Lord of the...World of Warcraft?Follow

I've got to admit, I loved WoW to bits, but after playing LOTRO for an hour I realised that WoW ins't as good as I thought. I now think LOTRO is for adults and WoW is for kids who aren't quite ready for LOTRO just yet.

You know to be perfectly honest, coming from a game developers stand point. Designing the interface and other facets of LoTR to be like WoW was actually a VERY good idea. For those WoW players that want a story based MMO that they are famular with and may of liked the books, designing LoTR similar to WoW was ingenuous. It makes transferring from WoW to LoTR seem less and simple to understand. Coming from a financial stand point, think about WoW for a second, they have a member base of about 8 million subscribers. Now, if the LoTR admitted that there game was not a WoW killer, and I believe they did. They at least realized that some, if not many WoW players were going to switch games anyways. The member subscriber base for WoW is not to be ignored here. The developers of LoTR were VERY smart to do what they did, and I applaud them for it.

Way to go!! Now I can play LoTR and not have to RELEARN and entire MMO all over again. Granted I have to learn the new content, but as far as some professions and the UI and a few other little things, heck I'm up and running pretty fast.

So it's not about copying, or stealing anything. The LoTR team made an excellent decision and they will make a lot of money because of it!!

Well, the biggest difference with FFXI and other games for their UI and such was that FFXI was/is Menu based. WoW, EQ2, LotRO are all ICON based. Hit an icon, use a spell/ability. Now, an icon system could have worked in FFXI, however a LOT of people seem to forget a key fact about FFXI:

It was designed for the PS2.

So, because of that, the UI had to be designed for the controller rather then a keyboard/mouse. When you have the keyboard/mouse available it lends itself to the icon based system because of reaction times.

As for similarities in playstyles and such... I'd only be repeating what has been said before in that it wasn't like WoW was totally original either. All MMOs (and heck RPGs actually, which is what a MMO is) share similarities. The only thing WoW did vastly different from the normal "mold" was to make the game solo friendly. It worked, so of course people are going to make their games more solo friendly too.

In all honesty, this game reminds me much, MUCH more of Guild Wars than it does WoW. IMO the only commonalities would be the look of the interface as well as the customization piece too.