Executive Producer Severlin posted the latest producer’s letter looking forward to what’s ahead for next year. The full text of the letter is at the LOTRO forums, but here are a few bullet points for a TL;DR version:
Update 23 will take us into the Lonely Mountain, east to the Iron Hills, then north to the Grey Mountains, exploring dwarven cultures. It will also include a level cap raise to 120.
Minas Morgul has been pushed back to 2019.
Class work is expected to continue, as well as work on festivals and quality of life improvements that may include being able to see “sheathed” musical instruments.
Seasonal instances! Including two planned for the upcoming Summer Festival.
These are just a few of the things that we can look forward to for the rest of this year and beyond.
Executive Producer Severlin posted on the forums, about a delay with Mordor
Mordor Launch Date Shift
We are as excited as many of you to get into Mordor, but we have some unfortunate news: we have to adjust the release date. While preparing over the weekend to release the expansion on Monday, we discovered an issue in the build that impacted the ability of monsters and NPCs to move around correctly. This problem was specifically identified in older content.
While correcting this issue is not a problem, the process to correct it takes too long to be able to release Mordor on Monday. So, we have to adjust the release date. We will have more info on the release date soon. We will know a lot more in the next 24 hours or so, and will pass along the info as soon as we can.
Sev~
Sounds like it won’t be long, but it’s a delay none the less.
Today, along with introducing the new Executive Producer for Lord of the Rings Online, Turbine released the 2015 Executive Producer’s letter. In the letter, new EP Athena Peters introduces herself to the community and speaks of two major updates for the year: Osgiliath and Minas Tirith.
The letter also outlines 6 major initiatives for the first half of 2015:
Legendary items – Imbue at level 100, so no more deconstruction is needed in order to continue leveling. This appears to be the change that was supposed to be implemented in 2014 but was pushed back
New fellowship challenges – the letter specifically mentions roving threats and group content on landscape, as well as new instances to be released with Osgiliath.
Quality of life improvements – no specifics here, other than these seem to be focused on fixing “persistent bugs” and not new convenience systems such as the mail update
Episodic content – not sure how this will play out, so I’ll just quote exactly as it appears in the letter: “We are currently in development on a new type of quest content that will roll out like an episodic TV show, a little at a time, as you follow a new friend across Middle-earth seeing familiar places in a new light.”
Server populations – Athena mentions three things of note, here. 1) Improved server transfer tools, 2) Upgrades to environments to improve playability and 3) Moving the EU servers back to Europe. It’s unclear what “upgrades to environments” refers to. Improved layering technology? Cross-server events? Server consolidations?
PvMP – Lastly, Turbine once again teases the possibility of a new PvMP map in Osgiliath. While Athena is quick to point out that this possibility is still under investigation, being that this is the second time they’ve specifically mentioned Osgiliath as the location and that it has not yet been shelved might give the PvMP population some enthusiasm.
As always, the producer’s letter seems to bring about as many questions as answers. That’s why we at LOTRO Players love it, though! Let the speculation begin!
In a follow-up post on the official forums, Athena has posted the following, hoping to clarify some of the points of the letter:
Group Instances in Osgiliath: We are specifically referring to a cluster of instance content for 3 & 6 man fellowships that is neither a Big Battle or a Raid. We evaluate the type of content we build with each region for what is appropriate and feasible. So we might do a raid again some day, but Osgiliath is not the time to do it.
Osgiliath PvMP map: This will be a different “layer” to the map. This way players will be able to explore Osgiliath in PvE mode in Update 16 and the goal is to then also provide a PvMP version shortly thereafter (not on the same release date).
Music: We currently have our sound engineers looking into the issues with the newer version of the music system that we pulled out late last year. Our hopes is that we can have it fixed with or next update, but I am still awaiting implementation and testing of the fixes to see if they are affective. Once we have it in we will of course be placing it on Bullroarer so we can get feedback before it is released. More info once I have it.
EU Servers: This will simply be a move of the physical servers to Amsterdam. The service will still remain in the hands of Turbine, so we will all still have the same downtime, updates, etc in sync with one another. Better location and newer hardware should result in better performance all around.
