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.