Edgefactor

He can smell it

On Sunday afternoon at PAX we stopped by the Turbine booth to take a look at the upcoming LOTR MMORPG.

First, I should note that I badly want any Lord of the Rings game to be spectacular. I have read the saga upwards of four times in its entirety, and love to immerse myself in middle-earth. I would love to take my World of Warcraft style experience and drop myself next to Aaragorn while manfully fighting back the tides of darkness. I went in to the demo firmly hoping to find evidence of an immersive experience.

I left the demo a bit worried. First, the middle-earth which I saw displayed on screen doesn’t look like either the middle-earth I’ve always envisioned, or the middle-earth that Peter Jackson portrayed. Turbine’s middle-earth looks more generic, more bland than it should. Old Man Willow isn’t too terrifying, the shire is only marginally quaint and happy, and even areas filled with giant spider web’s lack the necessary aura of evil.

At one point during our demo, one of the representitives from Turbine mentioned the term, “puzzle aspect”, like it was something to be proud of. I don’ t like puzzles. I don’t like jumping puzzles, I don’t like searching puzzles, and I don’t like 1000 piece puzzles that come out of a box. I realize that Bilbo won the ring through a game of riddles, and Gandalf did some clever things at times that involved thinking, but they had the force of nerrative behind them. I fear that if the puzzle aspect of the LOTR MMORPG is too strong, without the force of nerrative I won’t be up to the challange.

When I asked the Turbine representitives what differientiated their MMORPG form all the others, they said that the story element was key to Shadows of Angmar (which is the name they’ve given the beast). The example that took place in the demo was that the first time you saw a town, it was happy and whole, and than because of your inability to save it from a bandit attack, forever more in the game it was charred and burnt. Nifty, and necessary to tell a story well, but they were vague about how that would effect your interaction with other players. I got the idea that players would be seperated into worlds by catagories of who had seen the town burn, and who hadn’t yet seen the town burn, but if that is the case, than it would seem that middle-earth could get awfully fragmented, taking out the Massively and just leaving us with a MORPG. A less satisfying acronym.

My final dissapointment with the Shadows of Angmar is that Turbine isn’t planning a mac client. I like being able to play WoW on my ibook, and feel like that between owning an xbox and an ibook, I should be able to play most games. But I suppose if I want to play Shadows of Angmar I’ll just have to keep upgrading my quickly obscelescing PC desktop.

Players in Shadows of Angmar will have a choice of as yet undisclosed character classes, but will only be able to battle on the side of light. That means no joining with the dark lord to ravage the lands of the shire. While this might lend itself to more of a shared story line, it seems to eliminate the possibility of the sort of pleasure found on WoW pvp servers fighting against the horde or alliance and knowing that every time you kill an opposing player, someone, somewhere, is cursing.

Of course the game is still heavily in devlopment, and while the Turbine employees we talked with were coy about a specific release date, they implied a 2006 release sometime after the 1st quarter. As a consequence, everything I’ve come to believe about the game could be untrue by its final release.