Lord of the Rings Conquest could have been great…
Lord of the Rings Conquest comes from Pandemic Studios, the development team behind the Mercenaries and the Star Wars: Battlefront games. It was recently acquired by EA, and apparently with EA owning the Lord of the Rings video game license, Pandemic decided to combine that with their Star Wars: Battlefront gameplay. I had never played the Star Wars: Battlefront games, but I believe they had quite a following. I’m not sure whether it was due to the gameplay or the Star Wars license, but something kept the kids into it.
Before the demo, I was somewhat interested. After all, the official EA Lord of the Rings games on last gen’s systems were actually quite enjoyable. Hacking and slashing my way through the games with my brother while leveling up the various heroes was a lot of fun. The EA Lord of the Rings games on the PS2/Xbox were perhaps the best licensed games I have played in a while. Unfortunately, the demo for Lord of the Rings Conquest indicates that it is not going to follow that same path and I will most likely be skipping the retail release.
There was a time maybe 10-15 years ago, when simple team deathmatch was perfectly acceptable. Back then, just the fact that you could play online against human opponents was ridiculously awesome enough! You just joined a server, picked a side, and in the case of Team Fortress 1, you picked a class, and just went at it. Nowadays, there’s all sorts of objectives in multiplayer matches (Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament), various customization options based on how you actually want to play (Call of Duty 4, Shadowrun), stat-tracking and ranking/leveling (Halo 3, Battlefield: Bad Company), and even games that allow you to join online matches and still stay on the same team as all your friends (Halo 3, Shadowrun, Call of Duty 4, etc.). So how is it possible, that EA & Pandemic expect to release a primarily online game with practically none of these modern day online features?
When I think of a Lord of the Rings online style adversarial game, I think of two games that it should be inspired by: Dynasty Warriors and the Defense of the Ancients (DotA) mod from Warcraft III. Imagine if each multiplayer level is basically an epic war where hundreds of nameless foot soldiers like in Dynasty Warriors or DotA are advancing and each of the eight players on your side picks a unique hero. Throughout the round, the players work together to maintain and control various areas while fighting off not only enemy heroes, but dozens of enemy grunts as well. At the same time, your hero levels up throughout the round based on how many kills he racks up off the opposing team’s players and foot soldiers. Increasing in level makes it so when the opposing team kills you, they gain more experience, so it all evens out and by the end of the round, all heroes are practically super-powerful going at it to try to win the match. Either that or throw in an RPG style leveling profile you can make progress in and keep from one server to another or even equipment and items and you’d have quite the beloved game. Something along those lines would have been awesome and quite addictive. When I think Lord of the Rings, I think huge epic wars with cool heroes and villains.
But then I played the demo. The demo consists of single-player training and online multiplayer on two levels. Fine, I can accept that the multiplayer game is capped at 16 players. While it’s disappointing considering 3-4 years ago Star Wars Battlefront II had 64 players on the PC and 32 players on the Xbox, it’s not a deal-breaker since there probably aren’t even enough heroes on each side to support more than 8v8. Wait, what? We’re not playing as the heroes in Lord of the Rings Conquest? We’re actually playing as nameless grunts that can either be a warrior, archer, mage, or scout? What the heck – the license has heroes that are practically worshiped and they aren’t even fully utilized in the game. (Supposedly the highest scoring player on the team can eventually control one hero, but come on.)
Then there’s the second disappointing aspect to the demo: there is no epic war. One of the two multiplayer levels in the demo was literally a street. All I saw was some player controlled grunts on each team fighting on a street to secure a flag. What the heck. Where was the epic-ness? Where were the tactics and strategy? These were just capture nodes all in a line and it had people respawning and throwing themselves at the nodes. At least spread them out some so people can work on trying to control different points on the map. It almost seemed like the “War” mode in Call of Duty: World at War: everyone just heaving themselves at a contested node. There’s no strategy or skill in all that but just rams butting heads over and over until one side wins out.
There’s also no identification with your own character. If we can’t play as the heroes, let us at least customize the way we look or play. The gameplay actually feels like the simplified fighting instances in MMORPG PvP fighting arenas like World of Warcraft’s Battle Grounds. But unlike in MMORPG’s where you actually invest a lot of time into creating the character you want to use for PvP, in this game you simply just choose a class and play. In fact, if you don’t like that class, just switch to another one before you respawn and that’s it. There’s nothing deeper as your character doesn’t have a name, stats, or anything. No matchmaking, party systems, etc. either. Just a screen of various servers and auto-balanced teams. What is this, the 90s? Even the graphics seem a bit dated for a game this late in the 360 life cycle.
I guess the game may be a bit appealing to fans of the Lord of the Rings. At this point, I’d say that’s really all it has going for it. But to actually believe this game is worth $60? Ugh. Seeing how well mediocre Star Wars-licensed games sell means this one will probably still sell decently though. For anyone that actually likes playing good online games, I’d skip this one. It’s like Lord of the Rings Conquest is still living in the past while the rest of the online gaming industry has moved forward. Don’t let the Lord of the Rings license fool you.
These impressions almost feel like more of a rant of what the game is not rather than what the game is. But I guess that’s more of what I feel – let down by the potential that it had and what it ended up as. The gameplay is shallow and mindless as I sat there with various other ranged units trading fireballs and arrows until the match time was over. And this is coming from someone that loves the Dynasty Warriors games. At least in those games there’s a certain level of strategy on the field, leveling up, items, upgrades, etc. Dynasty Warriors online would be great but for people to say that this game reminds them of Dynasty Warriors online is an insult to Dynasty Warriors.
