Lord of the Rings Online launched as a free-to-play game today.
No, wait.
The gates that had been shut beyond the memory of Man groaned open on hinges made of dwarven stone, mithril-inlaid runes pulsing a message nobody living could read…. BE FREE….
No, no, no.
In Evendim, did Lysistra, a Capitan of Men, foresee
A day of future memory when Eriador would be free
Not from Sauron’s minions, not from Saruman’s lies
Not from Archet’s bandits, nor from the Shire’s pies
Only freedom from quiet, freedom so bold,
freedom from mail delivery, thirty days old
Does that work? I don’t think that really works. It’s Lord of the Rings! It inspires bad poetry and people talking in rhyme and stuff.
Lord of the Rings relaunched as a free-to-play game yesterday for anyone who had ever subscribed, and Friday for everyone else. While parts of the game are free to play, and there is a path, as tedious as it may seem, to get to the edge of Moria without paying a penny, it would be a mistake to start in LotRO thinking Turbine won’t ever earn your credit card number.
You WILL be paying, make no mistake. It would be more fair to think of LotRO as a game where you can try different races and classes to some arbitrary level – let’s say, 20 – before you really have to start worrying about how much it will cost you. Well before that level, though, you’ll have come up against the “unlock” button – a hint at something that sounds like fun, and all you have to do is press unlock and spend some Turbine Points (which, through some error, were being given away for random actions… I earned 30 for logging in and getting on my horse).
I’d gotten bored with the LotRO quest grind when I was a subscriber, and even paying nothing wouldn’t make me enjoy the endless killing of wildlife one bit more, but skirmishes – they sounded cool. Skirmishes are instanced encounters sized for your group and aided by hirelings which you can customize to a large extent with Skirmish Marks you earn from successful completion. You can also choose to relive certain “classic” dungeons, all from the comfort of the skirmish window.
After going through the skirmish tutorial, which leads you through two sample skirmishes dealing with the retaking of Bree (this was given at the skirmish camp south of Bree; your mileage my vary), I was absolutely ready to continue on. The skirmish window had a nice variety of fun little encounters. I chose to defend Amon Sul from undead and….
PAYWALL. It had taken me approximately fifteen minutes to hit the edge of free content as a 37 Captain. Since I have bought the Moria expansion, that’s open to me later on, but other than that, it’s just boring killing grinding. The fun stuff, I’d pay for.
What the heck. Amon Sul needed defending, and my credit card is my shield. Card in hand, I went to the store to buy Turbine Points and unlock a few skirmishes and… was denied. The store just generated errors.
So, that ended my peek into LotRO F2P for that night, anyway.
I will definitely be checking back when their store is working. I want to play with the skirmishes. I even want to see Moria.