LOTRO F2P Launches In Europe On Tuesday
Nothing says Lord of the Rings quite like a Hobbit dancing with a shrew
This is not a hoax. This is not a dream. This is fact. Hot on the heals of this week’s preview event, Codemasters have finally announced that Lord of the Rings Online will go Free-2-Play in Europe on Tuesday, 2nd November (2010 in case anyone is suffering from cynical doubt). Finally. Us Europeans may not be the fastest with gaming distribution or have the best games web sites or, heck, even have polite customer service but we do eventually get their in the end.
To be honest, I’m not quite sure how it’s all going to work and if we’ll need to download new game clients or not. Apparently we won’t which is good because the Preview Event wanted players to download a whopping 12GB at a snail’s pace via the hideous, Internet-destroying Pando Media Booster (I keep calling it “Panda Media Booster” for some reason). If anything is going to put me off a MMO it’s having to use a horrible third party downloader that drags the entire speed of my Internet connection down to a crawl. Fortunately I still have the box version installed from the previous false F2P launch a couple of months ago so here’s hoping I can just patch it up and get underway.
Maybe it’s the lack of any big MMO releases at this moment in time but I’m surprisingly excited about getting to play LOTRO again. I know it’s quite silly really considering I could’ve just re-subscribed at any point in time but that somehow felt like defeating the purpose of Turbine’s move to F2P. Plus, I’m looking forward to playing the game at any pace I want without any sort of feeling of guilt about subscription fees or getting “value for money”.
I’ll post some information about the character I create (expect horrendous moustaches) next week once it’s launched. Assuming I don’t have to spend five days downloading the darn thing that is. Anyone able to recommend me a server?
-Gordon
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“A little further, Mr Frodo, just a little further. Look, we’re almost there!”
My guild nexus has a small branch on the laurelin server. It’s not the most active branch though and I haven’t got on since baby arrival. I have always found it a good server to play on though. It is a role-play server but not forced, you will just see people role-playing mostly In inns. I think the fact it’s a role-play server could be a reason there are not many idiots around.
Sweet, I’ll check it out!
I believe that if you have the current Live client installed, the F2P version only requires a patch of about 1GB.
I got that from reading the LotRO forum, so don’t sue me if it’s not true!
That’s good news. Guess we’ll find out on Tuesday.