That's awesome news. That means they have room to grow the game at a reasonable pace and direction (instead of too fast and skipping areas). It also implies they're making a decent profit and any expansion plans they have are acceptable to the licensors.

Great news for us, bad news for the haters, they don't have a foot to stand on, hehe.  They have an option to extend as far as 2017 as well, and to develop other Tolkien stories.  Dare I hope that there'll be a Silmarillion-based mmo in the future as well? 

Anyways, for the time-being I'm more than happy with LOTRO and will definitely be playing it well into the next decade (unless all they say about 2012 being the end of the world is true).

Only way there will be a silmarillion based MMO is if christopher tolkien head of tolkien estate allows it. Unfortunately he won't even allow a film based on the silmarillion.

Tolkien enterprise has no right to the silmarillion so it is not included in the license that turbine has.

On another note back when this game first launched and hit Number one on the sites game rating. Everyone said give it 3 months and you won't see this game on the ratings anymore it will fall off.

Guess what it is still number one on this sites tope rated released games. Now i know the ratings on this site meen nothing. I just find it interesting that a story driven game that is not centered around PvP can be rated Number one released game on a pretty exclusive PvP oriented site.

Ratings on this site mean nothing at all to be honest.  What I've noticed from 'LoTR' fans is they tend to jack up the scores and hype for the game based upon their love of the IP (not necessarily the game).  If you strip out the LoTR IP and have the same gameplay, cutscenes, Instances (same game with a different story/characters) you'd have ratings much lower. 

Furthermore, that extended contract only shows that the whole lifetime sub thing managed to pad the overall subscriptions/financial figures enough to get at least the bottomline for an extension.  However, since Tolkien Enterprises didn't really have that much experience in the mmo gaming industry and went primarily with a company who has shown a history of failure/bad public moves I believe they don't realize how subpar LoTRO truly is compared to what it could have and should have been.

LoTRO's success so far has been because of the IP not the gameplay. 

Originally posted by Dethnoble

Ratings on this site mean nothing at all to be honest.  What I've noticed from 'LoTR' fans is they tend to jack up the scores and hype for the game based upon their love of the IP (not necessarily the game).  If you strip out the LoTR IP and have the same gameplay, cutscenes, Instances (same game with a different story/characters) you'd have ratings much lower. 

Furthermore, that extended contract only shows that the whole lifetime sub thing managed to pad the overall subscriptions/financial figures enough to get at least the bottomline for an extension.  However, since Tolkien Enterprises didn't really have that much experience in the mmo gaming industry and went primarily with a company who has shown a history of failure/bad public moves I believe they don't realize how subpar LoTRO truly is compared to what it could have and should have been.

LoTRO's success so far has been because of the IP not the gameplay. 

Says you, I like the gameplay.  Alot.

Tell yourself whatever you like, but some of us are really enjoying the game, and that's what it's all about, IP or not. 

Nothing wrong with you enjoying the game.  I have no doubts there are those who enjoy this game.  Of course, I do wonder how many people force themselves on a daily basis to defend the game because they did fork out that $200 for the lifetime subs.    Sometimes, people can convince themselves that they are enjoying something they put alot of money into yet if they were to clear their thoughts and take look at it from other perspectives they might realize that it just might be that they convinced themselves they are.

Of course the best argument to date about LoTRO and why it doesn't appeal to that many people is the lack of any real announcement/public release from Turbine.  There is nothing about units sold.  Some argue that Turbine doesn't have to release those numbers and of course they don't.  However, you really think Turbine would keep the 500k or one million boxes sold milestones tight-lipped? Those are BIG, VERY BIG milestones in the PC industry for both MMO and non-MMO alike.

This is the biggest, and most solid evidence, anyone can use in the argument of LoTRO being as big of a success as Turbine tries to play it as being. 

Then let us go into the next argument: Units sold doesn't equal subscriptions.  Well of course it doesn't but the ratio of people who subscribe to a MMORPG who bought that MMORPG is fairly low.  Furthermore, for an MMORPG, 200k subscriptions, 300k subscriptions or even as low as 150k subscriptions are considered milestones.   Turbine, without admitted a lack of 200k subscriptions, did admit to having at least over 150k subscriptions when they announced they were the second most popular MMORPG  (later including an * which noted they meant developed in North America).  This meant that they were somewhere above Everquest 2 and thus they hit above 150k.

Once, if they ever do (which I'm beginning to doubt) hit 200k subscriptions then you'll get another announcement from Turbine......-->

Originally posted by Dethnoble

Nothing wrong with you enjoying the game.  I have no doubts there are those who enjoy this game.  Of course, I do wonder how many people force themselves on a daily basis to defend the game because they did fork out that $200 for the lifetime subs.    Sometimes, people can convince themselves that they are enjoying something they put alot of money into yet if they were to clear their thoughts and take look at it from other perspectives they might realize that it just might be that they convinced themselves they are.

Of course the best argument to date about LoTRO and why it doesn't appeal to that many people is the lack of any real announcement/public release from Turbine.  There is nothing about units sold.  Some argue that Turbine doesn't have to release those numbers and of course they don't.  However, you really think Turbine would keep the 500k or one million boxes sold milestones tight-lipped? Those are BIG, VERY BIG milestones in the PC industry for both MMO and non-MMO alike.

This is the biggest, and most solid evidence, anyone can use in the argument of LoTRO being as big of a success as Turbine tries to play it as being. 

Then let us go into the next argument: Units sold doesn't equal subscriptions.  Well of course it doesn't but the ratio of people who subscribe to a MMORPG who bought that MMORPG is fairly low.  Furthermore, for an MMORPG, 200k subscriptions, 300k subscriptions or even as low as 150k subscriptions are considered milestones.   Turbine, without admitted a lack of 200k subscriptions, did admit to having at least over 150k subscriptions when they announced they were the second most popular MMORPG  (later including an * which noted they meant developed in North America).  This meant that they were somewhere above Everquest 2 and thus they hit above 150k.

Once, if they ever do (which I'm beginning to doubt) hit 200k subscriptions then you'll get another announcement from Turbine......-->

Argument?  There is no argument, there is just people trying to convince other people that their opinions are right.  When it comes down to enjoying a game, it's about - THE GAME.  I'm sorry if I don't give a rat's bleeding arse about how many official numbers, blah blah... I care about whether or not I'm having a good time.  Sure the pop #'s will have an effect on that, but I don't go to the headlines, data collectors or Turb's official release statements to see if there are enough people playing - I go INGAME.  And guess what?  The servers are very much alive and well.  At least mine is, and I don't play on Brandywine.

Really though, when you start suggesting that some of the people that claim to enjoy it really do not, and are just trying to convince themselves, you are starting to sound a bit nuts.  Why do you care so much about a game you don't enjoy and I'm guessing don't play, to come here and try to lay down so much nonsense?  You've talked about how the gameplay isn't enjoyable, but you gave no examples, you yammer on about pop #'s but have you played lately?  I'm turning down invites all the time and always passing people in the middle of nowhere..200k subs?  I don't know if they have it, and I don't care, like I'm ever going to play with 200k different people anyway.  Give me my kinship and a few on the side and I'm loving life in Middle-Earth.

The end of all this is simple:  In one hour the servers will be back up - hopefully - and I'll be back in my game having a great time, you can spout off about how this game is a letdown all you want, I just hope you are having as much fun doing that as I am questing in Arda.

Now, let us move onto the extension.   For all we know Turbine just needed to be that second most popular MMORPG created in North America in it's first year.  They might have only needed to recoup *half* of the money invested within the first year or they might have already had the extension locked up (based on if they released a title in a certain amount of time) and simply waited to finalize or announce things to provide hype and hopefully more sales.

Now, you see, the thing is Turbine has a very VERY shady history.  This is the type of stuff that Turbine has done in the past:

- Released an expansion pack (Asheron's Call 2: Legions) then within a couple months announcement the cancellation of that game.  IMHO, that is far worse than anything SOE has done.  One could even argue that that is on par with the Dark and Light fiasco.

- Conducted a poll about raising the subscription rate of Asheron's Call from $9.95 to $11.95 (or $12.95 I forgot) so that they could also develop the expansion. Nothing wrong with that until you find out they took all of the good programmers and put them on the LoTRO and D&DO teams, and then hired training engineers meant to later join LoTRO.  Meanwhile, they went around eight months without patching the game.  That doesn't seem to bad until yo urealize that the monthly patches were actually one of the reasons why people played Asheron's Call.  Note: tThe sub is still at that higher price even though they played it off as if it was just for the development time of the expansion.

- To tie into the above the expansion was suppose to have this very interesting Elder Game which was later scrapped and later on a gimmick 'rare system' was implemented that ultimately was completely useless except for a few things here and there. Oh yeah and they also introduced a pre-order gem that gave a 10% health bonus even though players on Darktide were 100% against it and wanted it to at least be excluded from Darktide.  They did it anyways.  The augmentation system was the only fairly cool thing that was introduced in the expansion.  Other than that it was just rudamentary art upgrade and a small update to the bits so that you could have more total experience (allowing up to level 275).  Which you could already hit (though your level never displayed past 126).

- D&DO: A game, no different, and IMHO not as fun as Guild Wars has a MMORPG subscription fee attached to it despite it not even being a true MMORPG.  The game released with no crafting, no housing and is pretty much nothing but instances with a fairly low party count.  It also had a extremely low amount of content.  Guild Wars, which had and still has more content is a one-time priced game with no subscription fee.

-  Asheron's Call 2: Revisiting this game.  The first and ONLY MAJOR MMORPG to be cancelled.  While games like Meridian59, The Realm,  Ultima Online continue to this day the first 'next-gen' MMORPG to be created flopped bigtime.  I mean, this game FLOPPED epically.  THough, it wasn't entirely Turbine's fault that it originally flopped what they did, as mentioned above, to the players was completely unethical.

There are more things, behind the scenes things one can mentioned, but all of the above are publically known FACTS about the great game development company known as Turbine.

Originally posted by Dethnoble

Now, let us move onto the extension.   For all we know Turbine just needed to be that second most popular MMORPG created in North America in it's first year.  They might have only needed to recoup *half* of the money invested within the first year or they might have already had the extension locked up (based on if they released a title in a certain amount of time) and simply waited to finalize or announce things to provide hype and hopefully more sales.

Now, you see, the thing is Turbine has a very VERY shady history.  This is the type of stuff that Turbine has done in the past:

- Released an expansion pack (Asheron's Call 2: Legions) then within a couple months announcement the cancellation of that game.  IMHO, that is far worse than anything SOE has done.  One could even argue that that is on par with the Dark and Light fiasco.

- Conducted a poll about raising the subscription rate of Asheron's Call from $9.95 to $11.95 (or $12.95 I forgot) so that they could also develop the expansion. Nothing wrong with that until you find out they took all of the good programmers and put them on the LoTRO and D&DO teams, and then hired training engineers meant to later join LoTRO.  Meanwhile, they went around eight months without patching the game.  That doesn't seem to bad until yo urealize that the monthly patches were actually one of the reasons why people played Asheron's Call.  Note: tThe sub is still at that higher price even though they played it off as if it was just for the development time of the expansion.

- To tie into the above the expansion was suppose to have this very interesting Elder Game which was later scrapped and later on a gimmick 'rare system' was implemented that ultimately was completely useless except for a few things here and there. Oh yeah and they also introduced a pre-order gem that gave a 10% health bonus even though players on Darktide were 100% against it and wanted it to at least be excluded from Darktide.  They did it anyways.  The augmentation system was the only fairly cool thing that was introduced in the expansion.  Other than that it was just rudamentary art upgrade and a small update to the bits so that you could have more total experience (allowing up to level 275).  Which you could already hit (though your level never displayed past 126).

- D&DO: A game, no different, and IMHO not as fun as Guild Wars has a MMORPG subscription fee attached to it despite it not even being a true MMORPG.  The game released with no crafting, no housing and is pretty much nothing but instances with a fairly low party count.  It also had a extremely low amount of content.  Guild Wars, which had and still has more content is a one-time priced game with no subscription fee.

-  Asheron's Call 2: Revisiting this game.  The first and ONLY MAJOR MMORPG to be cancelled.  While games like Meridian59, The Realm,  Ultima Online continue to this day the first 'next-gen' MMORPG to be created flopped bigtime.  I mean, this game FLOPPED epically.  THough, it wasn't entirely Turbine's fault that it originally flopped what they did, as mentioned above, to the players was completely unethical.

There are more things, behind the scenes things one can mentioned, but all of the above are publically known FACTS about the great game development company known as Turbine.

With the companies major issues, I am surprised that they continue to even exist. AC2, DDO and now LOTRO are all games that are less than admirable entries in the MMO field.

I think you had the original quote correct, when you stated the $200 lifetime fee helped keep them afloat, and infused the company with a wad of cash...also, their funds they have held from their original MMO , Asherons Call has kept this company together.

LOTRO is a gorgeous looking game, I will always admit that...but, the actual character models, awful UI, and boring gameplay (to me) just feels all wrong..

I have said it before though...a lot of people have experienced their first MMO with LOTRO...reason being it was bought on it's name alone. The game shines as a good beginners MMO, with pretty landscapes and hand holding gameplay...and eventually a lot of these players will graduate to the bigger daddy MMO's (WoW, EQ2, Eve Online, CoH)...and this can only be a good thing.

Later

onedge1,

The funny thing about Asheron's Call 1, from what I heard (reliable sources), is that Microsoft "LOST" money in that venture.  I've also heard that they only keep AC1 going/released expansion because of contracts with investors. 

Honestly, the only thing Turbine has managed to do is create a very impressive 'graphical engine' and luck out with the best MMO pvp system/loot system in Asheron's Call 1.   The graphical engine, created on Microsoft's money, is what landed them the investments to ultimately secure LoTRO and D&DO. 

IMHO, I think Turbine was the worse company (of the major mmo developers) to land those titles. Though, admittedly, they are only one of a handful of companies that would have/were able to launch the titles.  At least Sony managed to get 400k+ subscriptions for Star Wars (which isn't as big of an IP as Lord of the Rings; at least after the movies).

Six years is pretty good. I still think people are expecting too much though if they think that some day middle earth will be fully developed. What we have now (not even all of Eriador) is just a small area of middle earth (10-15%?). If you zoom out to the main map, you can see there are lots of areas left to develop (Rohan, Gondor, Rhovanion, Mordor, Eregion, Lorien, etc...). I am skeptical about Turbine's ability to develop all of these areas with as much detail as they have put into Eriador so far.

ok i am intrigued as 2 blockbuster films? I knew that The Hobbit was goign to be done (with wolfgang peterson) but another film as well, this one gets me intrigued as i not heard anything about that.

Originally posted by openedge1

 

Originally posted by Dethnoble

Now, let us move onto the extension.   For all we know Turbine just needed to be that second most popular MMORPG created in North America in it's first year.  They might have only needed to recoup *half* of the money invested within the first year or they might have already had the extension locked up (based on if they released a title in a certain amount of time) and simply waited to finalize or announce things to provide hype and hopefully more sales.

Now, you see, the thing is Turbine has a very VERY shady history.  This is the type of stuff that Turbine has done in the past:

- Released an expansion pack (Asheron's Call 2: Legions) then within a couple months announcement the cancellation of that game.  IMHO, that is far worse than anything SOE has done.  One could even argue that that is on par with the Dark and Light fiasco.

- Conducted a poll about raising the subscription rate of Asheron's Call from $9.95 to $11.95 (or $12.95 I forgot) so that they could also develop the expansion. Nothing wrong with that until you find out they took all of the good programmers and put them on the LoTRO and D&DO teams, and then hired training engineers meant to later join LoTRO.  Meanwhile, they went around eight months without patching the game.  That doesn't seem to bad until yo urealize that the monthly patches were actually one of the reasons why people played Asheron's Call.  Note: tThe sub is still at that higher price even though they played it off as if it was just for the development time of the expansion.

- To tie into the above the expansion was suppose to have this very interesting Elder Game which was later scrapped and later on a gimmick 'rare system' was implemented that ultimately was completely useless except for a few things here and there. Oh yeah and they also introduced a pre-order gem that gave a 10% health bonus even though players on Darktide were 100% against it and wanted it to at least be excluded from Darktide.  They did it anyways.  The augmentation system was the only fairly cool thing that was introduced in the expansion.  Other than that it was just rudamentary art upgrade and a small update to the bits so that you could have more total experience (allowing up to level 275).  Which you could already hit (though your level never displayed past 126).

- D&DO: A game, no different, and IMHO not as fun as Guild Wars has a MMORPG subscription fee attached to it despite it not even being a true MMORPG.  The game released with no crafting, no housing and is pretty much nothing but instances with a fairly low party count.  It also had a extremely low amount of content.  Guild Wars, which had and still has more content is a one-time priced game with no subscription fee.

-  Asheron's Call 2: Revisiting this game.  The first and ONLY MAJOR MMORPG to be cancelled.  While games like Meridian59, The Realm,  Ultima Online continue to this day the first 'next-gen' MMORPG to be created flopped bigtime.  I mean, this game FLOPPED epically.  THough, it wasn't entirely Turbine's fault that it originally flopped what they did, as mentioned above, to the players was completely unethical.

There are more things, behind the scenes things one can mentioned, but all of the above are publically known FACTS about the great game development company known as Turbine.

With the companies major issues, I am surprised that they continue to even exist. AC2, DDO and now LOTRO are all games that are less than admirable entries in the MMO field.

 

I think you had the original quote correct, when you stated the $200 lifetime fee helped keep them afloat, and infused the company with a wad of cash...also, their funds they have held from their original MMO , Asherons Call has kept this company together.

LOTRO is a gorgeous looking game, I will always admit that...but, the actual character models, awful UI, and boring gameplay (to me) just feels all wrong..

I have said it before though...a lot of people have experienced their first MMO with LOTRO...reason being it was bought on it's name alone. The game shines as a good beginners MMO, with pretty landscapes and hand holding gameplay...and eventually a lot of these players will graduate to the bigger daddy MMO's (WoW, EQ2, Eve Online, CoH)...and this can only be a good thing.

Later

Bigger daddy mmo's?

I've played all of them to endgame except EVE (maybe 4 months of that was enough for me), they are just other games, nothing makes them bigger daddy at all.  If anything is a beginner MMO I'd say CoH is.

Krogg,

"  And guess what?  The servers are very much alive and well.  At least mine is, and I don't play on Brandywine."

Well sure when you stick a thousand people in a dinky ass online world it'll appear busy and full. LOL.  That is one of the biggest deceptions this game has.  Bigger worlds appear to be less populated whereas smaller worlds, and in LoTRO's case, really small worlds seem more populated.

How many new servers have launched?  ZERO.

Krogg, I'm not trying to convince you that you don't like the game.  However, I am trying to convince people, with evidence that is pubically known that LoTRO might not be this massive success Turbine is trying to portray it as being.

My reason? Because LoTRO's gameplay is a water-down version of WoW and other past MMORPGs who did that style much better.  Lord of the Rings should have been innovative and not some second-hand, waterdowned mediocre (at best) mmo that sells on name alone. =/  

No point in feeding the trolls. Their bowl of sour grapes is full, and their popcorn (the one waiting for the downfall of LOTRO) is now almost a year old...

Just let them keep waving imaginary sub numbers (evidence that is publically know ROTFL) and chase delusions (like EQ2 as daddy of LOTRO )

DB

Originally posted by DonnieBrasco

No point in feeding the trolls. Their bowl of sour grapes is full, and their popcorn (the one waiting for the downfall of LOTRO) is now almost a year old...

Just let them keep waving imaginary sub numbers and chase delusions (like EQ2 as daddy of LOTRO )

DB

/salute

What I found interesting is that the license has been extended to 2014...when was it to have originally run out?  If it originally only ran say until 2010, then a "lifetime" sub was only for 3 years?!  What happens when it does run out?  The dangers of using an IP instead of creating your own...

Originally posted by uncus

What I found interesting is that the license has been extended to 2014...when was it to have originally run out?  If it originally only ran say until 2010, then a "lifetime" sub was only for 3 years?!  What happens when it does run out?  The dangers of using an IP instead of creating your own...

Still, a lifetime sub is worth much less than 3 yrs of subscription (less then 2 yrs actually), so they wouldn't be cheated on monetary terms anyway.

But this is not a danger anymore, it seems :)

BTW - I am also one who doesn't care about sub numbers.. my guild has over 200 members, online pop is between 40-120 at a time. Currently I am doing traits in low level zones (Ered Luin), and it is full of noobs :) (Server is Snowbourn)

DB

Actually, I think LoTRO will continue on for a number of years.  It'll end up releasing several expansions but ti'll never hit the subscription numbers it 'should have'.  I had no doubts it'd have a healthy playerbase.  Even 150k subs is a healthy playerbase.

But seriously with a IP like LoTRO shouldn't the game have had some massive unit sales?   Seriously, go check out what is considered milestones for PC unit sales.  500k,  1 million, etc.  Every company that hits those milestones has press releases announcing it.  Where is Turbine's?

I'm merely here to offer up a different perspective besides the one that Turbine 'rear end' kissers have and the....well, 'compensated' ones deceptively propose.