![]() If I'd gone another way in the Morgul Vale, I would have met Radagast. ![]() Ithilien had at least three side quests that Frodo and his party didn't do, including a crypt, a Haradrim deserter who will join the party, and recovering the eye of the statue. I never returned to Dunland, and thus missed the side adventures there. The open world is nice, but the game only gives you any directions along the main quest path. Now, it turns out that I missed a lot of side quests, mostly towards the end. This is related to the game's absurd healing system, by which characters are only fully healed at a few plot intervals, with meals and Athelas curing just a few hit points in between. In fact, every time you stop to check out an unexplored area or building, you run the risk of some extra combats that leave the party weakened for the required encounters. While many of the side-quests and chance encounters are interesting, hardly any of them offer anything material to the characters. Very late in the game, Aragorn can learn skills he won't need for the rest of the game.Įven worse is the way that it undercuts nonlinear exploration and optional encounters, essentially its only strength. ![]() Combat couldn't be more boring, and there's essentially no magic system: "spells" are keywords that solve puzzles, more like inventory items. Inventory upgrades are scarce and essentially unnecessary for the same reasons. None of these improvements mean anything because, first, combat is so easy that your characters don't need to improve to beat the game, and second, every party starts with all the skills they need spread out among the characters. Character development occurs through the occasional increase in attributes and the occasional acquisition of skills as a reward for exploration or quest-solving. The game fails, on the other hand, in just about every possible way as an RPG. Before we get into a litany of complaints, we have to at least admire the flexibility of the plot, plus the game's ability to introduce side quests that work thematically with the main plot points. In that sense, the game world worked out very well. Perhaps the only way to do it well is to allow such detours (as Interplay did here) and then give it to a player who doesn't care much about the original (e.g., me). The problem with using existing plots is that either the player is on a railroad towards a predetermined destination, or he's jarred by the detours. Offering an option to execute Gollum took some guts. Games based on Dungeons & Dragons' Forgotten Realms largely seem to take this approach, although with much less well-known source material. If I had made a Lord of the Rings game, I would have told a story of a group of rangers, or Rohirrim, or even a motley group like the Fellowship, engaged in a struggle ancillary to the main plot, perhaps featuring Frodo, Aragorn, et. ![]() This is different, you understand, than setting a new adventure in a familiar universe. I'm not sure that it's possible to make a truly excellent RPG based on an existing plot with existing characters, particularly ones who live as largely in the imagination as the canonical members of the Fellowship of the Ring. ![]()
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