LoTR: Fellowship of the Ring game demo

[Drawde]

The demo for this game was released a couple of days ago, I'm downloading it ATM (should take
a while since it's 120MB+ and I've got a modem). Anyone know whether the game is any good? Reviews
of the console versions (which are probably near-identical to the PC one) seem to indicate it's fairly
linear and shallow.
And are there any fan sites or similar for the LotR games? I was thinking that if the game is "moddable"
in any way it might be possible to add more dialogue, items, scripts etc. to it, as happened with Ultima 9.

[tamarae]

... so was excited when the game was released..

My bf has bought the game for xbox, and says the controls are kinda whacked... and another friend of mine told me that he's played it and it was a huge disappointment. I'll see about finding the demo to find out for myself before I buy it, especially after hearing bad things about it. I've yet to hear anything promising about the game. :(

As for moddable - I've not read anywhere that it is, but then again, I kinda quit looking when I heard the disappointing reviews last week about it... hehe

Let me know how it is when you install and play the demo a bit.

[Froggy]

I bought it for PC and I wish I hadn't. I can't believe Vivendi was given the rights to create this crap.

Personally, I had at least expected something along the lines of Ultima IX.

Don't waste your $50.

[Drawde]

Just finished downloading the demo and have had a quick look at it.
Graphically it's VERY impressive, like Morrowind meets Middle Earth, and captures
the "feel" of the books and film quite well, though the hobbit characters have a
rather "cartoony" look.
Gameplay-wise however it doesn't look very impressive - a mixture of non-combat
sections where you simply walk around and talk to everyone, with very limited pre-set dialogue,
along with a few fetch-item quests (which are totally irrelevant since there are no RPG elements of character development or item upgrading)
- and combat sections where you hack your way through endless hordes of orcs, goblins, wargs etc. with
a very limited selection of weapons or spells, eating generic healing items from time to time. Seems like
a typical mass-market, multi-platform, polished but shallow game; a bit like Dragonriders of Pern, a similar
waste of a good setting with an incredibly shallow and limited game.

However it appears that the data files for the game (stored in a number of different
files, with different extensions but the same format) are all stored in a simple, uncompressed
"flat" archive format. I'm sure someone with more binary file/hex knowledge than me would
be able to create an unpacker/extractor utility.
From the text in some files, I think that the game uses the same, or similar, engine to Drakan 2 - maybe
the file format is the same as Drakan 1? Did anyone ever create a file unpacker for that game?