General Discussion

News Manager Keith Cross recently had the opportunity to talk to Lord of the Rings Online Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel about the last year of Lord of the Rings Online and where Turbine's focus will be in 2008.

It’s that time of year again. A time when the New Year still has that new year smell. When every fortune-teller and futurist comes out of the woodwork to give their predictions about what our next run around the sun will bring. In that spirit, we thought it would be a good idea to dust off the old crystal ball and peer into the future of Lord of the Rings Online. Unfortunately, we overspent on poultices and herbal remedies in 2007 and we’ve been forced to cut crystal balls and other soothsaying devices from our dark arts budget. Luckily, there was plenty of room in our telecommunications budget, so I just picked up the phone and spoke to Lord of the Rings Online Executive Producer Jeffrey Steffel to see what he had to say.

But before we can look forward, we need to look back on the year that was and what it meant for Lord of the Rings Online. LotRO had a notably smooth and relatively bug free launch in late April 2007. The launch set the bar for AAA MMOs and confirmed that a smooth launch is a necessary ingredient if you want to call your game AAA. Since launch, Turbine has been busy adding content and features in the form of free expansions, called books. Three books have been released thus far, opening new areas to explore, bringing quests with new foes to defeat, and adding new features like monster play, player housing, and more.

Read the whole article here.

Interesting. LOTRO is definately a game to watch.

"Few details about specific customizations have been released but we can say that characters will soon be able to wear one piece of clothing for display purposes, and another piece for statistical purposes, which will complement LotRO’s equipment system nicely."

That is a great addition to any MMO.

Yea thats cool they have that on eq2.

One thing im thinking about though is will they have any new regions coming this year and if so when ?

I think it may be time to re-sub for me. I cancelled after levling my char and ran out of things to do. At that time, I had nothing left to do but Raids and it was hard to find a good raid group. Interested to see how the new chapters are.

I havent played in a while though I still keep an account active. 

I left lotr for the same reason I leave most MMO same ol rutt of  kill/level ,, idiot AIs ,, and lack of a perception of reality.  cookie cutter quests,,

that being said  I would still highly recomend LOTR as the launch was smooth and complete,,  complete being the operative word  to me it didnt feel like they were dumping a half done game onto a hungry comunity,, they treated the players with respect in this instance,   while I played I had seen MARKED inprovements to the game world like the removal of obviously artificial barriers. and monster design has improved and of course hobbit feet! also the atention to detail when it comes to layout of of the lotr  land makes things like the tolkin atlases be of added value in the universe something other MMOs lack is real world references.

as a point of the LOOK AHEAD  one thing I want LOTR to be very aware of is they need to address as a game gets older  the games become TOP HEAVY  and the "noob" zones become emptier and emptier, to the point that any new person coming into the game sees a very stark and empty starting area (a very negative thing) if they want to keep LOTRO from looking like EQ1  they should address this problem very early as it it much easier to add a few things each chapter than try to address it 5 years from now when there are only 1-2 players in all of bree.

what else would i like to see?   more resource nodes or a bit more yeald out of existing ones  got fustrated wasting all my time ore hunting,

puzzles and more terrain interaction  charactor customization,  collections and and research types of endevers     more things players can do that they dont have to micro manage, productive   things they can do while washing dishes  or waiting for a quest group to arive,  books and messages to decypher    merit badges to collect like for exploration or acomplishments.

Originally posted by brenth
make a world, not a game, we dont want another game.

I am quite happy with the world I live in, so why shouldn't I want a gameto have fun?

This article is just a compilation of well-known information. We would like to see some exclusive

Yeah, I have to agree with the last poster, you gave us bullet points from the devchat a few weeks ago.

This game is WoW or EQ2 with less options, you really have to be a huge JRR Tolkien fan to actually play it for more than a month. This book 12 info just reminds me that nothings gonna change and that this will continue to be a sterile, noninventive, uninteresting and totally dumbed down mmorpg.

I just wish that if your toon is from Rohan, you would start in Rohan, same for the others like Gondor and the dwarf places. It seems to me that LoTRO is getting there but the whole world of Tolkien is so big its gonna take a while. Except for housing, I think they have done a great job so far.