As Turbine tweeted earlier today, they have released us from the NDA for their upcoming F2P/Freemium conversion. I have an actual article in my head that I may sit down and write tomorrow but for now I’ll just leave you with a slideshow of the Beta 1 screenshots I took.
I have had neither time nor motivation to participate in Beta 2 yet other than keeping the client patched. Mostly because I found myself approaching the situation I was in during beta for The Burning Crusade which caused me to cancel my WoW account, delete every character on every server and never look back. I don’t want that to happen with LOTRO so I have intentionally backed off my playtime in Beta 2.
I did tweet this earlier, but need to vent and get it off my chest here in more than 140 characters. I’ve done my fair share of beta testing and it isn’t often I come across the type of NDA that doesn’t even allow testers to admit they’re in beta. Turbine did that to us. Then they release every possible tidbit of information to the gaming sites and blogs, then very detailed developer diaries. Meanwhile we’re still under NDA so we can’t even comment on all this because doing so is admitting you’re in the beta and therefore violating the NDA. Is there much left to even discuss at this point? It was an extremely aggravating experience, to say the least.
To reiterate, these are all Beta 1 screenshots; some things have changed. I will make a separate gallery for Beta 2 when I get time to play, test, and take screenshots.
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Thank you for posting the slideshow. I’d been letting info on the beta pass me by figuring that I’d wait for launch. The captioning of your slideshow got my attention and I looked through every one. You’ve officially made me more excited for F2P lotro!
BTW, apologies for missing you on my own blog roll. I’ve been subscribed to the site for a while, just forgot to add the link. Fixed as of right now
That store in the first screenshot must be one of the most immersion breaking things in the game. Damn F2P plague .
Very nice screenshots and explanations, I also would like a more button look to the “lock”. They could have changed their whole buy/sell system a lot more, actually, and have done away with necessity of “locking” stuff. I wonder how much more skirmish mark oriented this will become. It seems Annuminas got a bit more love than just a new armor set, apparently people are meant to do a lot more there, which is great. The dungeons there are largely unknown to me as the game moved on, maybe the reinvigorated them.
I wonder how this will turn out once it goes live. The thing is, I am at the end of current content, dunno how much changes to the old world will do it for me.
But for new players it will for sure be heaven!
Excellent screenshots! I decided not to participate in the beta as of yet. I kind of wanted to be surprised but now that I have a bit of an idea of what to expect there are some things that I will really like and others not so much. The fact of the matter is that I love this game and as long as I think about the fun I’ve had over the last 3+ years, and how much more stuff there is to look forward to, I will continue to play, regardless of whatever changes happen to the game in the future.
Thanks for posting this, Scott