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LotRO's Update 10 springs into action
Lord of the Rings Online raiders rejoice: Today marks the end of a very long wait for Riders of Rohan raids. Update 10: Against the Shadow, Part II ushers in the second half of the expansion's instance cluster as well as some fairly significant stat changes as the dev team prepares for wide-sweeping class revamps. The new instances include a six-person fight, The Bells of Dale, plus a trio of 12-person raids: Flight to the Lonely Mountain, the Fires of Smaug, and the Battle for Erebor. Update 10 has beefed up fate's effects and made agility the Warden's primary stat. Also included with the patch are several new store options, the ability to turn off forced emoting, the removal of dread upon defeat on the landscape, and new scaling for all of the In Their Absence instances. You can read the patch notes on the official site.
LotRO goes to the Lonely Mountain: Update 10 raid preview
If you haven't heard the garment-rending woes of Lord of the Rings Online players who have had to wait and wait for the promised second half of Riders of Rohan's instance cluster (now with raids!), then you haven't been anywhere near LotRO in the past half-year. Fortunately, the imminent Update 10 will soon swoop in and provide the populace with a trio of raids as well as a six-person instance to tackle. We got on the phone with Turbine for a tour of the new raids. Senior Designer Joe Barry opened the session by explaining that eastern Rohan just plain did not work for a location of instances due to lore restrictions, a lack of a big bad guy, and no iconic locations. So the team decided to tackle the IP-supported tale of the Easterlings' siege of Dale and the Lonely Mountain through the second half of this instance cluster. Join us as we take a look at just what is up with the Lonely Mountain now that Smaug has vacated the premises!
The Road to Mordor: Will our journey take us back to The Hobbit?
The next few years promise to be exciting ones for fans of Middle-earth. Ever since The Return of the King debuted in theaters in 2003, audiences have clamored for more of Tolkien on the big screen -- specifically, The Hobbit. After nearly a decade of back-and-forth negotiating and legal entanglements, it appears that this The Hobbit movies are finally going to happen, with Sir Peter Jackson once again in the director's chair and Martin Freeman taking on the lead role as Bilbo. That's smashing news for movie buffs, but what does this have to do with Lord of the Rings Online -- y'know, that MMO we sometimes talk about in this column? It could be "very little," with Turbine proceeding on its merry way and perhaps enjoying the free boost to playership as movie buffs hunt around for a game to extend the experience. However, if the company were smart, it would be laying out the groundwork right now to synergize the heck out of the movie with a similar in-game experience. For a while now, I've been chewing on the notion that Turbine could incorporate the events, locations and characters of The Hobbit into LotRO -- in fact, several of the key pieces are already in place. Could our journey in LotRO eventually take us back to the era of Bilbo's grand adventure? How would such a thing even work? Hit the jump and I will smack your brain so hard with ideas that you'll forget all of your piano lessons. It's OK -- you didn't really need them.
