I recently bought Lord of the Rings online, i've been intrested in MMOG's for quite a while now, I think my first one was actually City of Heroes and from that I migrated to WoW and since then nothing came close to WoW nothing enticed me enough to buy it, untill now.
When I heard about Lotro I was quite intrested but I was never planning on buying it, closer and closer to the release I still couldn't make up my mind, then the Lotro marathon happended and it kinda made me want to play it, so I decided to order it on Play.com.
It came on saturday immediatly I installed it, took ages to install had a few problems with the subcription but worked out in the end and I got the first month free, so I decided picked a hobbit minstrel mainly because I play instruments in RL so they appealed to me also I wanted to try and pick the most unsual one, i'm usually a Tank or borign Mage, anyway from what i've seen minstrels are basically hobbits that can kill animals with the power of rock! ..well maybe not rock but the power of music, there fat small and can eat smoke and sleep and do hobbit things, now the Minstrel class isn't unique to the hobbit race, but I know some races can't do it i'm guessing dwarves because I can't really see a dwarve with music tallent, no effence to dwarves :P
Theres a bunch of skills for the minstrels and each of them seem to have a slightly diffrent guitar riff played when you use them, you can buy other instruments like clarinets, hearps, flutes ect and what I thought was a brilliant touch, you can actually play the instruments manually, you pick which instrument you wish to play once you've bought it and it gives you keys 1-8 each one does a diffrent note and you can hold crtl to change the octaves, or bend the note whatever it's doing, I had alot of fun with this feature I actually crated the Beverly Hills Cop theme on a claronet :D I haven't got any fans yet but soon they will be bowing down to me :D
Now i'll talk about the proffesions a little bit, I haven't actually explored this area too much but I took woodworker as my profession you seem to go around chopping wood and then crafting it into sword, obviously you need to work with miners to get the right type of materials but they also have to work with you because they need wood, you can buy new recipes to make which you will need a certain woodworker skill rating to make, very similar to WoW you get the idea, there are a few new proffesions unique to Lotro I can't quite recall them all, I noticed Historian and jewler I think there is one or two more new ones but I can't recall them.
Now the graphics, obviously they've had much longer to pimp there graphics than WoW and they used there time well,l there stunning, I can't run them on full because I just can't handle it, but the settings I have right now which are about medium to high, are brilliant, I can't imagine what the game would be like playing with everything ultra high, theres some depth of field, a bit of bloom, anistropic filtering, didn't notice any anti aliasing but maybe its not usuable for my rig.
anyway, i've covered like 5% of this game in this short look at it if you have questions about anything else ask me because i couldn't fit it all and if your getting this game, good on ya because I don't think you'll be disapointed
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