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The Road to Mordor: An Update 6 play date with Turbine
This past week, Turbine called my parents and asked if I could come over to play Lord of the Rings Online. "Sure he can," my mother replied. "As long as he wears his galoshes. What? It's wet outside!" And thus I ended up hanging out with the Turbine crew -- Aaron Campbell, Jared Pruett, and Jeff Libby -- as they walked me through Update 6 with the optional developer commentary mode set to "on." I highly recommend you rent a developer for the same experience, as it helps to have someone giving you a Cliff's Notes version of the game's complicated lore. Pruett first caught me up on the major PvMP changes of this coming Monday's update. The team wanted to increase rewards and turn progression into a seasonal mechanic to keep players coming to the Ettenmoors. As such, PvMP now has a universal currency -- that's account-wide, by the way -- that will allow players to purchase top-end gear. The team also tweaked down what the devs saw as a DPS race in order to give players time to deliberate and make strategic choices during fights. Beyond PvMP, the devs marched me right into the next epic storyline book that whisked us away to a strange new land: The Great River. What did I find waiting for me there?
Upcoming chat with the Fallen Earth devs
There's one thing you really can't deny - the MMO genre has sorely needed some shiny new post-apocalyptic titles for some time now. Thankfully it looks like Fallen Earth's development is proceeding at a solid pace. With any luck we'll be able to jump in and get our post-apocalyptic warfare on before too long. As a way of working with the community to ensure that Fallen Earth is as solid they can possibly make it, the developers from Icarus Studios have been scheduling play-dates with the beta testers, followed by an open chat on Stratics for everyone who is curious - tester and non-tester alike. This month's chat, going on tomorrow at 9:00 PM EDT, should prove to be highly interesting, as not only will there be several developers on hand, but there's been talk of some swag (and beta keys) to be handed out as well! You can get all the details over on the Fallen Earth forums if you're interested in checking out more on this upcoming MMO. [via WarCry]
