First Information on Book 8 and Beyond: Mirkwood, Skirmishes, Summer Festival and Level Caps

Tony posted this on April 24th, 2009. It has 9 Comments »
Categorized as Mines of Moria, News, Patch.
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h-2-0649-inside-mirkwood

Tur­bine held a con­fer­ence call to dis­cuss their plans for LotRO’s two year anniver­sary. Inter­est­ingly, there were also some Book 8 details. I wasn’t on the call, but Mas­sively was nice enough to write up the details. I’ve quoted  por­tions of it below, but visit their site for the full post.

… Accord­ing to Jef­frey Steefel, the new Book 8 con­tent patch will bring play­ers into the south­ern Mirk­wood area, focus­ing mainly on the city of Dol Gul­dur, pre­vi­ously known to the Elves as Amon Lanc…

… A major game mechanic being intro­duced later this year will be known as Skir­mishes. This name may change, Steefel points out, but it’s their work­ing title through­out pro­duc­tion. They’re described as dynamic instances that are aware of the party’s size, and they respond accord­ingly, in rela­tion to how big or small the party is. They are also repeat­able, and will have mul­ti­ple objec­tives that will give you enough incen­tive to do them mul­ti­ple times with dif­fer­ent sized groups…

… the level cap will increase by year’s end, and a new Sum­mer Fes­ti­val will be com­ing with Book 8…

Pretty excit­ing. I’m sur­prised that any new areas are being added in Book 8 at all. It should be a siz­able update, par­tic­u­larly given that the new raid that was orig­i­nally sched­uled for Book 7 is now part of Book 8.

Book 8 is cur­rently sched­uled for a June release.

Summer Festival Horse: Before and After

Tony posted this on August 25th, 2008. It has No Comments »
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I’m one of the few peo­ple who didn’t have a major prob­lem with the Fes­ti­val Horse pre­vi­ously. Now that I’ve seen the new design, though, I’m glad they made the change.

horsebeforeafter

Pretty sim­ple really. They just desat­u­rated the col­ors a bit. Much eas­ier on the eyes.

If you’ve not got­ten your horse yet you have about a week left. Get on it!

Summer Fest Decides It’s Not Time to Die

Tony posted this on August 23rd, 2008. It has 1 Comment »
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Hope you didn’t destroy those fes­ti­val tokens and fes­ti­val fish you prob­a­bly thought were use­less … Turns out the Sum­mer Fes­ti­val is back on until Sep­tem­ber 1st. Now that the horse blan­ket has been desat­u­rated and all of the music boxes work, you might want to gather up every­thing you missed.

I’m glad they’re extend­ing it, hon­estly. There’s too few “hol­i­days” in LotRO com­pared to most other MMORPGs out there.

Summer Festival Ends on August 17th

Tony posted this on August 15th, 2008. It has 1 Comment »
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carnival-tent

This is just a friendly reminder that the Sum­mer Fes­ti­val ends on Sun­day, August 17th. If you still haven’t got­ten your Fes­ti­val Horse or don’t quite have enough Sum­mer Fes­ti­val Tokens to get all the items you want, you bet­ter get to it this weekend.

I still want a few more of those hous­ing items, so it’s back to the fish­ing holes for me.

Summer Festival Fishing Guide

Tony posted this on August 5th, 2008. It has 7 Comments »
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Fishing during the Summer Festival

This year’s Sum­mer Fes­ti­val has a good amount to do based upon fish­ing. For those of you who haven’t both­ered to learn the hobby yet, it might be a good idea to track down a Hobby Mas­ter and get started. You can start fish­ing at Level 5.

The nice thing about the fish­ing activ­i­ties related to the Sum­mer Fes­ti­val is that none of them require a spe­cific pro­fi­ciency in fish­ing. You could just be start­ing (with lit­er­ally as low as 1 point in your fish­ing skill meter) or a sea­soned vet. It also doesn’t seem to mat­ter what type of pole you use. All that mat­ters, really, is patience. With a lit­tle of that, you’ll be on your way to get­ting sev­eral items unique to the Sum­mer Festival.

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