Well it’s June 23rd, which means all of us US/Oceanic players will be updating our client to Book 8. If you run the launcher now, you can patch and/or download all the necessary files. I downloaded in advance (the files add up to about 600MB), but it’s still a pretty lengthy installation process. Just keep that in mind.
Servers are still down and will not officially go live until 12 EST. There’s always a chance it might be a bit earlier or a bit later than that.
For the Europeans out there, Codemasters has not announced an outright official time just yet. They are, however, currently aiming for Thursday. We’ll see.
Very excited to see some of the changes. I’m still largely playing as my Rune-keeper, who is pretty close to hitting level 40 now. I’m interested in seeing how some of the changes affect him. I might roll a new character to check out some of the Bree adjustments as well.
Does anyone else have any specific plans? I imagine at least a few of you will be hitting the new raid. 
I’ve got a couple of lowbie alts that I’ve barely touched if you need somebody for your new Bree charater to hang with. ^_^
Without a hint of irony or sarcasm, I can say that the revamp of the Bree area (far FAR more than ‘adjustments’) represents some of the finest revision and improvement I’ve ever seen in any MMO. Period. Full stop.
My wife and I have played through the first part of the story in the Bree fields — having just explored the improved Ered Luin, we decided to let the characters sit for a week in Bree without taking any quests, until Book 8 dropped, and it was SO WORTH IT.
Right at the end of the night, we’d made it through the new “Grimbriar” quest hub, Adso’s camp, and wrapped up with Chapters 6, 7, and 8 of Book 1, which took us into Buckland.
Our jaws dropped. Literally dropped open.
I already knew from Adso’s camp that they had revised the Old Forest and somehow — magically — found the perfect sweet spot between the original Old Forest (horrible death trap) and the more recent version (laughably harmless), but this… I mean… I had no idea.
The Southern Barricade along the Green Way with that one miserable mission that no one wants to do? They fixed it. It’s so much fun now.
It’s all just… so much fun.
Right at the end of the night, we noticed we both had a message in the mail.
I won’t tell you what it was, but it made us stop and just stare at each other and say “That… is so. F*@#ing. Cool.”
And it was. It really was.
I cannot WAIT to really delve into the Old Forest now. I am practically VIBRATING in anticipation of the Barrow Downs.
Thanks for this comment, loved it.
I’d definitely be interested in hearing your future thoughts on the Old Forest. I didn’t even consider that they’d be changing that in any way.
From what I can tell, there isn’t a single quest in the area they didn’t touch, and all for the better.
So far, I count a least a half-dozen entirely new quests, mostly around the Southern Barricade on Greenway.
Buckland quests into the Old Forest were entirely revamped, the story lines tweaked, and all of them MUCH more streamlined (you’re going into the forest? why not take all three of the wolf/bat/bear hunting quests AT ONCE? What a concept!)
It’s really excellent. They took what they learned in revamping Ered Luin and (to a smaller degree) Archet/Combe/Staddle, and took it up an order of magnitude.