Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar (MMORPG)

[Reginald]

Source

E3 2005: Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar
A short introduction to the hottest MMO around.
by Steve Butts
May 18, 2005 - When it comes to massively multiplayer RPGs, the gang over at Turbine know their stuff. At E3 this year, they're proving just how much they know by showing off one of the most anticipated MMOs in recent memory, The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. Based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and riding the surge of interest brought on by the recent films, The Lord of the Rings Online has a visibility and expectation among the gaming public that we haven't seen since Star Wars Galaxies.


Some of you may remember the title under another name and another studio. When Vivendi was in charge of the title, it was known as Middle-Earth Online. For whatever reason, Vivendi passed the rights over to Turbine where the game was rechristened The Lord of the Rings Online. The new title isn't meant to indicate that the game will shift its focus to the adventures of the Fellowship or the stories surrounding the Ring itself.
The first installment of the game will however tend to focus on locations and encounters that should be familiar to people who've only seen the movie. This makes perfect sense from a standpoint of both marketing and design. Rather than introducing a wide range of relatively obscure locales and encounters, the online version of The Lord of the Rings will let players explore areas like the Shire, Rivendell and Bree.

The placement of Shadows of Angmar at the end of the title indicates that future publishes will expand the world's content into new areas. Since Turbine has the exclusive rights to the online versions of the property, they can take their time to get things right. Since Tolkien's books are built upon a dense, fictional history, there's lots of room to take the game in new directions.

Though The Lord of the Rings is every bit as polarized as Star Wars Galaxies or World of Warcraft, players will only be able to play as the good races of Middle-Earth: men, elves, dwarves and hobbits. While it's perhaps going to far to say that all of the player characters will actually be uniformly good, players won't get the chance to take on the role of the truly evil races in the world, the orcs, goblins and trolls.


We haven't yet had the chance to get a handle on the actual mechanics of gameplay yet but we do know that the developers want to encourage the sense that players matter in the world by having the world respond to your successes and failures.

I think looks very very good. But, will it only survive until the wave of post-film nostalgia wears off as I predict The Matrix Online will. Still, it looks very intriguing, don't you agree?

This one looks like a render to me ^

This one looks very nice though ^

 

[BRODIEMAN2k4]

Well, If you're not one of the LOTR characters, is the LOTR universe really that much diffrent from any other fantasy setting? Persoanally, the doesn't look that good

 

[Reginald]

Well, If you're not one of the LOTR characters, is the LOTR universe really that much diffrent from any other fantasy setting? Persoanally, the doesn't look that good

"Well, If you're not one of the Star Wars characters, is the Star Wars universe really that much diffrent from any other fantasy/sci-fi setting?"

You could say it about Star Wars Galaxies and that did tremendously well.