I've had friends ask me before, "So standardheadache, you've logged quite a few hours in LOTRO, what do you think of it?" I'd ask the same: for an MMO that's been going for nearly 15 years, it's worth finding out whether it's a sunk-cost fallacy for the remaining 100k active players or whether there's still ample opportunity to hop on as a new player and have fun. With the advent of most of the game going F2P, it's worth taking the opportunity to review LOTRO to hopefully convince more people to try out this throwback to the golden age of MMOs.

And what a throwback it is. LOTRO was competing with Burning Crusade when it came out, and its first expansion was pitted against Wrath of the Lich King and Warhammer Online on the market. Much of its gameplay reflects this, and it has been less modernized than WoW. However, it still fits the bill of what used to be called a “WoW clone”: racial traits that matter, class trait specs that change how you play the game, one class per character, and an emphasis on side quests alongside the main story. The leveling experience has been streamlined where the open world is no longer as dangerous as it used to be, but the story remains a solid way to level in the expansions.

How is the story? It's definitely not as monolithic as, say, FFXIV's, but it also doesn't suffer from making you the most important person in the world, either. Your importance peaks at “incredibly helpful stranger”; you aren't a chosen one or capable of more than the average person, you've just built a lot of trust with important people by starting at the bottom with disparate factions. Ultimately, you become a trusted hired hand, capable of doing things an insider can't or won't do. You are still subject to the cold, the shadow, and dread, all of which are mechanically reflected in gameplay.

Gameplay spans a lot. There's the metagaming aspect, where you customize your trait specs to best fit your desired solo and group roles (which may be different), and the actual hotkey-mashing, rotation-completing you know and love from these sorts of titles. Rotations are fairly concise; key abilities are unlocked via the trait tree for each spec, and there aren't many abilities that you actually use in combat. I usually have two hotbars dedicated to in-combat abilities; for my level 130, two and a half. Each class gets utility skills that are rarely used in combat, and therefore can be relegated to a non-hotkeyed hotbar without much issue.

The classes themselves are par for the course for a WoW clone, with some exceptions like Captain and Minstrel. As previously mentioned, all classes are capable of filling multiple roles, and often have a sustained dps role suitable for soloing as well as a more group-oriented role. Main dps classes may have an ability to lose aggro, while even offtanks have ways to pull aggro. It's recommended to pick a race that complements your class; elves, for example, have a trait that increases bow damage, so it's best to have an elf as a hunter rather than a dwarf for group content. However, picking offmeta can open up unique opportunities for open-world content; hobbits aren't the best for group content ever since hope consumables were introduced, but free stealth and playing possum on any class can get you out of sticky situations and save on repair bills if you aren't a VIP (or if you're a lazy VIP like me and don't pick up your bonus in major towns every couple of days when the VIP consumable resets).

As for the community, it's something that hasn't changed much over time. When I started playing as a wee lad, given the lifetime subscription to keep me quiet and out of trouble, I was never bullied for being a child and never had predators make moves on me. My guild's coleaders were married, and many of them were in their twenties to forties. Now, the average player is between 30 and 60, and my current guild's coleaders are also married, and likely in their fifties. World chat has some definite dad energy.

tl;dr: do I think it's worth it? At risk of sounding biased since I've been with it since year one, yeah, I'd say so. At the very least, it's far more free content than most MMOs these days, and the “grind” to get microtransaction currency has been substantially reduced in importance, so you can spend more time actually playing the game. If you find you can't launch the game through Steam, try downloading the missing DirectX files manually. If that doesn't work, you can always try downloading the launcher through the main website; most LOTRO players don't use the Steam version.