Lord of the Rings Online - Intro Part I

I have been playing Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) for a little over a month. So far I think it is a pretty decent game. However it does suffer from the same drawbacks of games like World of Warcraft (WoW). There are some areas that it has improved on though.

LOTRO has a great story/lore to work from. There is a huge amount of source material to draw from, which should allow them to keep adding content for a long time. In a MMORPG, content is one of the most important aspects of the game, so they do have that going for it. Since the game is pretty new still, there is not a huge amount yet. Turbine, the people who made the game, recently released Book 9 (Books are their updates) which added a new area and quests. I was pretty impressed who soon after release the new content came, hopefully they keep it up.

Since they have all of this content to draw from, they introduced an epic quest line. It is important to note that you do not play a hero like Frodo and the rest of the fellowship. You are a mostly normal character just trying to help out. The epic quests will have you involved in their adventures. I like these, since it gives you a felling of being apart of something larger and your not just grinding. Besides the epic quests, there are numerous side quests.

Some of the side quests are not your normal 'kill 10 wolves' types. For example, in the Shire you are tasked to deliver mail without being seen by 'nosey' hobbits. There are other like that too, which make for a nice change of pace. Most of the quests seem to be kill/gather types though.

Part 2 will cover traits, deeds and more...