I'll also recommend trying Old Republic.
Not too bad. I pictured MMO's those kind of games where you go in and try to get started and you get stabbed by another person for no reason again and again. I guess I was wrong.

Don't really know what is progressive install but anyway..

I haven't played LOTRO much, but I'd say that overall LOTRO is more of a standard MMO whereas DDO is a solid hack 'n' slash dungeon crawler. I've played DDO a bit, and generally have more fun with it than most MMOs because the levels tend to be more interesting since it's more of a crawler and you don't have to grind the same places too much. And since it's D&D, there's a fair amount of detail in character building.

Right... Is that irony or something?
Because I for one think DDO, or TSW, or even TOR are superior to WoW, though part of the reason why is my disllike for the Warcraft universe.

Frankly, when I compare other MMOs to WoW, I'm always baffled by how well it does. It has (imo) a boring combat system, which is unfortunately copied by way too many MMOs out there, and the setting is bland.


I don't want to derail the thread into a debate on WoW however, so to get back on topic, I'll just say that I got back into DDO recently after about a year and a half long break. I still have a pretty good knowledge of the game and characters at pretty much every level, so if you choose DDO and want help, I can explain things to you or do some quests with you.

If download size is a problem, only Rift and LOTRO do progressive installs, you can pretty much forget about TOR since it needs a 30 Gb download or so. DDO is only 6 Gb or so, I don't remember what TSW's download size was.

Do you know if buying retail will lessen TOR or DDO much? Especially DDO as, unlike LOTRO, they haven't released a physical edition after it went f2p.

I'm not sure. I think the retail edition comes with 1 month of sub, then the game should treat you as VIP for that month, which is subscriber status with full access to everything in the game, and a few other advantages.
After that, you'll probably become premium, which is a status you get after buying any amount of Turbine Points once with more functionalities than pure f2p, but you still need to buy adventure packs.

That's not as big a deal as you might think, because you don't need that many packs to cap a new character, and you'll earn quite a few TP just playing the game. IIRC, I managed to buy 2 adventure packs before becoming premium just with the TP I got for free.
Basically, you earn TP by earning favor, which you get the first time you do any quest on a given difficulty level (there are 3 levels for most quest, normal, hard and elite). So if you start as a VIP, and you do every quest you can once on as high a difficulty level as you can manage, you should have enough TP to buy the best adventure packs when you become premium.

That was Ultima Online in its original form. Those days are long gone unless you opt in to a pvp server in your game of choice, if it even supports pvp.

There are some different areas I guess but mostly you can decline from a duel if some fat arse tries to challenge you and you just want to look at the inventory and run around.

I bought a 4 euros worth of chips and bought a bit bigger inventory space.. Now I can send mail in there and access my ships storage space. Also I got more quickbars which is also good.
So much for free-to-play. ^^

That's only half the truth.
Back in 2008 when this info you posted was announced, LOTRO belonged to Turbine.
At 2010 Turbine was bought by Warner Brothers. That's a company that does not publish info like that 6 years back (hell, they may never again publish such info).
Warner Brothers has no need to calm people down regarding the rights of the IP, cause they're HUGE.
Turbine on the other hand had to do that.

The downside to that is that we have people that are scared to invest in LOTRO based on info from 2008.
I have 2 characters in LOTRO that are 85 and i'm having much fun questing/duoing stuff there.

Haven't played DDO.

Yeah, there's no free lunch.