A few inter­views with Turbine’s Jef­frey Steefel have made their way online.

The first is a short one con­ducted by Mas­sively. It deals with his gen­eral feel­ings on how the expansion’s devel­op­ment has been going. To me, the biggest point of inter­est is that they’re already work­ing on Vol­ume 2, Book 7 with plans for it to hit some­time in the first quar­ter of next year.

The sec­ond is up at IncGamers, a site I’m not actu­ally too famil­iar with. This inter­view deals with the new addi­tions to the game, with ques­tions about enter­ing Moria, the new classes and the Leg­endary Items sys­tem. Steefel is asked about new Raid con­tent, where he talks briefly about their new “Raids” that use a smaller num­ber of play­ers and don’t take 6 hours plus. He does men­tion, how­ever, that they are work­ing on two new large raids that will be avail­able shortly after the expansion’s launch.

The third is actu­ally part two of the last one. IncGamers and Steefel dis­cuss Ere­gion, changes since the beta, launch dates, the life­cy­cle of LotRO, the devel­op­ment team, work­ing with the Tolkien estate and more. It briefly gets into LotRO’s suc­cess, wherein Steefel claims the game is within the top few MMORPGs out there (which seems hard to prove from our end because Tur­bine isn’t very forth­com­ing with the numbers).

Their con­sole work is also dis­cussed, although no real details are given. It pretty much comes down to the typ­i­cal “we’ll talk about it more when we’re ready”.

Any­way, it’s nice to hear a bit about their plans for the future of the game.. LotRO being a suc­cess­ful title cer­tainly makes me happy as I don’t want it end­ing any time soon.