A visual tour through LotRO's Dunland

@slickie on the middle earth map everything is plains and forests passed Eriador, besides the occasional bog, on the way to mordor so i do not know what you expect them to do lol.

@slickie

The problem being Modor is so dreary, black and devoid of fauna, that players would cry out for more fields and forests after it's eventual implementation. Just saying.

@Silverangel

Moria's size was in vertical regions. Moria had a bunch of little subzones that made it feel huge but just travel thru Moria in a straight line to the First Hall and see how long it takes you to get across it all.

This expansion has the biggest land mass addition we've had so far to the game. It might not look that big on the overhead map but trust me it's a big region. The Gap of Rohan and Isengard aren't that big but Dunland is pretty big and there's no giant lakes or mountains splitting the map taking up playable space. It's the largest playable space map yet.

@Ehra

IMO the stat cap removal is the best change to the game yet. It allows for such diversity among the same classes. You can have a morale build melee class or a stack might thru the roof to get more DPS. There's going to be some tough choices when it launches for tanks. Some people will sacrifice BPE and mitigations in order to get 12k morale. But they will be more squishy and that's never a good thing for a tank class. My champ has twice as much melee offense as pre RoI so I'm happy. 96% melee offense is WICKED!

@stephen09181981
That's the whole problem I'm seeing. This expansion basically brings us to the cusp between Fellowship and The Two Towers. The game launched 4 1/2 years ago. At the rate of development established thus far we have 9 years before they'll finish the trilogy's story line. That would make the game 13 years old... more than a little long in the tooth.

Yes, there are a few MMO's that have made it to that age, so it's possible. But how many of the original players were there to see the end? And how dated did the engine end up looking by that point?

As much as I love LotRO, I think the next couple years are likely to be pretty tough for it. Not only do we have a few major new MMO's hitting the market but two of them (GW2 and Secret World) are introducing significant changes to the various "rules" that current MMO's are built around. Turbine has been playing it very safe with LotRO. That will keep the players who are just content to explore Middle Earth, but it also means they'll have a very difficult time keeping interested those players who have grown bored of the same old mechanics. Sadly, even WoW has shown more innovation in breaking up the "kill 10 rats" or "FedEx" mechanics.

@stephen09181981

It all depends where Turbine goes with the story. The timeline is pretty short once you get passed FOTR. TTT and ROTK are pretty squished together in a time sense. We go to Rohan next then to Gondor and Mordor. The end!

Unless Turbine takes us north again to fill out some of the map. I wouldn't mind going into Dale, Northern Mirkwood, and the Lonely Mountain. Maybe have that expansion tie into the two Hobbit movies coming out in 2012 and 2013. Then head south again to get us back on course. Expansion packs are the real money maker for Turbine so I don't see them going 2 years between expansions again. Prolly 12-18 months. The problem with that is they will be smaller expansions since there's less time to development massive zones and tons of content/instances.

@JaySpeed

well i have enough TP saved up to get isengard for free almost 6500 TP and i think helms deep is next for a xpac and i don't think this will include rohan either probably helms deep, and fanghorn forest hope i spelled that right

@stephen09181981

Why do you want to get to Mordor so quickly. This game is about the huge story that is taking place in Middle Earth while the Fellowship travels to Mordor. I think Turbine is doing it right by fleshing out areas and charecters barely mentioned in the book to make Middle earth more epic and awesome.

I actually pray that when we get to Mordor LOTRO is the most awesome MMO ever, but let them take their time.

I also hope that everyone also understands that the reasons this expansion may seem fluff or not enough is also majorly due to Warner Bros. now owning Turbine.

I am sure that things changed inhouse that forced some Devs to leave and new ones to come in ect. So I am pretty sure that once this one is released and they announce what is next you all will finally be happy and stop hating

@kickman77

dude i played this game in 2007 i loved it then the constant solo content and lack of group content is destroying it casuals and soloers thinking they deserve everything a raider gets this is why i'm hating

@smartstep

I agree. This is my biggest worry for LOTRO. When the legendary relic removal mechanic was taken out of the game and put in the store, I saw where Turbine was taking LOTRO. When a developer carves out a basic game mechanic and puts a price tag on it, they've broken faith with their player base.

I'm sure the relic removal scroll was a toe in the water, a test to see how the player base would react to it. We can expect more and more of the basic game mechanics to end up being store items. And that pretty much puts LOTRO beyond the pale for me.

@OutThere

Yeah :(

Buying skills that normally come with ranks , already confirmed for monster side in PvPM. Kinda sucks if you ask me, you know to get high rank you normally have to play for weeks-months or more , and now you will be able to buy high rank skills for your rank 0 monster if you open your wallet :/

I think that with Isengard we will see some more push towards monetarizing advantage , but biggest push will be like 2 months after with some update, cause Turbine is very smart with catious step-by-step approach and they don't want to hurt Isengard sales by putting all that is planned on release day.

So some things will go live with Isengard and imho some big update to store will be with Instance update few months after Isengard.