Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Updated Impressions - More Early Impressions, Future Update Plans

Massively multiplayer games often let you play as a lone adventurer in a fantasy world, joining other players to hunt monsters and seek fame and fortune. Developer Turbine Entertainment is working on such a game set in the original fantasy world, the realm of novelist J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. We recently had a chance to try the game out, and we also got an update on some of the future plans that Turbine has in store for the game.

The game offers four playable races--human, elf, dwarf, and hobbit--and three of the four can be either male or female (only dwarf males are available at this time). The game offers seven character classes--minstrel, captain, guardian, hunter, lore-master (the wizard profession), burglar, and champion--each of which plays a specific role in battle, which is outlined in a brief in-game movie that can be watched as you decide your character's profession.

Once you've created a character, you start out as a prisoner of a Black Rider (one of the evil minions of the dark lord Sauron), and you must escape your imprisonment with the help of a human ranger, as we've discussed in our previous coverage. Once you escape, you begin in a small village surrounded by pastoral hills and small farms that have occasionally been attacked by bandits. Much of your early career involves performing brief quests for your village neighbors, such as clearing out pesky wolves and hunting wild boars for meat. However, as you continue through the lowest-level series of quests, you quickly find that all isn't right in the village, and that the bandits that seemed like small-time thugs actually pose a much larger threat--they're allied with the minions of Sauron and eventually lay waste to your village, turning it into a burning ruin. This development shows how the world will change over time using "story events"--cinematic sequences that happen in real time in the game that make players feel like they're much more involved in the story.

We chose to play as a captain, one of the game's melee-combat classes, which is a very group-oriented character. Captains possess various "aura" abilities that strengthen their teammates' abilities and heal them over time; they can also attack their enemies in battle with heavy melee weapons and with their distinctive battle shout ability, which can be heard from quite a distance. Even though captains look to be best suited for group play, they seem to do just fine when fighting solo, so long as they keep themselves well provisioned. Captains, like other characters, may engage their enemies in standard "auto-attack" combat, which causes them to repeatedly whack their foes until someone falls over and dies, though characters also possess various special abilities that can be used at a cost to the character's energy. Eating certain foods helps characters replenish their spent energy and depleted health, though when not in battle, you can recover from your wounds fairly quickly, at least at the lower levels.

We also had a chance to catch up with representatives from the developer who discussed some of the intriguing new developments that are planned for the game. To encourage community involvement, the game will implement functionality that resembles some of the most popular Internet technology. An example of this is a map system that resembles search engine Google's Google Maps site, as it lets players zoom and pan around world maps to better find their way. Turbine will also apparently offer an online "wiki" similar to the Internet reference Wikipedia, which will let players build their own reference compendium for monsters, weapons, quests, and other information. Finally, the game will reportedly feature a built-in social-networking-site builder that will let players create their own personal journal site on the Internet for each of their characters, which acts similar to sites like MySpace or LiveJournal. Turbine suggests that its community-management team will help police those sites for inappropriate content, and that these character-created sites should help players continue to connect with each other even when they're not playing the game.

In addition, Turbine is encouraging devoted players who have gained access to the game's beta program to preorder the game by allowing them to keep their beta characters even into release. The game shows a good deal of promise as something that should appeal to both online-game veterans and beginners who are fans of Tolkien's lore. Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is scheduled to launch later this year.