Turbine announced today that it was lifting the nondisclosure agreement on the closed beta. I’ve been playing the closed beta for a few months now and its been increasingly difficult to hold my tongue about the tremendous progress this game has been making. I’m looking forward to sharing lots of thoughts about what continues to be one of the most highly anticipated MMOs of the year.
Long story short, I will buy this game and play it from day one. My spouse, who is also in the beta, and I are seriously considering pre-ordering since we would be able to roll our beta characters over to the full release. I’m not aware of any other game that has allowed this (I’m sure someone will let me know if there is), but I think its a great idea. The population will start off somewhat disbursed and the economy will have a bit of a jumpstart. This will hopefully make for a much smoother general release.
Look forward to more reports from Middle Earth soon!
potshot 
You sure got a great screenshot of the game for your banner. Nicely done !
Thanks! But to be honest, my last two banners were sliced out of the publicly available LoTRO screen shots since I was under the NDA, so the “nicely done” deservedly goes to the devs.
The shot is a good one, but it is actually indicative of what much of the game currently looks like.
Now, what kind of machine am I going to need to drive this game? Nothing too close to Vanguard specs I hope!
Not at all. I plan on doing a series of posts on various aspects of the game, hardware included. But suffice it to say, LoTRO is closer to WoW in performance/requirements and closer to EQ2/Vanguard for looks, though that is a very rough, unjust and imperfect analogy.
I have run WoW and LoTRO in separate windows simultaneously without much of a hit. More lag I think than anything else. I haven’t tried, but don’t think I’d try that with EQ2.
Unfortunately, I never got the VG open beta dl’d so I can’t compare.