f13.net forums - LOTRO: Mines of Moria - Editors choice

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Greatness isn't really found in innovation, but in execution. Take, for example, The Lord of the Rings Online. Turbine's Tolkien-themed MMO launched in April 2007 and has marched in the shadows of its larger brethren ever since. Often dismissed as "WoW with hobbits" (there's an element of truth -- many of its gameplay systems are derived from the WoW standard), LotRO has spent the last year and a half becoming one of the best (if not the biggest) MMOs on the market by focusing relentlessly on what it's good at: PvE content, small-group, casual and solo-friendly questing that makes content created for masses of players feel intimate and personal. The culmination of this process is the release of Mines of Moria, an absolutely brilliant expansion pack that takes everything the development team has learned and crafts it into a sublime MMO experience.

While Mines of Moria adds three new adventuring regions to the game (Eregion, Lothlorien and Moria itself), the unquestioned star of the expansion pack is the huge city of Khazad-dum. The lost underground homeland of the Dwarves race is a masterpiece of art design. It's a series of cavernous playfields that continually overwhelm the player with one stunning setting after another. As the player progresses through Moria, they'll find the imposing black and gold geometry of Durin's Hall giving way to steampunk-ish waterworks to oppressive fungus-encrusted caverns teeming with insects to the Elf-influenced hall of Nud-melek. More than the big stuff, though, it's all the delightful details ranging from huge dwarf faces carved into the rock walls to the scars on the broken bridge where Gandalf fought the Balrog that really sell that the player is exploring the greatest "dungeon crawl" ever created.

The art design is matched by the fascinating landscape design. Unlike most videogame caves, the underground world of Khazad-dum is built like a real cavern. That means that the landscape of Moria is as much vertical as it is horizontal. The huge area is made somewhat difficult to navigate by a plethora of bottomless pits, enormous staircases and monsters and features that exist on different levels and aren't afraid to pepper players with arrows from places said players will find it hard to reach quickly. Indeed, what often looks like a short distance on the in-game map can actually be a tortuous route to navigate. This makes exploring and battling in Moria a unique experience. Unlike most other MMOs, fighting the landscape is as much a part of the game as fighting monsters. Cave-claws, for example, are terrifying creatures more by virtue of their knock-back ability than their damage-dealing. This does mean that Moria is not for beginners, but LotRO veterans will relish the opportunity to step up their game.

As with the original Shadows of Angmar, the developers at Turbine have wisely decided to take the focus off the Fellowship of the Ring as much as possible and stake out their own storytelling territory within Tolkien's universe. Thus Mines of Moria finds the Fellowship itself safely ensconced in Lothlorien and has the player base dealing with the insanity in the caverns kicked up by their passage and the death of Moria's former master, the Balrog. It seems that the power vacuum created by its loss has spurred Mordor, Isengard and Angmar to enter the caverns and try to claim a share of its riches for themselves. This results in extended internecine battles between each of them, along with the native Morians and the Dwarf expeditionaries that the player gets involved with.

This storyline is relayed primarily through brilliantly executed solo and small-group PvE quest content. It's here where the development team shows just how much they've learned since the game launched. One early quest, for example, has the player scouting out a particular tribe of goblins to learn why they've stopped attacking the Dwarves. This chain ends with a harrowing instanced chase through an old water-reclamation facility where the player learns that the native goblins are being attacked by Mordor Orcs who wish them to pledge allegiance to Sauron.

What makes that particular quest series so extraordinary is the realization that this is a basic chain that culminates in a solo-instance. There's no epic loot involved, nor is this a major plot point or a big boss battle, yet it's crafted with the kind of eye for cinematic detail and challenge that most MMOs save for their big raid content. As the player steps up to larger pieces of content (six-person dungeons are the norm, though the game sports a lot of two- and three-person content as well) the quests merely get better. A puzzle-oriented Dwarven bank vault run is a particular standout, as are terrific new "session play" quests that let players leave their main characters and briefly step into the shoes of characters such as an Angmarim torturer or a bystander during Durin's discovery of the Balrog. That's not to say that every quest is crafted with such care, of course. The game still has plenty of "Kill 10 of these and bring me their skulls," but Mines of Moria does more to break up the grind with exciting PvE experiences than almost any other MMO out there.

One of the truly new elements on offer in Mines of Moria is the Legendary Item system. These are fairly ordinary magical items with mediocre bonuses that possess their own experience levels that increase as the player utilizes them in combat. As items level up, they'll earn special points and acquire special relics and gems garnered from destroying other legendary items that can then be plowed back into the item to gradually increase its abilities. This system was an instant hit the moment it was introduced and is gradually becoming a major portion of the game. It's easy to see why. The process of leveling up to six items at a time to create insanely customized loot geared specifically to an individual player is tremendous fun and actually mimics the character leveling process that makes an MMO so appealing. Indeed, after creating our beloved "Speak Softly...," (our personalized Lore-master staff), it's difficult to comprehend going back to boring old epic loot.

The expansion also offers two new character classes, and both are great new additions to the game. The Rune-keeper is a DPS/Healer hybrid that has the capability of shifting roles from fight to fight depending on which skills he or she chooses to use. While the class fills in ably as a supplemental healer, its greatest utility is simply to be a kind of high-damage "nuker" class designed to appeal to players who enjoy a World of Warcraft Mage. The Warden, on the other hand, is just awesome. It's a tank class that can actually shift from being a defensive tank to a DPS class in the middle of a fight, again depending on which combination of colored skills the player chooses to implement. While not particularly easy to use (there are a lot of combos to remember, each of which does something different) the Warden provides the kind of moment-to-moment strategic intensity that's often missing in a turn clock-based MMO combat system. The result is a character that's a blast to use and requires much more from a player than merely the ability to watch cooldown timers.

If there's a major strike against Mines of Moria, it's that it gives short shrift to a chronically underserved portion of LotRO's player base -- the PvP gamer. The game's solitary "player-vs.-monster-player" zone (the Ettenmoors) has received a significant make-over. The mechanics of capturing and holding the main fortresses and lesser camps in the zone has been shifted to finally make it worthwhile for PvP groups of less than raid size to play. Monster players get a ten-level upgrade and a whole new Trait system they can use to customize their monsters. This and other new additions are most welcome and should give dedicated 'Moors residents all kinds of new stuff to sink their teeth into. The downside is that the 'Moors are still the 'Moors, the same Iluvatar-benighted valley PvPers have been fighting over since the game launched last April. Launching the expansion without a new PvMP battlefield can't make PvPers happy when there are games like Warhammer Online out there that cater specifically to the PvP bug.

In the end, Mines of Moria proves that while innovation is nice, it plays second fiddle to vision. The Lord of the Rings Online has never been about acquiring "phat loot" or farming raids or offering the most finely tuned PvP in the MMO space. Like the license it bears, LotRO is about the journey -- exploring Middle-earth and having exciting adventures within the world Tolkien created. Mines of Moria brilliantly enhances and refines this vision, taking the first and greatest dungeon crawl ever created and bringing it to life for thousands of players. What pushes it over the top into the realm of genius is that it takes a playground made for thousands and makes it feel like your own personal adventure.

Link to evil gamespy site.