THE LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE
A bittersweet return to Middle-earth.
Ideeply miss those brief few years when The Lord of the Rings had taken over the world. It wasn’t just the movies, but all the spin-off games too—those incredibly fun action-RPGs based on the movies, real-time strategy games like Battle for Middle-earth, and even the surprisingly great Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War. But of the dozens of games set in Tolkien’s fantasy universe, only one has successfully wormed its way into my brain and never left: The Lord of the Rings Online.
I’ve easily spent more time since its 2007 launch thinking about playing TLOTRO than actually playing it. I’m enchanted by the idea of a fully explorable Middle-earth, but MMOs are big, time-consuming games.
Despite a few attempts, I just never got into TLOTRO as much as I want to. But with news that Amazon Games’ attempt at making a Lord of the Rings MMO was now dead, it got me thinking about this 14-year-old game and the tiny community that’s kept it quietly going for so long. It was time to try again.
HOBBIT FORMING
After suffering through the age-old MMO problem of being forced to choose a class based on nothing but a paragraph of general description, I am ready to embark on my own journey through Middleearth. Feeling nostalgic, I decided to play a hobbit Guardian, which means I specialize in wielding big shields and full plate armor. It doesn’t sound very hobbit-like, but the in-game description tells me this class was inspired directly by Samwise
Gamgee’s stalwart devotion to Frodo. I guess the 200 pounds of plate mail I’m sporting is a metaphor for how ol’ Sam had to carry Frodo’s lazy ass halfway up a volcano. Share the load and all that.
Despite being such an old MMO, The Lord of the Rings Online surprises me with how involved its storytelling is. Instead of dropping me into the Shire and setting me loose, there’s a hours-long prologue complete with cutscenes that immediately suck me into the fantasy of this world.
It’s night time, and I’m walking on one of the main roads through the Shire, when I bump into a hobbit cop called a Bounder. He questions me about being out so late, but before long we’re interrupted by some familiar faces: Frodo, Samwise, and