Its all gone a bit peculiar actually - for once, I seem to be on the right bus, and find my usually curmudgeonly solo self in the midst of something of a Lord of the Rings Online revival, with quite a few folks setting up static weekly groups and working up from the ground floor, seeing it all for the first time from scratch, or getting stuck into all the new and shiny at the top end, with the big expansion. I try not to get all fanboy about these games if I can avoid it, but it is nice and indeed, refreshing to be playing the same thing as a lot of other people for a change!
I'm a first timer, and doing my usual thing of poking at the mechanics to see what falls off, but find myself doing so in a far less analytical fashion than usual, and find myself often just being in the Shire, farming, postal services and pies.
Still, I wouldn't be me if I wasn't soullessly deconstructing the thing on some level, and so far two particular features have stood out for me as particularly good, in what many might see as a fairly conventional example of the type.
Firstly, the Traits are very clever. Combining the character personalisation of Talents (WoW et all), with the sheer collectablity of Achievements (XBox360, City of Heroes, etc), these provide a fascinating alternative gameplay, based in, well, all sorts of stuff actually. There's a separate quest journal style book which does nothing but log your progress through all sorts of tasks in the game, from the simple (Kill 30 Wolfs, Visit all the Forts), to the epic (Complete all the Books of the Shadows of Angmar), to the ridiculous (Retrieve all the Suspect Pies in the Shire), and many of these progress bars dish out Traits as a completion reward.
Once obtained, you can then talk to the nearest Bard, and effectively respec the new Traits into your build, on the fly. The individual Traits function much like WoW's Talents, but are used in a far more modular and flexible manner than the trees found elsewhere. Traits can be incremented by carrying out various deeds that have the same Trait reward, gaining ranks and power, and come in various racial and class based categories as well as the more generic 'Virtue' based ones that everyone can use. We are all the Hero, after all!
The other thing that took my fancy, was Dread and Hope. Based on 'How you're feeling about things', the game does remarkably effective things with the visual display. With positive Hope, life is good, everything is colourful and cheerful and bright (even at night), and you even sparkle a bit. A number of things can burst this bubble; scary places, frightening enemies, and of course, being killed 'forced to retreat by morale failure', all of which give you Dread, a temporary debuff which negates Hope.
This acts as the usual kind of Death Penalty mechanic, nerfing your stats and such, but also starts affecting how the game looks. Increased Dread causes the colour pallette to bleed away, makes the edges of the screen start to fog up, and similar other little visual tricks, all of which serve to create the most convincing feeling of being unsettled I've ever seen in any MMO. Subtle in execution, you really fell like being killed has actually dealt you a blow, whereas in most other games of the type, the lone tiny death penalty icon in the far corner of the screen is easily overlooked and forgotten.
A stark example of this was the Old Forest, a region which gives you +1 Dread for just being there. One death in here tips you over neutral Hope/Dread into Dread. Running back to the fight, I was flipping my 'Happy Hat' on and off. My Happy Hat was a reward from The Life of A Bounder (Final) in the Shire and which gives +20 Radiance when worn. +20 Radiance equals +2 Hope, apparently, and putting on and taking off the hat was doing remarkable things to the entire screen, transforming the Old Forest form a brooding stark and cold place, done mostly in greys and blues, with fuzzy grey screen edges, into something altogether warmer, clearer and more sylvanian, and back again. Getting the most out of LotRO really does seem to be a matter of having a positive outlook! Very well done, and doing wonders to inject an often missing sense of drama and presence to computer game places and monsters.
All in all, a great deal more engaging and effective than the more traditional mechanisms governing this kind of thing, and seems quite typical of what I'm finding about the game on a broader level, in that while not particularly revolutionary or genre-breaking, it does do the 'usual' features of the genre very well, and with a continually impressive level of detail, making for a very polished experience, if not a startlingly original one.
Depends what you're looking for in an MMO really, and just now, I could really go for an extended period of uncomplicated familiarity conducted in a well-crafted manner. The game shares much with the books in that regard.