So a few weeks back I posted about trying to play “Lord of the Rings Online”, with the thought of going back to streaming that game on Twitch on a regular basis. Since that game had been the most popular on my old stream, I figured it might be a good choice to return to, and considering its age, I knew it would play well on my old laptop (which I used to stream it previously).
That did not work out well. Not at all.
First of all, I am aware that LOTRO is an old game, with old graphics, but holy cr*p, it just looks awful! Not just in comparison to modern video games, but in comparison to equally-old MMORPGs, too! I tried tweaking the settings to improve the graphics, but it was no good. Time has simply not been kind to LOTRO.
Worse yet, my “old” laptop (from 2018 or 2019) used to not only play LOTRO at maximum settings, it did this while streaming to Twitch over OBS running in the background. In short, the laptop is more than beefy enough, even at its age, to handle LOTRO. But now it runs like ass! By default it wants to run with all graphics set to Low or at most Medium. When I put all settings back to High and above, the frame rate crashed into the single digits. Granted, Standing Stone Games may well have upgraded the graphics engine over the last few years (unlikely), or done other tweaks to the game that might account for this, but such a pronounced drop in playability seems suspect to me.
Another thing I noticed was a distinct lack of other players in game. Yes, it’s a very old MMORPG, but LOTRO always had a very devoted fanbase, and I just find it surprising that I have run into so few players. IT could have been the time of day, but again, this seems strange.
Regardless, I think it is obvious that I won’t be streaming “Lord of the Rings Online” on Twitch, or making new YouTube content with the game. Not that I need to, since I have this awesome new gaming laptop, which plays “Starfield”, “Avowed”, and many other modern games just fine.
