Pumping Irony

Both Massively and Ten Ton Hammer put up the E3 preview of LOTRO’s upcoming content update, which sounds like it will coincide with the business model shift this autumn. Currently untitled, Book 2 will continue the storyline where Book 1 The Oath of the Rangers left off. It sounds like this will also be a FREE update, not a Quest Pack in the LOTRO Store; though I also read the new zone of Enedwaith and the Epic Book quest line will be free, and the rest of the quests will be in a Quest Pack. So, that bit is unconfirmed currently.

As stated (accidentally?) by Adam Mersky back in March, the update will contain a new landmass of Enedwaith, which will be a level 62-65 zone located directly south of Eregion. From the preview map seen on Massively’s article, along with guesstimates from the forums, it sounds like Enedwaith is roughly the size of Eregion as well. Also we can see two points on the south to travel to Dunland, which is technically a part of Enedwaith so we’ll see how that gets handled later.

The update will include four dungeons, although three are solo instances while the final is a public dungeon similar to Goblin Town, Haudh Iarchith or Sarnúr from the original Shadows of Angmar game. This means the progression of instance clusters and raids will still be in Mirkwood until at least the next update.

Finally, Turbine is ripping out part of their Skirmish technology and applying it to the Shadows of Angmar instances, such as Great Barrows, Fornost, Carn Dûm and all the other fan favorites (well, was Fornost ever a favorite?). The instances will now scale in level, and reward level-appropriate loot, though it sounds like they will not scale to fellowship size like a Skirmish would. Additionally, no Skirmish Soldiers allowed. I find this a little unfortunate; it might be nice to have a small fellowship then round out the group with Soldiers just like you can do in DDO or Guild Wars, though I’ll be the first to admit the Soldier AI needs some serious work and the cooldown on the Direct Soldier skill needs to be removed.

Some players whine at recycling old content but personally, coming from MMO after MMO that simply abandons old content, I think it’s great that Turbine is always looking at ways to keep older content relevant and in the regular playlists. Not an easy thing to do on a traditional DIKU leveling game.

UPDATE: Sapience stopped by the LOTRO forums today to clear up misconceptions that have been spreading since the E3 preview.

I’ll try and shed some light on a few things that seem to have confused people or that have come out somewhat out of context. E3 can be crazy that way sometimes.

The LOTRO Store
We sent out a number of screen shots last week that were mock ups of the store. If you look carefully you can tell they’re only for illustration purposes and don’t reflect any actual items. For example there is a shot out there that shows a “Helm” with a really nice image of a helmet and a description that says it’s a potion.

Some of the item descriptions aren’t even related to LOTRO at all. So I would say take much of what’s shown in the screens as placeholders. As we progress through the beta process, everything is being constantly reviewed. Beta players are already providing some great feedback, even though we’ve only been in Beta for 1 day!

Scaled Instances
To clear up any misunderstandings; Instances will be scaled by the player, not automatically. It works like the level setting for Skirmishes. So for something like Helegrod you could choose to run it at level 61 if you wanted. I know some are worried about a ‘solo raid’. The instances will not scale in terms of group size. Fighting Thorog is still going to take 24 people.
Also, not every instance will be scaled at launch. The team is working hard to get as many in as they can, but time is finite. The plan is to revist them all, but they’re not all going to happen in Book 2.

To give you some idea of how major this change is, JWBarry is currently writing his first novel, also called the Instance Scaling Dev diary. Seriously, it’s a book.

Enedwaith
It’s a level 62-65 area with a lot of new content. Berephon is really excited about this area! So much so he’s going to write a Dev diary all about it. Enedwaith, not his excitement.

Hope that helps clear things up a bit

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 11:02 am and is filed under Lord of the Rings Online, MMO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.