LOTRO is the first online LOTR game ever. You really feel as if you are there, standing on Weathertop overlooking the lands and seeing the Forsaken Inn in the distance, or fighting a Nazgul and feeling dread as Saurons eye flashes on your screen.

Online games are fun if the community is fun. The community in LOTRO is excellent, everyone is friendly and many players role play as their character. Other players affect your enjoyment of the game, as this is an online game. It feels out of place if kids are acting stupid. But that is not to be found in this game.

Gameplay is excellent. There are literally hundreds of quests to do, all of them with a unique story. Help a Ranger kill a troll from Weathertop with your Fellowship. Finishing quests gives you a feeling of accomplishment, not because you get more XP and rewards, but because you feel as if you have helped someone and that you had fun doing it.

Graphics are realistically detailed for an online game. Even better than Oblivion, I must say.

Updates are important for online games. Bugs need to be fixed, and the developers are onto problems all the time. The game is constantly updated. The developers do not care about rushing the game out or making seperate expansion packs to get extra money. The expansions are all free.

LOTRO is a game that is well worth purchasing over World of Warcraft for those who consider which one to buy. What does World of Warcraft have to offer? Cartoonish graphics, immature and rude community, buggy gameplay and an expansion pack that you have to purchase seperately.

Lord of the Rings Online is precious…an enjoyable game that is a rare and engaging experience…Gollum recommends it to you…yesss

I purchased this game because I wanted to save some bandwidth by getting the original game and patching it, instead of just downloading the digital download Turbine provide for Lord of the Rings Online (it is a free game now) for the entire game.

This proved to be a very flawed decision because after installing this copy of the game and patching it, it hardly worked at all. Because there has been so much new content in the game, patching the original cds does not work, you pretty much are forced to download the digital download turbine provide, instead of looking for an older copy of the game.

The game is fantastic, I've played A lot of the MMO's out there and this is the one I've enjoyed the most. It's player base is solid and very mature and there is plenty of content, also actually leveling is fun. It is not just a race to endgame like most online games.

The bottom line is, if you want to play Lord of the Rings Online, get the Digital Download from the official website instead of buying older game cds. Also with the Digital Download you do not have to patch the game, but if you install with this product, you will have to get about 8–10gb worth of patches, when the entire Digital Download is only 12.

This game is epic, with great gameplay and a beautiful and endless world to explore I have been addicted from the start.

But since the game was made free to play it can be downloaded for free from the LOTRO website. I bought this hoping that the install disks would allow me to avoid the 10gb download but once installed I had to dowload 9gb's of updates. Since the CD-key that came with the gane give's you a month of free VIP it is worth the $15 I payed for it but not wrth the full price of $50