Best New Game: Lord of the Rings Online (Turbine / Midway)
By Dana Massey
A license like JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings can be a blessing and a curse for a development studio, but in 2007, Boston-based Turbine managed to walk the tight-rope of expectations and reality to deliver the best new MMO since World of Warcraft launched in 2004.
The game is not exactly revolutionary in terms of design, but it boils down what has come before to an exact science and throws it all into a beautifully crafted world that manages to fully capture the feel of Middle-earth and, more impressively, do so independently from Peter Jackson's big screen version.
As an evolutionary product, LotRO moved the genre forward with a few key innovations: Monster Play created a new twist on player vs. player combat that made sense in Middle-earth and will surely find its way into future generations of games, while Deeds managed to capture the achiever crowd with a system of rewards that is second only to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Achievement system.
The classes are all relatively interesting and the story as good as any other MMO. LotRO did not exactly set the MMO world on its head, but it is solid in every single area. Most importantly, its launch was as smooth as one could hope and the game itself was polished to a fine sheen, which shows that Turbine did more than just claim they learned the lesson of polish from WoW. They made sure to put it in practice.
Sadly, it is a comment on the Western subscription-based MMO genre's current weakness that despite the fact that LotRO is such a solid game, its commercial success is at best modest and likely below the expectations Turbine and Midway had for a game with such an IP. Turbine CEO Jeff Anderson was replaced later in the year and while outwardly everyone says the right things, if LotRO had met or exceeded their expectations, it seems unlikely that Anderson would have been replaced.
Nonetheless, Lord of the Rings Online is clearly a profitable project with a bright future of free and paid expansions laid out in front of it. Fans of the game and the genre finally received a fun and stable new MMO in 2007, which is more than can be said about some previous years.
Past Winner
- 2006: Not Awarded
Next up, the most anticipated game of next year!
