Ques­tions always come with a new press release, espe­cially for an expan­sion. Tur­bine has clar­i­fied a few things on the forums so far:

Mar­ketroid On Price and Edi­tions:

Since this seems to have turned into the main thread on the topic I’ll address a cou­ple of things that have come up.

The announce­ment today didn’t con­tain pric­ing since we’re focused on announc­ing the game fea­tures and doing pre­views at PAX. A sub­se­quent announce­ment with those details will be out later. But since it’s being asked, here’s the scoop:

• Siege of Mirk­wood will have a base price of $19.99. As with Moria last year, we’re going to have a set of early upgrade offers that are very com­pelling. We’re not quite ready to unveil those details yet, but we’ll keep you posted.
• The epic story con­tin­ues on in Vol­ume 3 as a reg­u­lar con­tent update early next year.
• Some of the improve­ments to the game com­ing with Mirk­wood will ben­e­fit every­one, but the key fea­tures will require the Mirk­wood upgrade.

Hope­fully this clears things up a bit.

Note that Kotaku has said this expan­sion was free. This does not appear to be the case. As of now, it’s not clear where they got this infor­ma­tion from.

Zom­bie Colom­bus on World-join (aka Skirmish-join):

World-join is a bit of a mis­nomer. The name of that part of the over­all Skir­mish sys­tem is likely being changed to the more infor­ma­tive “Skirmish-join.” Remem­ber the way half the com­mu­nity calls Fel­low­ship Maneou­vers Con­junc­tions because that’s what it was in beta? This is one of those sit­u­a­tions

Well, what IS Skirmish-join? There will be a dev diary on it (I’m work­ing on it now) but the short ver­sion is it will be how play­ers can enter the new Skir­mish spaces. It’s a UI that will allow play­ers to select the group size, level, and dif­fi­culty of a Skir­mish, and then be instantly trans­ported to the Skir­mish. Empha­sis on “Skir­mish”, the sys­tem does not, as of now, inter­act with Instances, PvMP, Bat­tle Instances or any­thing else.

The link where this infor­ma­tion was found does a fairly good job of describ­ing Skirmish-join, as well as some lots more about the Skir­mish sys­tem that we’ve been work­ing on for some time now. I, per­son­ally, am very excited about it! http://​tinyurl​.com/​n​h​k​nbt

Sounds neat to me. Reminds me of one of the more enter­tain­ing aspects of Warham­mer Online, so I’m not upset to see some­thing sim­i­lar here. Be sure to read the link pro­vided, as IGN has the first pre­view on the game itself.

floon on Fur­ther Details on “Enhanced Com­bat Respon­sive­ness”:

That’s mostly it. Autoat­tacks will not delay fir­ing a skill. What this does mean is that ani­ma­tion have a chance to pre­empt autoat­tack anims in such a way as to pro­duce a pop in the anim tran­si­tion that isn’t there right now.

This is what I fig­ured we’d see. Hope­fully it’ll help stave off some of the com­plaints that the com­bat in this game is too slow. For every­one else, it means more effi­cient skill use. Big plus!

It sounds like we can expect to hear more over the course of PAX, through inter­views and so forth. Look­ing for­ward to it.

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