I played in the Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar beta for a bit, but I stopped once I realized I really didn’t have much interest in the game.
I have always loved the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings books, and the Peter Jackson movies were fantastic. But what makes those things great is the story, the lore. And while some of that is captured in the MMO, there were some things that were just out of place. Much like with Vangard, their attempts at trying to attain a “realistic” look and feel for the game is destroyed by floating question marks and exclamation points. Over in this thread for the problem in Vanguard, Destral proposes what I think is an excellent idea:
I would have thought it wouldn’t be too hard to have NPC’s react to the proximity of a character that can perform a quest for them by having them call out to the player (and only to the player, so that other players don’t see it).
So a character could be walking around in Leth Nurae, when they might see ‘Flavian Vel’selth calls out to you, “Good day, Soandso, would you have a moment?”‘. If the player is interested in accepting a quest, he could then walk over to the character and hail them, initiating the quest dialog.
Of course, this should only happen with some NPC’s in any case, else all quests would be discovered all too soon.
That should take care of the floating question marks, imo.
That is one seriously good idea, and while there are issues brought up in the following discussion, I’m sure most of them could be worked out rather easily.
The other really huge problem I have with Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is the title to this post. Yes, hobbits wear shoes. Sure, you can disable the graphics much like turning off helms and cloaks in World of Warcraft, but seriously… in the original lore Tolkien spends entire chapters (well, not really all at once, but over the course of the tales) talking about hobbits and their feet. Their leathery soles and hairy toes are arguably an integral part of the world. Even giving them a shoe/boot equipment slot is abandoning the lore. Of course, the designers were probably worried about equality in equipment… but why? Why does there have to be equality? Why not give the hobbits an anklet slot instead and allow them to wear ankle jewelry that no one else gets to wear in place of the shoes that they don’t wear.
Overall, it is things like this that keep me playing WoW. I want to play an MMO, but so far no new game has really shown me anything I want that isn’t in WoW that is good enough for me to put up with the stuff that is wrong with those games.