Questing:  Killing Rats for Your Safety

One of the most obvious differences between Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft is the pace of leveling a character.  In the time it takes you to reach the mid-20’s in Warcraft, you’ll be lucky to get to level 12 or 13 in Lord of the Rings.  Now I believe some of this is by design; the developers at Turbine may have decided that they preferred a slower and steadier pace for their MMORPG than people are used to with World of Warcraft.  But unfortunately, I also feel this slower pace is due to some other points that I do not think helps the game.

One of the issues I have with Lord of the Rings Online is that quest monsters seem to be quite scarce at times.  In World of Warcraft, if you get a quest that says, “Kill 15 Duck Billed Platypuses to the south and report back”, you can bet your +2 Robe of Grinding that there will be a veritable Million Platypus March to the south of your location making it simple to complete the task at hand.

However, in Lord of the Rings Online, you will spend far more time than I feel necessary waiting and searching for mobs.  Middle Earth is a far more barren place than Azeroth, and that means you’ll be spending less time slaying beasties and more time walking around LOOKING for beasties.  And since “Lots Of Walking!” isn’t something you’ll find as a box quote for a computer game, I feel this is a bad thing.

I also found Lord of the Rings Online’s quests to sometimes be a little vague as well, causing you to spend even MORE time walking around the landscape wondering where you’re supposed to be going.  It’s not a huge problem, but I definitely did notice the difference in the time I’ve spent with both games.

What Lord of the Rings gets right in terms of questing are the main storyline quests.  In all the time I’ve spent with World of Warcraft, I couldn’t name one NPC I’ve run into from memory, nor could I recite any of the storylines I’ve been a party of.  With Lord of the Rings, however, the main storyline quests are very well done and feature characters that are recognizable to those familiar with the lore.  Let’s face it – meeting Strider at the Prancing Pony is far cooler to most people than searching out characters that only exist within the limited lore of Azeroth.

If familiar characters and settings are very important to you, then you may be willing to overlook the slower pace that is questing in Lord of the Rings.  However, I prefer a more brisk experience when it comes to grinding levels, so I’m giving World of Warcraft the nod in this category.

Graphics:  Scenery in the Virtual World

As I previously mentioned, you’ll be spending a lot of time walking around the landscape in Lord of the Rings Online, so it’s important that the environment is pleasing to look at.  Add to that the fact that fans of the Tolkein mythos expect a certain grandeur when exploring the cities and regions of Middle Earth;  they don’t want to see a “cartoony” version of Rivendell or cell-shaded Ring Wraiths.

Fortunately, Turbine not only meets these expectations with their graphics in Lord of the Rings Online – they exceed them.  I cannot say enough about the look and feel of their virtual online version of Middle Earth to do it justice, so I’ll use a little personal anecdote to convey my feelings on this matter.

One morning, after a long night of questing in Middle Earth, I was driving to my real life job.  It was an absolutely beautiful spring morning in Maryland – the sun was shining brightly on the tops of the hills in the distance, and the echoes of sunlight could be seen gracing every leaf on every tree on the side of the country road I take on my way to the office.  It was one of those mornings where you just exhale and thank whatever all-powerful being you choose to worship for giving us such an amazingly wonderful planet to live on.  As I took in the scenery, and felt the warmth of June touch my skin through the passenger side window of my sedan, I smiled and thought:

“Gosh… it looks just like Lord of the Rings Online.”

Now on the other hand we have World of Warcraft and its more “tongue-in-cheek” style of graphics.  The folks at Blizzard didn’t have the pre-conceived notions of Tolkein fan-boys to deal with, so they pretty much had carte blanche when deciding what Azeroth would look like.  The style of graphics their art direction team went with very much compliments the overall character of their game – Lord of the Rings Online is a serious place with serious graphics, World of Warcraft is a self-referentially humorous game with graphics to match.  So I’m not taking anything away from the look and feel of World of Warcraft; they’ve done a fantastic job in conveying the overall emotion of their world.

That said, I’ve never had an experience where the beauty of the real world we live in reminded me of a virtual world we play in.  Lord of the Rings Online did that.  So with all due respect to the talented artists at Blizzard, I’m giving Lord of the Rings Online the nod in the graphics department.

As a side note, I found both games ran very well on my system (a new Vista PC with 4GB RAM and a pretty hefty video card).  World of Warcraft ran very smoothly with all options turned on, while I only had to “dumb down” Lord of the Rings Online’s graphics just a little bit.  So performance didn’t seem to be an issue with either game.