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The Road to Mordor: LotRO's next four expansions
With under a month to go until Riders of Rohan hits the digital starting gate and gallops past the horse metaphor, expansions are weighing heavily upon my mind. I'm excited about horse combat and a break from traditional questing (to a point), but I'm also hoping that Lord of the Rings Online's fourth expansion will prove far more compelling than its previous one turned out to be. LotRO may be coasting into its middle-age years (in MMOs, every year in real life is like nine for the game), but it still has quite a bit of life -- and journey -- ahead of it. Unlike every other MMO out there, this title has a specific story it's following from beginning to end. Maybe we get off the beaten path of Tolkien's works now and then, but our fate as players is intertwined with the fates of Frodo and the One Ring. It gives us the advantage of knowing more about our future in the game than we would have otherwise. So today I'm putting on my prognostication cap and giving you all the skinny on Lord of the Rings Online's next four expansions past Riders of Rohan. I have no insider knowledge, just a gut feeling and a time-traveling buddy named Soren from the year 2020.
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.
