MMORPG.com News Manager Keith Cross recently spoke with Turbine's VP of Product Development, Craig Alexander about the future of Lord of the Rings Online.

On the last day of the 2008 New York Comic Con, Craig Alexander, Turbine’s Vice President of Product Development and Kate Paiz, Senior Producer on Dungeons and Dragons Online updated the assembled fans and press about the current state of their products.  After the panel I had the opportunity to sit down with Craig Alexander to chat about Lord of the Rings Online and the current state of the MMO business. 

As he had just finished a panel where he talked a bout Lord of the Rings Online for half an hour, LotRO is where the conversation began.  The big news for LotRO lately has been Book 13: Doom of the Last King, which went live last week, and their upcoming paid expansion that will take players through the Mines of Moria and beyond. 

Read more here.

Cool :) I really like this game, they've really made it better and better with every update, I read in the newsletter the game is over 30% larger than it was when it 1st launched.

So, yeah... LOTRO isn't the most groundbreaking game we've come across, but it still works. The new expansion is looking to be really interesting in terms of playing in a huge underground expanse.

I played it at around beta and release for a total of two months and I really enjoyed it. We've got a good deal of new blood entering the scene during the rest of this year with AoC,War, Spellborn, etc., so LOTRO will have to keep on it's game to compete, but I think with all the free updates that their doing, it's going to stay relatively strong; at least until the end of the expansin phase (ending with Mordor). They might do a Haradrim expansion, which would be interesting.

all and all, good stuff.

Wait, the Korean version....will it be the same as USA version but translated or they will have a different version of the game?

Moria will be fun. I'm assuming, by way of lore, that this'll happen after the Fellowship passed through. I would love to see the entire north-western part of Middle-earth created in the game. It would take years and who knows how long LotRO will be around but someone at some point needs to make a game where you can just explore the land at scale during the events of the Third Age...or the Fourth Age, for that matter, with Aragorn as King.

Nerd alert!