Accessing Skirmishes

Isy posted this on November 6th, 2009. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Siege of Mirkwood.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2365

The lat­est, and penul­ti­mate devel­oper diary for skir­mishes, was  posted a short while ago on the offi­cial LotRO web­site. The arti­cle can be found HERE.

Some of the infor­ma­tion the diary con­veys has already been cov­ered in part by inter­views and devel­oper com­ments, but is still worth a read. In sum­mary: Read the rest of this entry »

Massively Talks Siege of Mirkwood with Turbine

Tony posted this on September 8th, 2009. It has 3 Comments »
Categorized as News, Siege of Mirkwood.
Tagged as , , , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2143

Mas­sively recently posted their inter­view with Tur­bine con­cern­ing Siege of Mirk­wood. It’s writ­ten in more of a para­graph style as opposed to a Q&A style, which is kind of nice.

The arti­cle con­tains some nice infor­ma­tion and I’ve grabbed some bits below:

Skir­mishes

These all hap­pen in areas that should be famil­iar to any LotRO player. Places like Bree, Tuck­berry and Weath­er­top — except that since the War of the Rings is begin­ning, there’s some­thing new going on. A cou­ple exam­ples given to us were scourge of the Shire-like event hap­pen­ing at Tuck­bur­row, or an attack at Bree where peo­ple have been locked in the Pranc­ing Pony with the invaders out­side ready to set it on fire. Plus, every Skir­mish has nine ran­dom­iz­able alter­nate objec­tives. Basi­cally, Tur­bine is doing every­thing they can to make these just as fun on the hun­dredth time as they are on the first.

Loot drops and Skir­mish Points will prob­a­bly help extend the replay value. Those points can be spent on var­i­ous rewards rang­ing from ways to improve your sol­dier buddy to actu­ally get­ting mean­ing­ful rewards typ­i­cally gained else­where in the game. Jef­frey did point out that these rewards are meant to com­pli­ment, not sup­plant, the ones already in place through­out the other activ­i­ties in LotRO.

I love that the skir­mishes take place in some oth­er­wise “friendly” areas. I really like the addi­tion of ran­dom­ized com­po­nents to MMORPGs … It lets you see some­thing new each time.

Horses

Even more impor­tantly, mounts are being made more func­tional. No longer will they sim­ply move play­ers around the game world quickly. With Siege of Mirk­wood you can talk to an NPC on your mount, buy stuff from a ven­dor, cross land block bound­aries, enter large spaces on horse with­out dis­mount­ing, emote on your horse — you can even name your horse. If this isn’t Tur­bine hint­ing at their next expansion’s set­ting then they’ve got a pretty cruel sense of humor.

I’ve been think­ing the same thing. Sure, this is some­thing nice to do and peo­ple have been request­ing this sort of change for a while. Still, it’d be pretty cool if this is open­ing the way for some great horse use in a future Rohan expan­sion, right?

The game is also get­ting shared account stor­age, which was news to me. The com­bat changes are also touched upon a bit as well. Jef­frey Steefel says there will be a devel­oper diary on these changes soon.

Sounds good so far. Be sure to check out the orig­i­nal arti­cle for the full story.

Siege of Mirkwood Pricing; Skirmish-join and “Combat Responsiveness” Details

Tony posted this on September 4th, 2009. It has 9 Comments »
Categorized as News, Shadows of Angmar.
Tagged as , , , , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2085

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.

Read the rest of this entry »