Variety: The Spice of Gaming

When one spends $15 of month on a virtual world, it’s important that there’s a variety of game styles and play experiences to choose from.  I’m sure that there’s a few folks out there who start off with one type of character and play it through until the end-game areas.  However, I’d imagine that most of you – like myself – want to try out all the different race and class combinations that are available, and expect to have a somewhat unique experience with each one.  I found the biggest difference between the two games in this category – World of Warcraft takes this by a landslide.

In World of Warcraft, you have eight races to choose from (10 if you’ve picked up the excellent Burning Crusade expansion pack), as well as a myriad of classes to play.  If one day you decide to be a dwarven warrior, your overall experience will be much different than if you decide another day to be an undead warlock.  Each race and class combination almost feels like a completely different game – each with their own skills to master and, more importantly, their own unique play style through the first 20 or so levels.

Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, only gives you four races to choose from (elf, human, dwarf, and hobbit).  I do understand that Turbine had their hands tied by the Lord of the Rings license (they couldn’t exactly throw in a race of playable alien tentacle-men, it wouldn’t fit the setting), however I feel they could’ve made the first stage of the game a little more unique among the different races. 

There is a certain “sameness” that permeates the beginning stages of the game regardless of what race or class you play – and that severely damages the replayability factor.  This becomes even more of a problem when you tie in the lethargic pace of leveling in the game – you’ll just be spending far too much time when you re-roll a new character doing the exact same things as you did with your previous character.

With all that in mind, I definitely give a huge edge in this very important category to World of Warcraft.  And, given the previously mentioned issues with the Lord of the Rings license, I really don’t see much of a way that it can be fixed.