I recently started playing Lord of the Rings Online (also known as LotRO), an MMO from Turbine that was originally released way back in 2007. I really don’t have very much experience with MMOs – I played a little bit of the first Guild Wars back in the day, but I didn’t get real far.
I do, however, have a lot of experience with world maps – see posts on Final Fantasy XIII, Mass Effect 2, Borderlands 2, The Witcher 2, and even one on different ways to access the world map. Despite the game originally coming out 6 years ago, I’m still nominating Lord of the Rings Online to have the worst world map ever.
I’ve limited myself to three major beefs with this map:
- The quest markers are barely visible
- Places that are zoom-able aren’t labeled at all
- The various hint texts on the map aren’t consistently located, and zooming out isn’t real intuitive without it