The size of the icons wouldn\'t be such a big problem if you had the slightest ability to zoom in and out of the mini-map even just a little bit. Getting closer would be great so that you can see individual icons more clearly. It would have been a great addition, small but very useful with those icons.

You can hover your pointer over the rings or other icons in your mini-map, to get a tooltip on who/what it is, but sometimes the icons are just too big and overlap terribly. I can\'t think of how many times I didn\'t know where to finish a quest because it was being covered up by a shop icon. The mini-map and world map can have an assortment of icons turned on and off though, so you can easily turn off all shop icons, but that doesn\'t mean it\'ll make the cluster of five rings on top of each other any easier to understand.

Another thing I kept running into when going about this game was how insanely hard it was to navigate to where quests are. I\'d like to tell you how many times my quests told me my objective laid beyond a certain area only to have my objective actually land in the middle of the area it was suppose to be beyond. Excuse me Turbine, does the word "beyond" not mean "farther than" rather than "in"? The quests also have a terrible way of telling you where houses are, it gives you directions as if you can read the street signs themselves, or by just giving really bad examples of things to look for.

An example, you want an example? Well alright, here goes. The shire is a rather hilly place, so when a quest tells you that the house is right at the bottom of a hill inside of a town, how exactly are you suppose to find it when that\'s half the town? But the one I ran into that caused me a ton of trouble was when they used the "at the bottom of the hill" inside of a town that was pretty much in a low point of many hills. That\'s right, the town was more or less in a bowl. The house I was looking for was indeed not at the bottom of the hill, but rather at a small terraced off section of the hill, about halfway up and out in the middle of nowhere off the road. That\'s right, even the people in the country are city-folk in Middle Earth.

Once you get a handle on having an exploding number of quests, and figure out what exactly the games quest directions mean, it isn\'t half bad. As you go up in levels you can go to trainers and learn new skills. These skills will vary depending on your class, obviously. One nice thing is that some of your other skills will go up in power a little bit as you level as well, that way they don\'t become completely useless down the road or right before you get the next rank of that skill.