The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) is a WoW style MMO that's been online for close to 16 years. It's a love letter to Middle Earth, and is chock full of content and charm.LOTRO is my favorite MMO by far. The combat is clunky, the interface terrible, and the lag is awful. For some reason it really doesn't bother me. The music is excellent and the graphics still manage to look great. Every quest has a ton of lore written for it, even the smallest most mundane fetch quests. There is no great recreation of Tolkien's world, and everything is done with such respect for the source material, which seems rare these days. There's a very generous free to play model with optional expansions, quest packs, and a subscription. There's hundreds of hours of content in the F2P, and the expansions often go on sale. It's worth signing up for VIP for a month for some of the permanent effects you get, but event hen it's a really cost-effective game.

MMOs aren't a genre I mess with a ton, but when I do get the urge I always end up coming back to LOTRO.

Verdict: Endless

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