Update: Appar­ently LotRO offi­cially went live in Rus­sia last Sep­tem­ber. They are just now releas­ing the Mines of Moria expan­sion. Not sure what the sit­u­a­tion may have been in Korea.

Yes­ter­day we received a press release from Tur­bine announc­ing that LotRO is finally launch­ing in Korea and Rus­sia. We first heard about these two local­iza­tions a while ago, but for the most part things have been very quiet since then. I was won­der­ing if maybe they slipped under the radar, but it seemed unlikely .… After all, Korea is a poten­tially mas­sive con­sumer base for this title and it’s some­thing I think Tur­bine will want to make a big deal about.

I assume this upcom­ing launch had a lot to do with the sud­den inclu­sion of the Quest Guide. Sure, a lot of peo­ple have been ask­ing for one since the start, but it’s almost an expected fea­ture for Korean released MMORPGs. Inter­views with Tur­bine in the past had sug­gested that there would be some changes to the title to bet­ter accom­mo­date these new players.

Tur­bine is part­ner­ing with NHN (essen­tially, Hangame) in Korea and ITT in Rus­sia, who will han­dle the game much like Code­mas­ters does in Europe.

You can see the indi­vid­ual logos above, but I’ve also included the two screen shots that Tur­bine is dis­trib­ut­ing below the break.

This reminds me that the game released in Japan quite a while ago. You don’t hear too much about that, although there is a reg­u­larly updated blog that  links here from time to time.  Maybe we should start­ing adding for­eign lan­guage links? We now link to non-English offi­cial sites too.

It’s inter­est­ing to see this in dif­fer­ent lan­guages. I hope the launches go well.

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