The Digital Continuum: LotRO's feature future
There are many wonderful features within Lord of the Rings Online, especially with Siege of Mirkwood edging upon the horizon like a merchant's ship carrying treasure chests full of shiny new features. However, for many a person, the game just doesn't click into place. Whether it's because of a missing feature or the pace of combat, some people find themselves unable to acclimate a groove.
So let's talk about features and changes that would help attract fresh blood while keeping the old guard happy -- because changing the core of an MMO is never truly a good idea, but bring in fresh blood doesn't hurt.
Start with the basics
With any MMO the most basic and fundamental feature is combat, simply because you do so very much of it. Now, with Lord of the Rings Online, something you'll hear a lot is that people find combat to be unacceptably slow. Siege of Mirkwood is seeing Turbine tightening the bolts and raising the beat per beat of combat in general, just as it did with Mines of Moria.
That's all well and good, but there's something in particular that we think will drastically help new players generate a glowing interest in giving LotRO's combat a chance.
Bring in the Horses!
So yeah, Siege of Mirkwood's combat improvements are great, but when do we get to Rohan and the mighty Horse Lords? And, just as importantly, when do we see mounted combat? Battling atop horses is most certainly a key component of Tolkien's books and Turbine has to address it sooner or later. Yes, it's not an easy thing to implement, we're sure -- but if anyone can do it, Turbine can.
Since LotRO is setup in a way that requires the developer to follow the books' storyline, it seems like "soon" is a fair word to use when mentioning mounts in battle. Rohan comes into play quite prominently during The Two Towers, and that's the next logical story step.
I sincerely hope that horse combat and riding isn't limited to high level players. It seems to me that mounted combat would even do well as its own class -- or maybe even two. Then again, making mounted combat something you layer onto an existing class makes sense. I only worry that such a feature will be squandered on people who've been playing the game for hours upon hours. This may draw some ire from the LotRO community, but what Blizzard is doing with Cataclysm (IE showing love to low level players) should be a normal thing in expansions.
Future skirmish PvP
One aspect that's always been lacking in LotRO is PvP with a real, tasty hook. Siege of Mirkwood brings a hint of what's to come with its skirmishes. Of course, right now they're merely PvE encounters but in the future they could serve as a developmental springboard into a PvP variant that would be unlike pretty much anything else in MMOdom.
What I speak of are 12v12+ PvP encounters (with added soldier pets to increase the sense of scale) that would reenact such battles as Helm's Deep, which is another piece of content we'll likely see in the near future.
These would be battles that capture the grand scope of The Lord of the Rings while simultaneously creating a grand player vs player environment that no other game could really match in terms of game mechanics and lore. Players rushing around on Wargs and Horses and clashing in the trenches; it would be incomparable for some time to come.
