Lord of the Rings Online Open Beta

Well, the open beta has started, at least for those of us who have preordered. Everyone else gets to wait until April 6, 2007.

For those of you who aren't quite sure what's going on, Open Beta lasts until sometime around April 24, 2007 (probably April 20th or so), and characters are capped at level 15. For those who preorder, all characters will be ported over to the live servers at launch, and Turbine is looking at handing out nearly a million CD keys for open beta, starting with seven servers to play in.

I created an Elven Champion on Landroval to play with some friends, and because I haven't played an elf yet. The intro for the elves is really nice, and takes place hundreds of years before the actual game does, showcasing a younger Elrond as you see the destruction of Edhelion. Once you go through the intro, which shows off the snow troll as well, you flash forward to 'present time' in the ruins of Edhelion for the newbie area. Apparently, this is the newbie area for elves, dwarves and hobbits, as I saw a number of all of them. While everyone clusters around the opening monsters for a level or two, it's easy to spread out after that, and even in the starting few feet, there's trainers, shops and a number of quests to work with. There's even an instance not far away, which has a very nice visual of another troll turned to stone with a shaft of sunlight shining upon it.

Response on the beta forums have been solidly in favor of this game. Queues are mentioned (although I haven't seen any yet), but that's really a reality now thanks to World of Warcraft. From what I've seen (on a low end machine), the game runs rather well at medium settings, although there's some definite lag here and there, which I attribute to my system. Personally, once I get my new system set up (hopefully sometime in May or so, still need to buy parts), I'll really be able to see this thing for how pretty it really is. After all, I'm currently running a system which BARELY beats minimum requirements.

Got anything you want me to check out? Lemme know!