Pi in the Sky

LOTRO - free or not

Posted on November 18th, 2010 at 11:53pm by Pi.
Categories: Gaming.

My last addiction regarding games has been The Lord Of The Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (aka LOTRO), the MMORPG version of the literary classic and encumbered cinematographic trilogy of The Lord Of The Rings. Because who will believe that someone would make one of the most complex and ambitious MMORPG compared to the original source, if that source weren’t polished until shining due to one of the most ambitious sagas in cinema history. But I’ll beter get back to the original direction and I’ll talk about LOTRO.

LOTRO is a MMORPG, or in plain language, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. That means it’s a cRPG, a computer role-playing game, which is quite different than the paper and pencil role-playing games. It also means that you play it from your computer, but connected throught internet with servers that hosts a game which is being played by hundreds, thousands of people simultaneously.

The MMORPG concept is not new; actually it always seemed so appealing to me that I’ve avoided playing them due to being scared of getting too hooked on. And the fact is that, in a weak moment, to give up and play LOTRO has demostrated how well founded was that fear. I’ve played intensively and the game has surpassed all my expectations. What hasn’t surpassed my expectations, and actually came too short, is the free-to-play model of Turbine, the creators of the game. I don’t know if I should be happy or not, but at least it saved me from an addiction.

LOTRO started some years ago as other MMORPG of the “subscription” kind. You could buy the game, but to play with it you should keep a monthly paid subscription. Another very well known example is World Of Warcraft, world’s most popular and more played MMORPG. However, Turbine decided to expand its business model with LOTRO and introduced its particular “free to play” in September 2010.

The process is simple, at first sight. You visit LOTRO.com, create an account, and download the installer of only 2 MiB (only for Windows). Without credit cards or anything, without asking for personal data except user name, password, e-mail address and birth date. Of course the user name has to have between 8 and 12 characters, without space (what a weird restriction, 8-12 letters…) and if you want to access your account and change the password, they will ask you for a lot of personal data. Thus it’s better to choose a simple password since the client will ask for it each time it’s launched.

The client is huge. The 2 MiB installer only downloads a component called Pando which in turn downloads from a private P2P networl the real game (the client) installer. This installer is 10,12 GiB (originally 2 DVDs, I think), and that throught a P2P network, translates into six hours to one day. The installer needs again another 12,6 GiB to install the client, which should give an idea of the humongous amount of visual, audio and playable content that this MMORPG has. Once installed, the game is launched, which ask for user name and password, and you should choose a server to connect with to play. Each server is a “world” where the created characters will live; choosing one is easy since in the information we’ll get by e-mail there’s a list of the less populated worlds, in other words, the ones easier to connect to.

If when trying to install the game with the first 2 MiB installer, Pando gives a spur of errors with code 0xc0150004, look at the end of this article. It’s not a problem with Pando or Lotro, it’s a bug of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.51 SP1, if you ever installed it on your Windows.

Finally the game runs, and we are forced to watch for what seems an eternity a screen where it’s announced that LOTRO is now “free to play”. And it’s that word, “free”, the one which has given me more problems than Microsoft’s bug.g de Microsoft.

In english, the word “free” has two meanings: one is not obstructed, restricted, or impeded, like in the word “freedom”; the other meaning is not costing or charging anything, like in the word “gratis”. Unfortunately, none of the meanings is absolutely true, regardless of the meaning that the marketing responsibles at Turbine wanted to give (probably both, in an ambiguous sense). In my years of experience with internet, one of the most abused words to the point of not meaning anything when its used is “free”. No one sells a dollar for three nickels; and this game costed millions of dollars.

In LOTRO’s case, we find a game which is very easy to learn, since everything is self-explained. Just by hovering the mouse cursor over any thing, whatever, an explanation appears with what it does, what it is, how much it’s worth, what are its effects, etc. And this applies both to game elements, characters, missions and enemies, and to the game interface: buttons, menues, options, terms and the rest. Everything is designed to give a gaming experience from the beginning. LOTRO is a complex game, with a lot of different playability layers: quests, deeds, skirmishes, crafts, hobbies. You could go to kill a spider queen in a dark forest with trees which literally catch you and throw you several meters away, or you could spend ten minutes fishing in the middle of a river (my favourite place is just on the exit of the west gate of Bree, it’s a rock in the middle of the river a few meters south of the Greenway Crossing bridge).

Regarding playability, ease of handling, immersion, variety and enormity, LOTRO is a 10 over 10. Regarding the experience of playing gratis and unrestricted, it has been disappointing. Technically speaking, in a literal way, you can play a lot without having to spend a dollar. All the “epic” side, the quests related to the story of The Lord Of The Rings, is playable from beginning to end (with free expansions until “Book 15″). There are free accessable regions and missions, with four different regions available from the beginning. Two characters per server, three bags for carrying objects, etc. Enough to enjoy that side of the game.

Besides that, when completing deeds, you get “Turbine Points”, the points used to buy stuff in the LOTRO store. You can buy the poins, but for the small things, e.g. the horse riding skill (95 TP), it’s enough with what you get by accomplishing deeds. But, and this but is important, the things really worth it are expensive in TP, and gathering enough deeds to get them is weary, without a better word. The deeds are, for example: find all the ruins of the Dúnedain history, killing 30 Dun Neeker-breeker (a kind of giant crickets) in the easter Bree marsh, using the Swift Bow attack 600 times, achieving 500 critical hits against an enemy, tracking animals 300 times, and similar. Some deeds are fun to get, others come by simply following the quests, but many require dedication and they are a quest by themselves. Quests without history and repetitive.

And besides the epic quest line, and the novice quests (until level 20-23), the content is restricted. To access it you have to spend a long time gathering TP to be able to acquire quest packs, or paid expansions like Mines Of Moria or Siege Of Mirkwood. And I say paid because they cost so many TP that they can’t be achieved by playing gratis. Moreover, the free modality players have lower limits than pay players regarding the top level attainable by their character, the amount of money they can have, the grade of crafting they can achieve, and other stuff which affects gameplay. There are other things of this kind, but to end I would like to mention that if you ever pay with real money, the kind that comes from the credit card, then you have access to the “expanded functionality” of the interface, specially related to the social part of a MMORPG: enhanced chat, oriented to fellowships and kinships, Monster Play, using destiny points, and more.

Then, if there’s content which is not accessable, it means it’s restricted, and if to access that content you must pay, it’s not gratis. Again, technically no one is forced to put a single coin over the table, but it’s the same as shareware/trial programs which only unlock complete functionality when acquiring (paying, of course) the registered/commercial version. They’re also gratis, but they’re not as free/gratis as they announce.

In this LOTRO is one of the best examples of marketing. Converting LOTRO to “free” hasn’t been simply allowing to enter players without making them pay. It involved a large amount of work which translates into being left wanting: there are quests which consist merely in travelling to another region under the promise of new adventures and thrill, and 10 TP as a tip. Only to discover at arrival that all the quests in that region are locked until purchasing the corresponding quest packs of each region. And they don’t cost 10 TP, nor 50. You can fight the enemies that appear randomly, but the RPG side of MMORPG is nulified.

And now the question arises, is it worth playing LOTRO? The answer depends on the person. I have literally hundreds of games that I’ve been “acquiring” over the years, games that I have since 10, 15 or 20 years waiting to be tried; and personally it’s not worth for me to use my time and energy in squeezing the content of a game which is announced as “free”, whatever that word means. Also personally I think it’s worth trying, until the free playing limitations appear around level 20-23, which is when I got tired. I actually know a couple of level +30 players who haven’t spent a single buck yet. And of course if you like MMORPG and LOTR, it will be very much worthy.

Conclusion is, the experience has been positive, but not as satisfacting as it promised. These last gaming days have been really fun and exciting, and the game pours quality. It simply failed to satisfy the expectations of the word “free”. Probably in a future I’ll try again some MMORPG which is really free and gratis, and there are some. But for now I’ll stay with “local” mode cRPGs. My next stop will be Planescape: Torment. I’ve heard more positive stuff about that game than of any other cRPG, including LOTRO and WoW.

To know more:
LOTRO-Wiki (english), a huge database about the official content of LOTRO, from the beginning with characters to lists of all the enemies, NPCs, items, places, and whatever is needed.
Official comparison table of play models (english) explaining the differences of playing as “free”, “premium” and VIP.
Wikipedia - The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (english), to know in a condensed way the inmensity of gaming that LOTRO means.
What’ll Be Free and What Won’t in Lord of the Rings Online (english), article about free-to-play LOTRO.
Defining the ‘Free’ in Free-to-Play (english), article about free-to-play LOTRO.
Thread about Pando’s error 0xc0150004 (spanish) to troubleshoot installation.

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