Lord of the Rings Online

[Timi]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Allanon @ Feb 2 2007, 07:35 PM) [snapback]142575[/snapback][/center]

I beta tested it before they went to open stress-test beta and was unimpressed. I've read the trilogy, as well as the Hobbit and the Silmarillion. The biggest problem for me was that I did not feel I was in Middle Earth. This is likely because of the films (which I love) and the Battle for Middle Earth games. These games use the music, faces, voices, personalities, everything... from the films. Turbine does not have license to any of that. So, there already exists a gaming and entertainment market for LOTR, but turbine can't use any of it in their game because they didn't want to pay for the rights.

So because everything is different LOTR-wise from what I've watched/played, I don't feel like it's LOTR. In addition, whether it's true or not, the refusal to include playable evil-races or to obtain licensing rights makes me feel like Turbine is being an elitist publisher/developer. Sacrificing the epic-ness that is Peter Jackson's entertainment LOTR vision for the sake of saving a few bucks.

LOTRO will never be a big player in the MMO market. In refusing to include evil races in a world that is so primed for civil war and pvp (the driving force of online gaming) they cripple and banish themselves to mediocrity in the market, imo.
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It's not that. It's that when they were developing the game the were told specifically what they could and couldn't do and one of the main things that was not allowed to happen was create any means that would drastically alter the history, world, or the original story and that meant preventing players from playing evil races.