our level eleven elf has so far to go before we see it.

 

And there's one area that we haven't even touched on that could really make or break LOTRO. PVP. Most experienced WoW PVE players that we know have moved on to PVP for their serious kicks, yet we haven't seen anything about this in LOTRO. Apparently it will have a revolutionary new PVP system, where players can step into the shoes of monsters, which can then be quested against by other players. It sounds intriguing, and as soon as we get some hands on time with this function we'll let you know if it lives up to expectations.

 

For most previews, fifteen hours of play time is about thirteen hours too long. With LOTRO, we've barely scratched the surface. Yet we have to admit that if first impressions are right, it's shaping up to be the first true WoW-beater we've played. Not because it radically changes the WoW formula, but because it uses the exact same formula. Only this time around the formula has been improved, and is now used in a setting that most of us can relate to.

Endret 22. mars 2007 av RamGuy

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