Blood for the blood god! Skulls for the skull throne!

I’d rather wait for War, am not so interested in Conon, but hell I need something to play now. I’m back to playing The Sims2, if you really need a visual on how tired I am of WOW. So LOTRO will suffice for now and might surprise me a last even longer. I love crafting and this is closer to a real crafting system than WOW ever had or will have. So if I’m going to go, I figured I might as well join in style as a Founder.

I look forward to bumping into or reading about the adventures anyone has who’s been on WOW but giving LOTRO a try.

Personally, though, I don’t care. The game looks nice and character models have nothing to do with long term playability. The time it takes for me to stop noticing character models altogether is measured in weeks. Turbine may miss those people who won’t play the game because their elf isn’t hawt enough, but I won’t. From my point of view WoW-level popularity is a liability, and I think it would be much more disruptive to Middle Earth than Azeroth.

Aye the skin and facial features remained relatively unchanged. The armor did get more detailed as well. Though that is hard to notice the difference from high to very high unless one actually looks for it, and does nothing to change the actual armor model.

The world of LotRO is gorgeous never said otherwise, the High Def textures make it even more so. As with Rose (by the by I just started playing Titan Quest myself…rather fun ) my problem has been the awkward characters and animations. Turbine apparently learned nothing from DDO where they had the exact same problem (though I do think they did a great job on the Warforged visuals) with normal humanoid PC’s. There is a disturbing similarity in visuals, and they all look “dead”. As much an issue as I have with WoW’s lack of character diversity, not once did I ever think a human looked like an elf, or a gnome/halfling like a dwarf without a beard. I also never got the feeling that I was looking in to a the face of a fresh corpse with dead eyes and slack features.

I get ALL those negative things when I look at LotRO player characters.

Single player instances remind me strongly of COH/COV and what DDO has begun to implement, for example. But it has nothing to hook a so-called “powergamer” who has an average of 30+ hours of play time per week, and wants to fill them all with gaming goodness. Right now I spend at least 40 hours a week playing a single player game, TitanQuest, which is more fun than any MMO I played in the past year. That’s somewhat backwards, until you think about how long people played Diablo II…

Personally the games on my watch list are Age of Conan, Warhammer, and Aion. Soul of the Ultimate Nation is also there, but it’s supposed to be a free to play game, so I’m probably going to play it regardless. Graphically speaking, the best will be Aion hands down. The men will be big and bulky, the women will be lithe and pretty, and you can’t beat real wings that come out of your character’s back. How’s that flying epic mount? Can’t fight from it? Too bad. I can’t wait to try out fighting in the air and casting pew pew spells in the sky.

And higher textures still doesn’t account for the way too bulky looking armor. Instead of looking like plain old blankets wrapped around someone, with higher textures they look like patterened blankets wrapped around someone.