Win a trip to dine with Turbine

I am in my 10 day tryout of LOTRO I really trying to like it but its really hard I think the graphics are ok but they are too clean to much the same looking they not where playing around too much to put more life into it all look so by the book ... not have the impression WoW left me with where the blizzard designers did put the tiny details in there that make the crappy graphic look great! Also I can not stand the UI look like all this boxes where designed in like 1 day really everthing is so by the book. Also the game world over all does not give me the feeling LOTR movies did give me its all looking too toony and the ingame voice acting is apart of the opening line missing and is just more text too read, really after the great voice overs in the loading movies and intro movies the main game is just the one liner when you click on someone and later text too read.... really lame!

Also for me the game is way too color full and kid friendly it had to be so much more dark!!! And again the killing 10 of this and get me 5 of that quest ... people are so easy to take in my put a big IP on the box!

I do not think I will play this game pass day 10!!

$10 bucks not is free! and can be a lot of money for some. All that games you posted are crap but not for the dark story elements!

I just think that the world of middle earth need be more dark to do it justices. When token did write the books he did not have a colorful world in mind! He even base some on his world war history!

Personally I found the game pretty cool but maybe you rolled a non human character as the other race starting areas can be a weak in places - but it soon gets better! At least I found it that way.

Try making your way to Bree for a while and see how it all feels then. It's certainly more of a storytelling game in many ways and that might not be for everyone, but it's sure worth a look to anyone out there.

As for the graphics maybe you want to play around with the settings as it's actually one of the best things on the PC I've ever seen when ramped up a little and the music - especially in Angamar - is amazing. And if you look around the interface options you can tweak the interface to just about however you want it really. On WoW I used to strip the lot away and have a few custom bars and key shortcuts and I found I could recreate the same set up on LOTR with a little work.

Maybe it could do with loosening a little on the IP if anything and a few more features like global chat channels to smooth your way around some of the areas as a new player, but it's still probably the best PvE game I've ever played on line. The atmosphere is great and you can't help but see those player bands playing purely for the fun of it - no rewards, just for fun - and start to smile.

The main things that let it down for me (so I'm not really a fanboi here, all games have there faults, including WoW) was way too many group quests and a poor PvP (although that could be fixed with a little work :) ) but then I think it's quiet open about how it's more of a PvE game.

At the moment I'm really enjoying AoC (Only a single level 24) but then it's an 18+ game and as an older player that makes it easier to seek out the older guilds. But look of this game is nothing compared to LOTR. Why not take a break Jack and re-roll another character. You might find it's a lot better than you thought, unless you need PvP in your games, then better walk away.

Oh and the 'dark look' part: Try the later areas, they look a LOT more dark and gloomy. The starter areas are supposed to be nice and pretty but that soon changes. See if you can get someone to show you Angamar for example

Eh, I'm in my second try of LoTRO and still not getting into it. I tried it back in Sept. and got bored, decided to try it again this month to see if MoM had fixed it any. Unfortunately, no, at least not for me.

The environments in LoTRO are just stunning and the game engine -- stuttering aside, and that's mostly fixable with some tweaks -- degrades very gracefully, much better then most such games I've played. The sound is decent -- albeit playing a Minstrel can get seriously tiresome with those screams and the same chords over and over -- but nothing special. The critter agro system is pretty nice. Bears and such don't just attack you, they'll growl and threaten if you get close, only attacking if you don't back off. It's a little thing, but it beats having to fight every bloody creature in the zone because they agro on sight, and it makes a lot more sense. That Orc might want you dead, but that boar probably mostly just wants to be left alone.

Unfortunately, that's about all the good I can say about the game. The character models are some of the worst I've ever seen. Proportions are odd, the colour palette -- even on expensive town cloths -- is muted and uninspired. Hair is a particular annoyance of mine, in LoTRO hair has no life, no body, no movement. It looks literally painted on, and not painted very well. Their attempts at making faces expressive is nice, but slams headlong into the 90% problem. It's close, but far enough away to look disturbingly artificial.

Beyond that, the UI is dreadful, worse the dreadful. It's basically a clone of the WoW UI (yes, I know, WoW's UI is hardly original), without mods or the ability to customize much of anything. Icons are indistinct at best and, worse, are bitmaps rather then vector drawings so resizing them (or their containers) only makes them look worse. MoM at least added coordinates, something that was missing (albeit could be gotten with an oddly convoluted chat command) back in September, and a kind of Questhelper-like pane that helps... Sort of. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to know about Deeds, and since they're a (depressingly) major part of the game that's a bit problematic.

The economy in LoTRO has always struck me as odd, while things have improved slightly that is still the case. Things like fast transport and gear repair are significant expenses, rather then chump change. Many basic functions seem to serve as gold sinks that inordinately effect lower level characters making it difficult to afford much of anything, sometimes even new skills, for quite a while. This can be worked through, of course, but it does detract from the fun more then a tad when you find yourself walking for significant portions of your game time because you can't afford to use the horses.

Lastly, the quests. The storyline quests specifically. I was really excited about these when I first started, that was until I discovered that they were pretty much all group quests, the LFG system was nightmarish, and I could pretty much go an entire day's play without running into another PC. There are player-created server-wide LFG and other channels, a necessity because the default channel is, absurdly, limited to the zone you're in, but that doesn't really help given the limited population and the heavy skewing of that population to the high levels. I tried for four days to get groups for Book2 quests before it finally became apparent that for all intents and purposes the story quests may as well not exist and I'd better hope they could be skipped and picked up at a higher level.

I really want to like LoTRO, if for no other reason then the glorious vistas, but every time I try it I feel disappointed. I suppose I'll keep checking in on it every few months, but I've seen no indication that Turbine is working on any of the problems or that the -- understandably rabid, especially in the case of lifetime subscribers -- playerbase is unhappy enough to force the issue.

Well, except maybe on one thing. The anti-exploit code, my god is that a buggy and annoying mess. Seriously, remove it now, Turbine, and don't put it back in until and unless it actually works and doesn't kick in half the time when you're standing right next to the mob.

Jack:

Or if LotrO just isn't for you for some reason, maybe you seek something totally different? In that case, check another Turbine game, Dungeons & Dragons Online.
Trials:
http://www.ddo-europe.com/trialkey.php
http://www.ddo.com/trial/?source=ddo.com

10 days free :). If I had more cash, I'd play DDO & LotrO, but I can't afford that now. I prefer LotrO than WoW, and I know WoW quite well. But no other MMORPG can do for me what DDO does. It simply doesn't exist, and of course it's real D&D, the only Online D&D MMO. I'm a fan of that system, played pen & paper for a couple of years, and I love what Turbine accomplished with this game. Maybe it's not perfect, but still, no AoC or anything else I've tried could match that fast, active, environmental experience or real adventures. Plus duneon master's voice... :)

I known WoW too well, my lotr toon is human now and make it too level 14 and seen the first big town I think its the dwarf town that look like a crappy version of the dwarf town in WoW. The quest did get a little more dark but still the toon models and classes are pretty bad I try them all but hunters feel like wierd. I had the more fun on a Master but still was bored after 20 minutes. This looks and feels way too much like WoW and it does not really help the game at all for me. :(

I read the books and so on and seen the movies. I just saying that Lord of the rings online look like a crappy version of WoW! And like Warhammer Online does look like a rush job... just compare the map of the dwarf town with the map of the dwarf town in WoW... Much more work was putting in it.