There was a post on the official forums where a player was bemoaning on the current state of the game.
A few pages into the thread, it was brought up why are we not in Mordor yet? Produktion Malphunktion chimed in with this statement :
Exactly. The MMO landscape has changed drastically over the past 6 years.
All I can say right now is we are very aware of this and well, we will see what we will bring to the table in 2015.To Mordor!
Mount Doom. The plan is already there and has been for years. It’s awesome. But yes, we very obviously do not follow Sam and Frodo since in the books they don’t have any population where we can hide players. Sure I guess we could do ‘the forward guard for Frodo’ or the ‘cleanup crew’ but that is kind of lame, and very forced.
But there is a war a few hundred miles to the east of Frodo that fits what is needed for an MMO-towns, conflicts, good guys, bad guys, places to explore. This gives breath and space for YOU to be the hero for a while, not the baggage handler for Merry and Pippin. It is fun to run alongside Legolas, but it is not fun to watch Legolas do all the work…if you get what I mean.
Would a Frodo and Sam game be cool someday…sure, but not as an MMO. That would just turn into Frodo and his Amazing Friends!We will continue to visit Frodo and the real hero- Sam–like we do in 14.2.
So to sum it up, there is a plan for Mordor. We ARE going there, but not with Sam & Mr. Frodo.
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I read that post rather differently. To me it sounds like we’re going TO Mordor (the Black Gate, I’m guessing) but not INTO Mordor…. which is disappointing to me, even it it is more in line with the lore. I don’t anything in the books that could be indicating that expeditions including hobbits and dwarves venturing into Dol Guldur (nor elves, ere the last days of the war) or Orthanc (before the ents visited the vale), yet there was room for this in the game. For Tubine to now say “we’re not doing it.. because of the Lore!” seems weak to me, and is a big let down.
Since that post, PM clarified* that he didn’t mean east of Frodo and Mount Doom at all with “looking at my map, Central Gondor to Mt Doom is about 250 miles…”. I’m thinking he may have just gotten his east-west directions muddled, which can happen to us all, or was just holding the map upside down.
And if “We will continue to visit Frodo and the real hero- Sam–like we do in 14.2”, well, that sounds like more session play. Which is slightly better than not seeing inside Mordor all at. But not much. I doesn’t yet sound to me like our characters will explore within Mordor. I very much hope I’m wrong.
So, if 250 miles from Mount Doom into Central Gondor, where does that have us adventuring? Around Minas Tirith, Lebennin, Anórien, or elswhere?
*https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=7230989#post7230989