Lord of the Rings Online is a pretty generic MMORPG.  It bor­rows heav­ily from ear­lier games and intro­duces lit­tle in the way of inno­va­tion.  There are dif­fer­ences, but any player of Everquest II or World of War­craft will feel very famil­iar with the UI on LotRO, which was nat­u­rally the inten­tion of Tur­bine when they designed the game.

So, whilst the game can, at first glance, seem like WoW with Hob­bits, it is worth tak­ing a look at how Tur­bine has taken sta­ple MMO mechan­ics and tai­lored them to fit into the world of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.  In this fol­low up to my pre­vi­ous post on how Tur­bine uses the back­ground mate­r­ial in it’s game I want to exam­ine the role-playing game itself.

Of course, every fan­tasy RPG ever made, be it com­puter or paper and pen­cil based, has drawn heav­ily on Tolkien.  Games like Dun­geons and Drag­ons were almost iden­ti­cal in their use of cer­tain char­ac­ter classes and mon­sters.   Com­puter RPG’s, sin­gle player or oth­er­wise, have used Tolkien as inspi­ra­tion for a ‘class based’ approach.   Bilbo Bag­gins, the clas­sic fan­tasy Bur­glar, in The Hob­bit is the main inspi­ra­tion for this approach.   Tolkien makes it clear that the job of Bur­glar is a spe­cialised one, and a Dwarf sim­ply can­not do it.  The idea of clear roles being applied to char­ac­ters in books was noth­ing new, but the way in which Tolkien used it so promi­nently in a fan­tasy set­ting was, and it’s effects are still felt today.

So the basic idea of a fan­tasy RPG is essen­tially com­pat­i­ble with Tolkien, regard­less of the set­ting.  Tur­bine had it easy in this respect.  Their ini­tial choice of classes was easy as well one would imag­ine, but the way in which they have linked the mem­bers of the Fel­low­ship to each class was inspired.  Some of the choices take a bit of imag­i­na­tion to rec­on­cile, such as Sam Gamgee as a Guardian, but you can see where the devel­oper is com­ing from.

The big prob­lem for Tur­bine comes in the classes which they didn’t include at ini­tial release, namely Wiz­ard and Ranger.  I would imag­ine that the deci­sion not to include these arche­types as playable would have been made very early on.  You sim­ply can­not have hun­dreds of Wiz­ards run­ning around when Tolkien only names 3 in The Lord of the Rings and gives hints as to the exis­tence of two oth­ers who came to the North of Middle-Earth in the Third Age.  Like­wise, it would be far­ci­cal to have playable Rangers.  True, there were more Rangers then there were Wiz­ards, but the Rangers were beings of con­sid­er­able power, far greater than nor­mal men.  All the playable classes had to be roughly of sim­i­lar power for the sake of game balance.

With classes decided some basic game­play mechan­ics could be looked at.  LotRO uses Morale rather than Health or Hit Points.  Many new play­ers, me included, report being con­fused by this at first.  How­ever, when you read through The Lord of the Rings you are struck by the num­ber of times Tolkien refers to the way peo­ple are feel­ing in the face of evil rather than any phys­i­cal injury they may suf­fer.  He talks about how their hearts sank or how their spir­its were lifted.  The con­cept of Morale fits very nicely with this.  Morale also solves the prob­lem of Hob­bits.  How can you explain in an RPG how a tiny Hob­bit can stand next to a mighty Dwarf war­rior fight­ing Orcs and hope to last the fight?  Morale is the answer.  It’s the rea­son why, in The Return of the King, Pip­pin stands fast at the gates of Mor­dor whereas so many of the host of Gon­dor turned aside.

Morale as a basic mea­sure­ment of ‘life’ also helps with other game­play mechan­ics.  In this game, you don’t ‘die’, only to spring back to life, Lazarus like.  It’s one area where games in gen­eral fail to main­tain any­thing like a believ­able approach.  LotRO char­ac­ters are ‘defeated’, but are not killed.   Dread, too, can now impact play­ers directly, where it hurts.  The Lord of the Rings is full of ref­er­ences to the power of fear and evil on char­ac­ters.  The effects of the Nazgul are the most notable exam­ple of this.  Just being near one of the Ring­wraiths is enough to make peo­ple cower in fear and become eas­ier to defeat.  Min­strels too, become more believ­able with Morale.  The idea of some­one play­ing few notes on a Lute and giv­ing you the strength to fight on just doesn’t work unless you use the con­cept of Morale.  This gets around the lack of pure spell­cast­ers in the game as you don’t need magic based heal­ers any­more (I’m going to ignore Rune­keep­ers for now, that dis­cus­sion is for another time).

Tur­bine removed some accepted norms from MMO gam­ing with The Lord of the Rings Online.  Spell­cast­ing is one, but other changes were made as well.  Unlike games like WoW, which give play­ers a choice of Good and Evil, LotRO forces new play­ers to side with the Free Peo­ples, or the good­ies.  You do get to play an Orc, Warg or Spi­der in the lim­ited PvP in the game, but for the main, LotRO is played as either an Elf, Man, Dwarf or Hob­bit (or Chicken).  Whilst the choice not to include Wiz­ards as a playable class would have been an easy one, I expect that the deci­sion to effec­tively make LotRO a PvE game with lim­ited PvP would have been some­thing that Tur­bine would have given a lot of con­sid­er­a­tion to.  A large part of the MMO mar­ket expects PvP.  Many play online games purely to com­pete against other play­ers.  In mak­ing LotRO mainly PvE Tur­bine risked their game fail­ing.  For­tu­nately, it hasn’t turned out that way as there is a large mar­ket of peo­ple who pre­fer PvE.  It’s a deci­sion which fits with Tolkien lore much more com­fort­ably than one in which the game was based in a totally war torn world, one sim­i­lar to the recently released The Lord of the Rings Con­quest, where play­ers can chose to play as a Bal­rog and walk around crush­ing hob­bit holes.

LotRO has no fly­ing mounts (thank good­ness), there are no playable sum­mon­ers (we have Lore–Mas­ters and Cap­tains instead), we can’t make poi­sons and Hob­bit char­ac­ters can’t equip shoes (actu­ally this isn’t in the game but I would love to see it).

The game we play is a ‘by the book’ MMO.  But the small changes made to it all work in bring­ing a suc­cess­ful game genre to a Middle-Earth setting.

Future posts will look at each region in the game in turn, and how the devel­oper has adapted Tolkien’s writ­ings into the game and intro­duced some set­tings of it’s own.  I’ll start where both The Hob­bit and The Lord of the Rings both start, in The Shire, where else?

Related posts

• Building Middle-Earth: The Shire (6)
• Building Middle-earth: Ered Luin (3)
• Turbine’s Console MMORPG New IP? (1)
• The Last King of Gondor (8)
• Why LotRO?: Story, Lore and Those Less Fanatic (2)