Whilst The Shire remains the most instantly recognisable location in Tolkien’s legendarium, it can be argued that three of the best loved locations of The Lord of the Rings are found in the neighbouring Bree-land. The Old Forest, the Barrow-downs and Bree itself are the main locations which see the Hobbits flee from The Shire and begin their great adventure. The chapters which detail the journey from Crickhollow to the Prancing Pony, The Old Forest, In the House of Tom Bombadil, Fog on the Barrow-downs and At the Sign of the Prancing Pony are often cited as fans favourites, mine included. The appeal of reading about the seemingly helpless Hobbits blundering around from peril to deadly peril, with little or no help, and bearing the One Ring, makes for fascinating reading.
Much of the journey through the Bree-land is commonly excluded from adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. The films by Peter Jackson and Ralph Bakshi, as well as the 1981 BBC Radio adaptation, move straight from The Shire to Bree itself, missing out entirely the adventures in the Old Forest and the Barrow-downs. Additionally one of the most important, and best loved, characters of The Lord of the Rings, Tom Bombadil, has not been included in any of the major adaptations. For this reason, many players of LotRO who are unfamiliar with the books will experience these locations and characters for the first time in-game.
I’m sure many are aware of the Bree-land revamp that came along with Book 8. I’ve not had a chance to play yet, but this is something that really caught my interest. I never thought Bree-land was bad, but it sounds like these adjustments make it a lot more fun.
Doyce has a great post about this on his site that I encourage everyone to read. He hits upon all of the areas and quests that have frustrated people over the past couple of years. Interestingly, they also made another pass at the Old Forest, which was surprising to me as well:
They revised the Old Forest (which I didn’t think they’d bother messing with, as it’s already seen one revision) and somehow – magically – found the perfect sweet spot between the original Old Forest (horrible death trap, but cool) and the more recent version (sadly, laughably harmless).
Whenever I finally get to go in game again, I’ll be interested in seeing how all of this played out for myself.
I’ve always wanted to put together videos from my time playing LotRO, but was never entirely sure how to go about it. Rog has been creating some and reminded me that FRAPS allows you to grab video in-game. I had completely forgotten about that since I’ve only used it for screens. I’ve not edited video in years and even then that was only in school, so I’m definitely a bit rusty.
I’ve been playing around with that, a free editor I found and various codecs to compress the video and finally put together something I was happy with: a video walkthrough of Bree. This won’t offer anything new to existing players, but I think it does a good job of showing off how well Turbine crafted the city and how large it is. This was during off-peak hours, so there weren’t too many people in the way.
If you’re interested, you can download a larger version too that’s about 640×440. My original was 1280×720 or so, but resulted in videos over 100 MBs for something this length. I think that resolution might be better suited for shorter clips.
I hope to make more in the future, some similar and some not. Hopefully I’ll get better at it too.
I’m in the process of adding images to MMeOw’s new Galleries section. I thought some of the images I came across on press sites were of special note, so I uploaded them first. These images are back from 2002 to 2004 for what was then The Lord of the Rings: Middle Earth Online.
You can check out all of the shots and artwork I have from this period in the Galleries section now (in addition to artwork from then). However, I thought it would be interesting to make some comparisons between the two versions of the game. While the final version of The Lord of the Rings Online certainly looks better in essentially every way, it’s interesting to see how many aspects of the game remained the same or were at least inspired by these earlier builds.
Whilst The Shire remains the most instantly recognisable location in Tolkien’s legendarium, it can be argued that three of the best loved locations of The Lord of the Rings are found in the neighbouring Bree-land. The Old Forest, the Barrow-downs and Bree itself are the main locations which see the Hobbits flee from The Shire and begin their great adventure. The chapters which detail the journey from Crickhollow to the Prancing Pony, The Old Forest, In the House of Tom Bombadil, Fog on the Barrow-downs and At the Sign of the Prancing Pony are often cited as fans favourites, mine included. The appeal of reading about the seemingly helpless Hobbits blundering around from peril to deadly peril, with little or no help, and bearing the One Ring, makes for fascinating reading.
