My first MMO: The Lord of the Rings Online

Ever since they came into existence, I’ve always thought that I’d be able to go through life never having to play any kind of MMO game… ever.

I had to reconsider my position on MMO’s when BioWare and LucasArts announced Star Wars: The Old Republic… it’s pretty hard to resist… BioWare, Star Wars, the successor to Knights of the Old Republic… and the fact that it’ll be the ONLY decent Star Wars game to be released in a very long time make it something I really want.

Of course, since I have… had ZERO experience with MMO’s, it was going to be a little difficult for me to learn about the basics without feeling lost for most of the first couple of days of playing it. However, thanks to The Lord of the Rings Online, I’ve begun to gain a lot of valuable insights into MMO’s and I’ve begun to understand why they work the way they do.

Back in the day there were a few reasons why I never wanted to get dragged into the whole MMO scene. For one thing, it took up way too much time that I feel could be better spent playing a lot of other games. Right now I have quite a lot of games to finish and if I were to let an MMO take up all of my time, I’d never get any of them finished. Of course, my mind about that changed a bit after I realised how much time I spent playing Pokémon day in, day out… when the Pokémon bug bites, I tend to spend a month or two playing nothing but.

The second reason why I avoided MMO’s has to do with the costs that are involved with a lot of them. I feel that if I buy a game at the store, that’s the only price I need to pay to access everything about it. That’s why I hate useless DLC and stupid Limited Edition exclusives. It’s also why I don’t like subscription fees and such… but I do understand why they exist. I guess for me, nothing has really been worth it for me to want to pay that extra cash for that extra service. Hell, I’m amazed I even paid the extra money to subscribe to a Gold account on Xbox Live.

This is where The Lord of the Rings Online comes in… it didn’t used to be, but now it allows you to play the game for free which is very awesome and I thank Turbine, the developers of the game, for doing that because, frankly, I would never have bothered to try it if it didn’t have a free option. It’s a good system too, I don’t feel limited just because I chose the free option over the paid one. I’m still able to do everything in the game, it’ll just take a longer time for me to do EVERYTHING… which isn’t really a concern since I’ll stop playing it once TOR is released.

But now that I am playing it, I’m having a good time playing with my friends, Bob and Jae. Jae’s been showing me around the world and Bob’s been giving me lots of neat stuff. I’ve also been exploring on my own and spending time doing little quests and killing a bunch of stuff. I chose to start the game as an Elf Hunter… a female one… I was feeling pretty at the time… I like the idea of ranged attacks and killing the enemies long before they’re able to get near me. For TOR, I’ve decided to go with the Trooper class which is pretty much the same deal.

It’s been pretty fun so far, I’m starting to understand why people get sucked into these types of games… when The Old Republic is released I’m sure I’ll get sucked into that pretty badly, but hopefully by the time it is released I’d have finished the backlog of games I’ve yet to finish and take care of any other ones that are on the way. I’ll enjoy LotRO in the meantime and see what else I can get up to in the game. Right now I’m just a humble lv11 Hunter, but I really haven’t been going out of my way to play it… which I think is a good sign that I’m not easily addicted to things.