Massively's LotRO: Siege of Mirkwood launch day roundup

by Shawn Schuster on Dec 1st 2009 9:00AM

Fantasy, Lord of the Rings Online, Expansions, Interviews, Launches, MMO industry, News items

Lord of the Rings Online's newest expansion, Siege of Mirkwood, will release today for North America -- while later this week it will release for the European servers -- and we have a comprehensive wrapup available for you to find the biggest news for the new content. We have a dev tour, a video of the new maps, an interview with Jeffrey Steefel and more!

	A visual tour of LotRO: Siege of Mirkwood If you haven't had a chance to see Turbine's latest creation, check out our video tour of the expansion just after the jump below. Also, be sure to watch Massively for more coverage on Siege of Mirkwood from now to December 1st and beyond!
	LotRO: Siege of Mirkwood developer tour If you've been faithfully following along with the Lord of the Rings Online: Siege of Mirkwood beta, you may be excited by what you've heard -- or even seen yourself -- so far. The new expansion, which is set to launch on December 1st of this year (December 3rd for EU), centers around the forest of Mirkwood, just to the east of Lothlorien. It introduces us to a large new map of Mirkwood, the skirmish system, five new instances and much more.
	Massively Speaking Episode 78: An interview with Jeffrey Steefel Massively Speaking Episode 78 is back with Rubi, Shawn and special guest Jeffrey Steefel, executive producer for Lord of the Rings Online. They talk about Siege of Mirkwood, LotRO's future, Jeffrey's past and much more!
	Lord of the Rings Online to make drastic combat changes with Siege of Mirkwood It's very rare that you hear about a game changing how combat works at a fundamental level, but that's exactly what Turbine is doing in Siege of Mirkwood. We hope you guys weren't in love with weapon speeds and slow animations, because those are two of the things that are getting major overhauls.

	Latest LotRO dev diary details legendary weapon changes From the last "Ask the Dev Team" session with the Lord of the Rings Online developers, we knew that some changes were coming to the game's Legendary Weapon system. The latest Developer Diary entry is devoted entirely to filling in some of the details on these changes, which should come into effect when the Siege of Mirkwood expansion launches in December.
	Lord of the Rings Online developer diary revisits the Lone-lands The latest developer diary entry is from Lord of the Rings Online Senior Designer Allan "Orion" Maki, and takes us back to a very familiar area: The Lone-lands. While the region seems like a low-level walk in the park to the majority of players these days, Maki had always felt that there was a bit of a "disconnect" and that players were being sent to an area far above their level. The Lone-lands have been given what he describes as a "massive overhaul", bringing them more in line with low and mid level players abilities.
	New developer chat transcript for Lord of the Rings Online There's only a little time left until Lord of the Rings Online launches its next expansion, Siege of Mirkwood, but the players still have questions and the developers are thankfully quite happy to answer them. Not so long ago, WarCry had their first developer chat transcript up for fans of the game to digest. A fair bit of new information has come out since then, and so a new chat transcript is available with more information for the playerbase to mull over for the next week.
	Story moments in new Siege of Mirkwood screens Lord of the Rings Online is well known for its story, which it has Tolkien's works to thank for -- although Turbine does a great job of making it all come alive. These new Siege of Mirkwood screens depict a few of the new epic story moments players can expect come December 1st when the expansion is made available for purchase.
	Lord of the Rings developer diary explores Dol Guldur We've seen the screenshots and trailer for the fortress of Dol Guldur in the upcoming Lord of the Rings Online expansion Siege of Mirkwood, and today's developer diary explores it in more detail, giving us an extensive look through the area.
	Lord of the Rings Online dev diary tells of creating Mirkwood We've been enjoying the gorgeous screenshots and trailers from Turbine in the weeks leading up to the release of Lord of the Rings Online: Siege of Mirkwood, and the latest LotRO developer diary gives a behind the scenes look at creating the regions in Mirkwood.
	Lord of the Rings Online explains skirmish rewards "Let's be honest, people play new content for the rewards." Perhaps not the most uplifting or metaphorical way to start off a developer diary, but if nothing else you need to give Lord of the Rings Online credit for being so direct about it. But with the most recent developer diary regarding the Skirmish system coming in the Siege of Mirkwood expansion, they really deserve still more credit than that.