Who’s left? People who have broadband connections, love LoTR, loved the books, think paying a monthly fee is worth it, and were just waiting for the right medieval-fantasy MMORPG to come along?

Hahaha. Totally. Right in one. :)

I guess ‘the audience’ I’m thinking of is Joe Sixpack. If I were Midway/Turbine/Tolkien Enterprises, I would seriously be thinking of doing some television advertising for this one. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a TV ad for a MMOG. I thought I was dreaming.

The LOTR PS2 games sold pretty well. Assuming that an ad can explain to them the substantial differences between hack and slash PS2 gaming and a MMOG, there might be some traction there.

I guess the bottom line is that I believe in the IP. I think Turbine is making some okay design/financial decisions, and hoping for the best. My own personal opinions of the game are not the issue: how is the buying public going to react to it?

LoTRO is not based on the movies, but it uses most of the defining elements Peter Jackson came up with. Turbine probably had no choice. In a living persistent movie, you can’t ignore the best thing to ever happen to Tolkien’s work since he wrote the books in the first place. Jackson made LoTR mass marketable, and Turbine had to carry that torch.

But they did so by wrapping LoTR movie graphics around a core gameplay everyone who’s interested in this genre already can access. This is their mistake I feel. Even if combat wasn’t plodding and boring, it’s just so close to WoW that I can’t see hundreds of thousands sticking with it after the first month or so oh-gee factor wears off.

Further, how many players will ever see the ring tossed into Mount Doom? How many will fight the leader of the Naz’ghul directly? Are they ever going to ride an Oliphant? Most of the stuff in the movies are the super-high-level events that pockmark the average stuff we do every day in standard MMOs. They HAVE to be epic and therefore only accessible to those who do a lot of freakin’ work beforehand. That leaves out 90% of the account holders.

WoW is EQ1, but built for normal people to actually play it. LoTRO is WoW with different graphics. The leap is just not keep people interested for long.

That said, we’re just not the audience they’re going for.

I disagree with this, which is why I wrote the above.

They will capture some new folks by name alone, ala SWG. However, people who want a massive RPG set in Tolkien lore have dozens of options to choose from. They all borrow the same conventions, written by him, like D&D before them. We’ve been chasing spell-casting/sword-weaving for a decade. Who’s left? People who have broadband connections, love LoTR, loved the books, think paying a monthly fee is worth it, and were just waiting for the right medieval-fantasy MMORPG to come along? :)

Blizzard has changed the gaming landscape forEVER. You can’t pitch spending millions of dollars in game development just to capture a niche audience. Investors want millions of players. They want the untapped audience that Blizzard has unleashed into the market and rightly so. Does this mean no niche games? No, it doesn’t. Somewhere someone will continue to develop niche and indy games. Sorrry folks, this wasn’t one of them. You don’t aim for EQ1 numbers when you’ve purchased the LOTR ip. Come on, please get serious.

To the rabid fans – and I loved the books and the movies, I say try getting up the venture capitol to back a game and you can make it anyway you please. This game wasn’t built to pay homage to Tolkien. It was built for mass market gaming appeal. You want explicit LOTR? Get someone to back a console or single player game and you can get that kind of implementation – no variance or compromise. Until then, cut developers using existing IPs some slack. These are million dollar deals. I’m sorry if they can’t be so concerned about your feelings.

The point is, either way, it’s not aimed at Massive gamers. Getting upset because they’re not being innovative with a commercial product is like faulting McDonalds because their new sandwich uses bread.

Wrong. LOTRO is aimed at fans of the Lord of the Rings MOVIES. The fans of the books hate the game.