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.