March of the King – First Impressions

Update 19 starts right where Pelennor Fields left off.  Players have to deal with the immense loss that is fully realized after the battle’s end.  One item players have to clean up in particular creates a pretty eerie quest.

While the cleanup is still going on, players take part in assembling The Council of the Captains.  I found that throughout the new area, so far anyway, there seems to be plenty of interesting quests.  I think this is the most fun I have had doing side quests since Western Gondor, if not before.

Sunlight has returned!  The end of the dawnless day is possibly the biggest plus to this entire update.  It is so nice to see Gondor in all of its Sauron-destroyed glory.  The contrast between the immense loss at Pelennor Fields and the new found beauty of Gondor creates emotion that is impossible to describe.  It is a liberation that feels like the first time I stepped out of months of Moria into the beauty of Lothlórien.

This is another great update for LOTRO that builds on the success of Update 18 as players march on toward Mordor.

If you want to see my impressions of the rest of the zone, you can watch my commentary series as I make my way through the rest of March of the King.

You can also visit my YouTube channel for even more LOTRO content.

This series is made possible by supporters on Patreon.

What do you think of Update 19 so far?  Let us know in the comments below!

One comment

  1. Awsome landscapes in North Ithilien, but as in a few previous updates, quests are boring, lot of fetch quests made by lazy quest designer (we are collecting rangers caches 3 times in a short time… we are collecting water 2 times… we are talking to frightened warriors 3 times, which in my case was as 3 quests in a row – yaaawwnnn, we are also collecting ore and stone… would be really great to see here some creativity, Turbine once promised to treat us like heroes, but it never happened, we are still physical workers or servants when developers get lazy, it would be enough if instead collecting ore or stone personally we would have to defend workers who are collecting it… thats micro change in game design and questflow but huge in gameplay. But it looks like Turbine do not care anymore… Layoffs davastated team, killed any creativity, they just copy old ideas, while RPG genre moved forward a lot in last years (Witcher III for example)

    The only really interesting quests IMO were patrol on which we went with 2 Dunadains and trip with 2 very important NPC’s ended with demolition work made by one of them 😀 (no more details to avoid spoilers).

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