I am sorry, but LOTRO is...like a LOTR game? The plot is good? It has which characters?
HAH you know that's such a good question, didn't even think to explain it properly.
LOTRO is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), think World of Warcraft-esque. It's about 15 years old so it's a little on the dated side graphics wise and it's gameplay is essentially landscape exploration and combat, with group content that goes from three-person dungeons to full 12-person raids.
BEING a 15 year old game the plot is... enormous. Like its hard to even talk about a 'plot' at this point, since there are about 30 different individual storylines for each zone strewn throughout a multitude of quests that see you talking to every character imaginable. Like 'which characters does it have'? all of them, LOTRO has all characters from lotr in it. LOTRO has characters you don't even remember in it. In LOTRO you get major questlines from Denethor's two unnamed elder sisters. In LOTRO they make you care about the men named amongst the dead in the song of lament after the pelennor fields, people you never speak too in the books.
You create a character and choose your race and begin to journey from the furthest west (Ered Luin, the Shire, Bree or Cardolan depending on choices) to the furthest east and act as a side character to the main plot of lotr. You cross paths with the fellowship at various points and develop relationships with all of them, up to and past the death of sauron (currently the game has expanded into Umbar, months after Sauron's defeat in game canon.) All of the game's story is told through quest dialogue, which you have to read, it's a hell of a lot of reading, whether thats reading what people are saying to you when you accept a quest or reading what NPC's are saying to you within quest instances and 'cutscenes'.
So there is an overarching plot, called 'epic book quests', which will take you on this journey, but it is dwarfed by the sheer number of surrounding tales going within each area you visit. Dunland is an excellent example, you have to travel through it to get to Rohan but what you're doing whilst you're there is investing yourself in the struggles, politics, dangers and cultures of the people who live in Dunland. And that is true for every area you visit, which inevitably makes LOTRO a massive worldbuilding and expanding project for middle earth. Like it's really hard to put into words quite how much 'plot' there is in this game. Some of it is good, some of it is not so good, some of it is so good it makes me want to bite the game, some of it is so bad it makes me want to bite the game, you will find 30 favourite plots and 30 hated plots and 100+ more in the middle.
Of course, this means LOTRO also creates it's own characters to fit into the world and get attached too, many of whom I now love and care for just as much as original canon characters. Like fucking Ayorzen. Oh my god. I love Ayorzen. You only meet him at level 110 in mordor and it takes you real life months of questing to reach that point. Not anything repetetive either, you do not grind exp in this game unless you actually want too, there are just that many quests and storylines between you and mordor that it takes you months to finish them all. Are some of the epic book quests kinda superfluous and make you run around way too much? Yes. I don't care about them, the point of lotro is in the smaller stories you find along the way. The game is about being able to walk, by yourself, no loading screens, from the Shire to Mordor and beyond and experience the minutae of middle-earth living whilst you do it. Hope that somehow answers your questions!
Oh it's also a dress up game, forgot to mention that, the lotro devs will disagree but this is a dress up game except you're dressing up TO journey through middle earth and you can unlock multiple outfit slots to customise that you can change your character into whenever you like, no restrictions on what you can put on your outfits regardless of levels or classes so long as you have wardrobe space. Unfortunately the game's armours are ugly as sin until level 50, though happily that's a shorter trip than it sounds, early game goes by much faster than the post-50 stuff.
I theorized once that the early armors were ugly in order to promote the costuming system. Even early on there're plenty of decent hauberks and surcoats to dress up the fighting characters as well as robes and dresses for the casters. Or vise-versa, since they have no effect on stats.
I don't play as consistently as I should, and have never even had a max-level character, but I have a lot of good memories of this game and screencaps going back to at least 2013.
When the game launched in 2007 there were very few hauberks and dresses and the like. Very, very few lol
As for the OP, I agree there's a whole lot of things to do in Lotro (its also, by square miles, the largest MMO landscape wise), but I really love the epic story and some of the post sauron stuff has been excellent.
My one complaint is pretty much throughout Rohan especially but other zones later on, a lot of plot threads in the epic story don't get solved until you do the zone quests. Which means if you wanted to find out what happened in that really cool icy zone in Rohan you had to stick around (and boy am I glad I did)
I fell for my wife alpha/beta testing LOTRO and it will always be a game we go back to despite taking many breaks. In alpha there were…three zones tops. Beta added several over the course of six months or so. We had epic arguments on the beta forums about topics including blonde elves. (elves couldn't be blonde for early beta until we convinced the devs to add blonde hair options for elves)
My wife couldn't make it past the character creator in alpha. Lotro's has always been lacking but it was…really, really bad in alpha. After I tried it and walked into the fields of flowers in archet, watching them wave in the wind, standing there and just…existing in middle-earth…I convinced her to try again and go to that field.
And it's been one of our homes ever since.
Have an alpha screenshot!
