You are not the hero of this story

I do wonder how LOTRO comes across to anyone who isn't familiar with the source material.

Of course that begs the question is anyone unfamiliar with The Lord of the Rings? It's been the defining work of fantasy literature in the english speaking world for well over half a century, and the Peter Jackson films have given it a similar stature in film. Even if you haven't read the books or seen the films the likelihood is that you know something of the setting, and even if you didn't that setting defined, or redefined, so much of what fantasy worlds are that it would still be familiar even if your only knowledge was of other fictional worlds it has inspired.

If there's one fictional setting that doesn't really need to be explained it's this one.

Even so, LOTRO does assume that players will come to it with more than a cursory knowledge of Middle-Earth. The quest text leans to the lengthy – intentionally, to reflect the style of Tolkien's writing – but it doesn't often stop to explain things that would be obscure to someone new to the story.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the epic story. Aragorn's vague references to his greater responsiblities would be maddeningly opaque in another game, and there are frequent moments when events that would be big story events – like the Riders attacking the Prancing Pony – take place off-screen, while the player is elsewhere following up on a subplot.

We're not the hero of this story. LOTRO is perhaps unique in this respect among MMOs, in that our story exists in the margins of the larger narrative.

What's amazing is how well it works, and how it effectively sidesteps a lot of the narrative pitfalls of other MMOs. Too often there's a sense of "Well why don't you do it yourself?" when a questgiver sends you on some errand, but we accept it from Aragorn because we know he actually does have something much more important to do than run around Bree-land chasing the lesser agents of the Enemy.

Similarly – and this is one that made a big impression on me the first time I experienced it – it makes sense that when we first encounter the Ringwraiths we are literally too scared to fight them. It doesn't feel anti-climactic because we know that they are way out of our league, and the story is careful to provide other significant and still formidable enemies.

There's a larger story going on around us and we know what that story is, but our characters only see parts of it, while their own quests in turn give a sense of the many other battles taking place during the War of the Ring that the books often only refer to in passing. In doing so it makes the world feel deeper and more real, in a way that other games, where the character is the hero of the hour, often fail to do.