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One of the key balances the developers at Standing Stone Games (SSG) have to deal with is creating a fun and engaging game while also adapting arguably the most fully realized and beloved fictional universe in literature. As a result, adapting The Lord of the Rings to an MMO is obviously going to come with concessions.
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The concept of a health bar VS a morale bar is irrelevant. Health is morale, morale is health. It functions the exact same way in every other game ever created. You can buff your morale, you can buff your health. Enemies can debuff your health, and debuff your morale. You die in a game with health bars, you are defeated in LOTRO with it's morale bar. You respawn at your bind area just like every other game.
During the development of the game Turbine (not SSG) had some strict limitations on what they could do. The had the rights to the books, not the movies and if you know anything about the Tolkien estate you know that they are very careful as to how their IP is handled. So you got things like morale bars, and no wizard classes and things like that. They had to stay true to the books.
Over time the restrictions faded. They added Beornings, Rune Keepers in 2012, you fight a Dragon (even though there are none left) You can even fight another Balrog.
Right now, if you want to, you can run around wearing a wrapped Christmas box as a chest piece weilding a giant flower into battle while a flying a kite and having a cosmetic pet sheep follow you around. And when you defeat the bad guy, you can do the /golf emotes.
So, yea....not exactly the same game as it was in 2007.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
how so? i played it a little and despise the gameplay , being a bear is cool but , healing bear was meh , tanking was "ok" , but dps was badly , and not fun
Healing bear was probably the strongest, but I didn't play LOTRO to be a meta-gamer. I thought the DPS spec was really fun because you had to shift back and forth between human/bear form and keep bleeds up, with your crit scaling with higher rage in bear etc.
I agree with some things, but you are off the mark with a lot you say.
First, SSG was created as WB decided couple years ago that Turbine should focus on mobile game development and a lot of devs got laid off. They also wanted to close down LOTRO and DDO. So the former devs formed SSG and strike a deal with WB to take over LOTRO and DDO, since WB was no longer interested in keeping those games running.
While true that Turbine at that time only had the IP to the LOTRO books and not The Hobbit (they still don´t). It was not a deal with Tolkien estate, but Middle Earth Enterprises, that has the entertainment rights like for the movies.
Turbine had complete freedom to do whatever they wanted to do (since they were not under pressure by Tolkien Estate at all or there wouldn't have been any games or movies) and the first iteration of the game was completely open world game and was called Middle Earth Online, but they got cold feet, when they saw how popular the movies were (as they released in the same time period as when the game was in development) and scrapped the game and started over to bank on the success of the movies and create LOTRO Online instead to stay more true to the storyline of the books, sell it that way just to bank on the success of the movies. That caused quite the uproar in the Middle Earth Online community who were completely taken aback and dismayed by that decision at that time!
Fighting a Dragon was right there with the Retail release, as the very first RAID was a Dragon and the Balrog fight was there with release of the first expansion Mines of Moria.
It does indeed have tank, healer and dps, but it also has support classes which is why it is not a trinity game. A trinity game only has 3 roles, lotro has 4 (or six is you want to separate support into buffer, debuffer and cc roles).
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
I can remember talking about the lore breaking aspects when they came out. This was my favourite reply 'Yeah but have you seen the animations on stuff on the saddle, really cool.' Different prioties I guess, today I would imagine walking around with an Xmas box as an outfit beats that. MMORPG drift at work.