New LotRO screens give a peek at free-to-play

Those are there because that person needs to buy the content for that area. If you have the content, they are just regular rings.

Yep, that is what you would see in areas you had not bought content for as a F2P account. As a subscriber it will just be the regular rings that are currently in game. This is the same system that they use in DDO F2P.

Exactly what visualgloss said, it is just like the ones in DDO when you don't have the quest purchased.

Looks like a lot of quests that person needs, hopefully it isn't everywhere.

It's there to remind the people that they have to spend money.

If you are a Free or Premium player, all non-Epic Storyline/Book quests need to be purchased after the starting zones. So basically, the level 1-20 quests are free. When you go into Lone Lands or North Downs you will need to buy the quest pack for whichever zone you're entering. This will give you all quests for that entire zone. When you move on to another zone you would need to buy the quests there.

Alternatively, you can skip the quests and grind mobs. There is a hidden benefit to this, as many of the deed give you Turbine Points upon completion, with which you could help offset the cost of the next zone's quests if you wanted.

This makes the Freemium model ideal for casual players. If you take a couple weeks or more to get through a zone's content then it is cheaper to buy the quest packs than it is to subscribe to the game. Also, once a quest pack is purchased it applies to your entire account. That entire zone will then be unlocked for all future characters that you might play.

As has been mentioned, VIP players (lifetime and monthly subscribers) will get all the quests for free. (Although you'll still need to buy Mines of Moria and Siege of Mirkwood if you haven't already.) A current subscriber who decides to let the subscription lapse (for example, if you find you can't play as much as you used to) will drop to the Premium level. If you already have MoM and SoM you will keep all the quests from those zones but you will need to buy the quest packs for the pre-Moria zones; I would assume Enedwaith as well.

No rangers in lord of the rings except for the Dunedain (Aragorn's posse), Hunters are similar but are not called 'Rangers'.

No, no you won't. You'll rise to probably level 10 then see a bunch of Turbine logos inside of rings. There is very little "Free" to play here.

Yeah, the ability to be a Ranger steps on the IP's toes apparently so you can't be one. One of the few problems with this game is the IP is like a straitjacket on the potential fun. I love roleplay and immersion, but never at the expense of fun.

Keen, Bree should get up into the early 20's. You could hit 24 if you do the GB quests. That is a decent amount of content for free.

Tessellation is not just a switch that you flip and it's suddenly active in-game. You do realize that tessellation requires displacement maps, right? In order for it to have an effect on the game's graphics Turbine would have to go through and create additional textures for every single texture that's currently in the game. That is not an easy thing to do, especially retroactively.

There are other benefits that can be expected from DX11 such as even better water shaders and ambient occlusion. Those are fairly easy to implement. However Turbine has not yet revealed any screen shots under the DX11 engine. They're probably still turning on features and understandably don't want to release shots until closer to release.

If they are adding tessellation at all, then it will most likely be very close to release before we'll see any shots due to the massive amount of texture work that must be done.

@aurickle

Yeah, I am aware that you need displacement maps for tesselation to ADD DETAIL. Like any subdivision surface however, you do not have to have displacement maps for it to ROUND OFF CORNERS. That means if you want to get rid of squarish heads and blocky hills, this is what you want to do and you do not need displacement maps for that.
If you wanted to add additional detail, you would need a normal map and whenever they have been using bump mapping in the game, they already made those.
Further, they would not have to do that for every single texture in the game. That is ridiculous. I would expect it for characters, mobs and maybe for the landscape itself and some selected (!) buildings and decorative landscape objects. I quite honestly dont care about some better water effects. The water in LOTRO is already looking pretty good. What is not looking good are blocky, low poly characters (still better than in WOW, but hey, they are the ones doing DirectX11).
Also, they would not have to update everything for the first release. It would already be cool, if they just updated some things (e.g. player characters).
So, you are exaggerating the problem.

Actually I just ran the Heaven benchmark in DX10 and DX11 modes to see the difference. The ONLY surfaces that are smoothed by tesselation are those that have displacement maps. For example, when you watch the camera pan down past the dragon from above the polygons forming the wing are clearly visible with an angular bend rather than smoothed. This is because no displacement map is applied to that particular surface. The dragon's chest changes dramatically and the polygons are smoothed, but that's because that surface has displacement maps telling the tessellation how to behave.

So the only way for the character or other models to be smoothed even with DX11 is if displacement maps are created for these models.

In order to do this, the game models would have to be taken into something like ZBrush where they could be divided and possibly sculpted some more. They could then generate the displacement map that shows the differences between the smoothed and unsmoothed surfaces. This would have to be done for every single model to which tessellation will be applied. In the case of armors and many walls (such as the bulk of Bree's timbers used in the walls or the stonework), they would absolutely have to sculpt the surface.

A bump map can be used to create normal maps, but normal maps cannot drive tessellation. This is because neither normal nor bump maps contain any actual depth information. It's all an optical illusion. What's more, bump and normal maps are 8-bit files. Displacement maps require 16 or 32 in order to look good and not result in a stair-stepping effect. An 8-bit file cannot be upconverted to 16-bit very well at all. Displacement maps can only be accurately created from actual 3D data, which bump and normal maps don't contain.

When it comes to LotRO, tessellation can't be used to smooth the character models without a ton of work. While ZBrush (which I know the LotRO team uses) can do a lot to help, there would still be a terrific amount of manual labor involved. Even if they limit the efforts to just the characters, they would have to also do the job with every single piece of armor or the results would be really jarring. That also means every single armor texture due to the fact that the game's texture artists added so much detail to the majority of armors and for the effect to look right things like straps and other raised surfaces would need to be manually sculpted. Even where they could use texture data to drive masking through which they could control sculpting or deformations there still won't be an automated process that could work. Every single texture would need to be worked on a case by case basis. Just limiting the project to the characters and their armors would still be prohibitive.

The bottom line is that the best time to create displacement maps is at the same time that you're sculpting and texturing your models. Working retroactively is not an easy thing at all.

So no, the odds of us seeing any tessellation in LotRO are virtually nonexistent.

@aurickle
Whether tesselation smoothes something or not, depends on the tesselation shader. It does NOT require a displacement map to smooth things.
It is a simple shader.
From left to right:
Non tesselated, tesselated, tesselated with displacement map.
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=532&Itemid=72&limit=1&limitstart=1

You can see that the displacement map adds detail, but it is not required to smooth the object. That can be done with the tesselation (domain) shader allone.
The tesselation in DirectX11 is fully programmable and you can make it do whatever you want, without the need for textures. You only need to define a function by which the resulting vertices are smoothed. You can do any type of subdivision surface that way. It is really awesome!
Anyway, here is a little screenshot to show you what I mean.
So, no you do not need displacement maps.
Also, Landscapes probably already are using highlevel maps in LOTRO. These are essentially displacement maps.

You wrote:" but normal maps cannot drive tessellation. This is because neither normal nor bump maps contain any actual depth information."
Uhm, a grey scale bump map contains actually just that. In fact a grey scale bump map can be used as a displacement map just as well. They are the same thing. A highmap (which is basically a displacement map) used for landscapes is also the same thing. The depth information contained in any bump or displacement map is always relative. You have a separate parameter to define how much the maximum displacement actually is.
A normal map is a little different in that it contains the direction of the normal at a texel. Anyway, you can convert from a normal map to a bump map easily.
Also, you do not need a displacement map for tesselation! Read it up god dammit!
Finally, displacement maps do not have to be of more than 8 bit, if you do not want a lot of detail in them.
Normal maps of course have more than 8 bits, since they have 3 channels (RGB). They have 8 bits per channel if you mean that. But that is irrelevant.
Anyway, you should go and do some reading on tesselation shaders and how to write them and all that. Once you have done that, we can go and talk again.