Last night Tur­bine jumped the gun a bit and stuck up a post about the release notes for Mines of Moria. Unfor­tu­nately, the link lead­ing to all of the infor­ma­tion didn’t actu­ally work and the post was taken down.

It’s been added again today and you can read the notes here. There’s a TON of stuff in here and I won’t attempt to cover most of it. Any­thing of real note will likely be dis­cussed here in the future when I’m able to play around more for myself …  It’s the only way to really come up with stuff worth blog­ging about or guides worth writ­ing. Changes com­ing up with Mines of Moria have def­i­nitely scared me into think­ing that any­thing of sub­stance I’d write would be come obso­lete. That should really change here soon.

Any­way, the release notes cover all of the obvi­ous things and addi­tions I’ve talked about in the past on this site, but they also cover a great deal of smaller things that might be of inter­est to peo­ple. I guess what those things are will be dif­fer­ent for every­one, depend­ing on if you’re into craft­ing, raid­ing, PvMP or what have you. I’m excited about a lot of things, but from a sim­ple game­play improve­ment per­spec­tive a few seem­ingly minor things caught my attention.

I sup­pose the most sim­ple one that I’m very happy about is the new quest item sys­tem, which we’ve known about for a while. I’ve com­plained about inven­tory man­age­ment in LotRO before and this should really be a big help. Most quest items will be stored in their own sep­a­rate bag, no longer clut­ter­ing up your inven­tory. Warham­mer Online uses this sys­tem as well and it’s really a godsend.

Single-use recipes can now stack up to 10. I rarely had tons of these, but it’s def­i­nitely a help there.

The cos­metic cloth­ing sys­tem is acces­si­ble by all of your char­ac­ters pro­vid­ing you have one that is Level 20 or higher. I’m not sure why they restricted this as much as they had, but it’s a good change. Peo­ple seem to enjoy this and I think it’s espe­cially impor­tant early on in the game when a lot of your equip­ment really isn’t typ­i­cally that exciting.

Addi­tion­ally, the Mines of Moria man­ual has been posted on the site in PDF form. It’s only about 6 MBs, so it’s not too bad of a download.

Obvi­ously run­ning a LotRO related site proves I enjoy this game, but I’m offi­cially excited at this point. It’s been pretty ago­niz­ing writ­ing on here, ready to cover Mines of Moria and miss­ing out on the beta. But now it’s only a few more days away .