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Players show off Lord of the Rings Online's epic battles in Helm's Deep beta
The central feature of Lord of the Rings Online's upcoming expansion is battles of a truly astounding size. Battles large enough to truly earn the name of epic. With the drop of the NDA, players have taken it upon themselves to produce an equally epic assembly of footage for these epic battles. Narrators Andang, Ethelros, and Pineleaf have created five videos walking through all of the enormous battles, from smaller scale to the biggest possible encounters. As the videos show, success in these battles is not simply a matter of killing all of your enemies, focusing instead upon tactical management of the supporting NPCs while keeping an eye toward how many enemy forces are incoming. It also requires some amount of the calculation you'd expect, allowing some forces to fall so that your main force remains healthy. But you don't need to take our word for it -- click on past the break and start watching. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]
Thirty thousand Orcs and you: A LotRO epic battle story
The rain beats hard down on steel helms as a flash of lightning illuminates the horrible truth: a carpet of monsters stretching to the horizon, advancing on the last refuge of an entire country. A catapult rolls up and fires a flaming shot over the battlements and into the troops behind you. People die. More people take their place. As you watch, a formation of 600 Orcs breaks away from the host for the first charge against the wall. Your wall. The wall you've sworn to protect at all costs. The wall that may well be your grave in the next 30 minutes. This isn't just flowery language but actual in-game events we witnessed when Turbine took us in for our first look at the epic battles coming to Lord of the Rings Online: Helm's Deep. There's been plenty of talk on the studio's part as to the scale and scope of the system, but it's something else entirely to see it in action. Turbine's been working on the epic battle system for well over a year now, drawing inspiration from World War II documentaries as well as the 10-page description of the battle in Tolkien's novel. The team reworked the game's technology from the ground-up to allow for thousands of characters to fill the screen and up to 50 NPCs to be in combat at any one time. And even though the outcome of the battle is locked into place by lore, the conceit is that you will be judged based on your performance. Join us and 30,000 Orcs as we go over the many, many details of epic battles. But be quick about it -- we've only a few moments before the fight is rejoined.
The determined defense of Lord of the Rings Online: Helm's Deep
The veil of secrecy has been lifted, and the flood of details about Lord of the Rings Online: Helm's Deep is about to sweep you off your hairy Hobbit feet. The only question is... are you prepared? And are your mommy and daddy OK with your heading off to fight in a big war that will decide the fate of a nation? Turbine sat down with us to give us a broad overview of LotRO's fifth expansion with a special emphasis on its much-vaunted epic battle system. Let's start with the bullet points: Helm's Deep (officially Update 12) will contain five new zones, three additional books for the epic story, 300 quests, a 10-level bump in the cap to 95, plenty of awesome new armor and cosmetic models, and a new crafting tier. It will not contain traditional instances or skirmishes (more on that later), the much-anticipated housing update, or more mounted skills. But let's go beyond mere lists to take a closer look at an early view of the expansion and what it will hold when we finally move on to eastern Rohan.
