Lord of the Rings Online. Yes, the one that's been coming -- been overdue, in fact -- for a long time.

Yes, also, it's true that EA had a batch of Lord of the Rings action games that came in the wake of the motion pictures, but those were largely locked into the movie license and the specific characters/events therein. Midway's forthcoming Lord of the Rings Online, however, is a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) courtesy of Turbine Entertainment (makers of Asheron's Call). Too, rather than paralleling the staggering whole of Middle-Earth's drama, the game lets players live their own role-playing adventures, focusing in on the detailed virtual region of Eriador within the "Third Age" (that be The Fellowship of the Ring era).

Because of the game's time-frame, players will occasionally find the paths of their own quests and adventures weaving in and out with those of major characters like Aragorn and Gandolf (effectively joining users at the fringes of the larger "War of the Ring," while still letting players stray well outside the fabled tales).

As was evident at a Midway hands-on preview event (and again at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas), the designers clearly know and revere their subject matter; the player-roamable regions are jammed with potential quests -- well over a thousand at last count -- each painstakingly crafted down to the most purist, niggling details. During the first hands-on event, Turbine told us of serious, epic disagreements amongst the design staff as to how something as minor as a particular gate, one barely described in the novels, should actually look in the game-world.

Such an accumulation of authentic detail is intended to draw both the hard-core crowd experienced with MMORPGs, and also the wider audience of more casual gamers who will, nonetheless, appreciate the faithful interpretations of Tokien's world, the occasional appearance of their favorite heroes, the so-called "dramatic moments" (cinematic sequences that bookend the actual quests the gamers participate in), and most of all, the freedom to do as they will in a large, well-presented world.

Players will be able to choose from four playable races -- hobbits, humans, elves and dwarves -- and seven character classes. Hundreds of character traits and skills -- some earned in the many quests, some intrinsic to given professions or races -- will be available. The quests are a mix of both the solo variety as well as those necessitating the "fellowships and kinships" of players (adventure parties and guilds, in traditional MMO-speak).

As players tackle the quests they are offered (or discover on their own), they can earn themselves a sort of virtual renown in the realm, a dramatic, vanity-suffix to their character's name -- perhaps, after putting down enough nasty spiders in the ruins, fields, and creepy basements of farmhouses, for example, they will earn a title like "Guuglebrix--Bane of Spiders" (you can use that one, if you want -- we've got a buttload of 'em here, every bit as good).

It's just geek-chic enough in its own right to have a bad-ass title precede you in your travels, but there's more to it; not only do the missions themselves offer tangible rewards of wealth and special items, but, in some cases there are characters who won't even deign to speak to you unless you're obviously an adventurer of some season and caliber. Level up before you step up, kiddies.

Whichever race the player chooses, there will be specific tutorial areas suited to that race (and yes, at least one of them starts with an escape from a jail). Later, as newly-created characters get some experience under their tunic, they'll move along to the central staging-region of Bree (that's when the real free-roaming adventuring starts).

Of particular interest, there's an in-game scheme revolving around "Hope and Dread," which playeys will discover if they chance to encounter extraordinarily powerful relics, characters or places, the nature which are intregal to and directly affecting the game itself. For example, if in the presence of some extremely potent source of hope and all-around good energy -- I'm looking at you, Gandolf -- you'll find your character gaining inadvertent (if temporary) morale/health bonuses. Conversely, running across some extremely bad Tolkien juju -- something straight outta Mordor, as it were -- means that the Dread effect will kick in, initially tingeing and warping the edges of the user interface, and giving your character an unhealthy red glow. Later, if you insist on sticking around, Dread causes some serious psychic and physical damage. It's a nice touch that gives the game's mythos a sense of permeating mystery and danger.

While the game is meant to hang on player cooperation and player-versus-environment challenges (as is the case with most MMOs), there is the promise of a player-versus-player (PvP) mode (albeit of the "lite" variety) called "Monster Play." Rather than alienating less-hardcore players with the oft-frustrating bane of full-on player-killing, Monster Play lets gamers do battle as monsters, against other characters. Thus, there's no risk of damage to the player's actual character -- or fragile ego --, which can often take days/weeks/months to build up but only one bad player-killer encounter to tear down. So PvP by proxy, as it were. PvPbP? It's not clear at this time whether, while in monster form, players will be able to toodle off and have further, monster-specific mini-quests with appropriate rewards, but based on the level of detail we've seen so far, it wouldn't be too far off the map to imagine.

Anyway, at the Consumer Electronics Show developer Turbine also showed some new game locales (including "The Last Homely House," where Frodo himself can be found) as well as a "quick-travel" system that lets horses and ponies fast-transport players to locales they have previously visited (in-game funds permitting, of course).

Lord of the Rings online is at the beta-testing stage at the moment (as of this writing, an excess of 300,000 have signed up to play and help debug the game), and the best guesstimate for its release is... [drum roll]... um, sometime this year (officially "the first quarter of TBD" or something like that, though Amazon has pegged March 31 as the big day while GameStop is posting April 24 as the street date... then again, both are prone to pulling dates out of hats just to get the pre-order campaigns under way).

Regardless, when it comes -- and yes, it really is coming -- Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is sure to be yet another massively-multiplayer mega monster.

Come to think of it, between Turbine's forthcoming Tolkien opus just mentioned, plus the new Warcraft expansion and the soon-to-be-released Pirates of the Caribbean online, gamers of the near future might never get out of the house and shall abandon the cities of Earth to the jocks, the dork-walkers, the panhandlers and the tragically gameless. Prepay the high-speed internet bill and stock up on Cheetos, people. See you "in there."