The Lord of the Rings Online's devs gave an update on a whole slew of in-development features that fans have been waiting for in a long post on the official forums, including info on crafting, Kinship changes and more.
Lead Designer Allan "Orion" Maki took to the forums to address a number of topics, tackling quite a few of LotRO's long teased but never fully completed in-the-works development initiatives.
One of the main ones many players (myself included) have wondered about is the Kinship Revamp that was teased earlier this year. As someone who has run a Kinship since 2007, the system does need some love, but Orion unfortunately announced that the feature would be delayed.
"The kinship revamp is going to require more time than we expected so it is not going to be in the U42 release. Along the way, we found some pitfalls we want to avoid and some ideas from you, the players, which are really good and we feel need to be included in the revision and we want to get this right[.]"
LotRO's crafting revamp is also something players have been wondering about ever since it was announced, though we've since learned that some of the ideas the team had for the revamp weren't easily doable thanks to the way crafting was designed back before launch.
"My ambition was far larger than our capacity here and after diving more deeply into the code with the engineering team we found a good number of major hurdles in the underpinning of the system making the complete overhaul I wanted to achieve nigh impossible. "
Orion does mention that the team is looking to make a "more sustainable method for crafting" in 2025, as well as getting "multitracking working."
Related:
Building an Expansion: Crafting LotRO Corsaris of Umbar's Mariner Class
Other updates, such as the Elf Avatar update, got a mention (it's "forthcoming" though "not as quickly" as the team would want), while the 4K UI update, MFA and a new launcher are all "on the whiteboard" but are limited in terms of how the team can tackle them based on "time and resources."
