Open beta for Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar began last week.

Combat is borrowed from EQ2, quests and crafting are straight out of WoW, classes fall into the standard archetypes. Is it worth playing? More than any other game out there. For two reasons:

#1
The narrative based gameplay is not something I thought I would see in an MMOG. LotR uses instancing to move a story forward. For example, (spoiler alert!)

…you can start as a Human in a small town outside of Bree with all the other newbie players. You do the typical”kill this”/”fetch that” quests. A pie seller wants you to collect some ingredients for her and check in on her husband, the town Jailor. Running around the zone filled with farms, a spider infested ruin and a fortress of brigand introduces you to some other quest npcs that you can help out.

Then around L6 you get put into a private instance of the entire outdoor zone. The town is on fire! The sweet pie selling quest giver helplessly watches her husband get brutally beaten by the soldier that betrayed the town to agents of the Nazgul! Only you can defeat the traitors, rescue a fallen ranger and face down the leader of the bad guys.

And when you succeed, you zone out of the instance back to the “normal” zone, only to find that the town is mostly burned down and will remain so. You realize the zone you were in for the first 6 levels was actually a “shared instanced” version and this one is the real one from here on out.

Many of the surviving townspeople are there to rebuild and they have all new quests for you that will help them do it. One of those quests is to bury three dead quest npcs you got to know rather well before the town burned down. That quest had some emotional impact.

The game gets you to care about the NPCs and then inflicts irrevocable consequences on them. You will never see them alive in the game again. Can you remember the last MMOG that managed that?

#2
I don’t know about the rest of you, but ‘The Hobbit’ was the first fantasy book I read. My uncle gave it to me when I was 11 and it opened my eyes to the fantasy genre. Every night over the past 8 years that I logged into Norrath or Azeroth I was really trying to recapture that feeling reading Tolkien’s books. And now I can play in that world directly.

In a weekend of playing LotR I had fought along side Gandalf, explored the Shire, helped a Ranger thwart a Nazgul rider, watched as an elven outpost fell to invaders with Elrond by my side and smoked pipeweed. I can’t even begin to imagine the adventure that lies ahead of me in this world, but I now know I’ve been waiting 26 years to start it since I read the words "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…"

So if you read reviews about LotR that tell you its "nothing special" or "not innovative" because it borrows game mechanics from other popular MMOGs, ignore that. Every MMOG before it borrowed from its predecessor. The real value of this game is playing in the world that made you fall in love with the genre in the first place.