The Lord of the Rings Online Four-Year Anniversary Q&A

With Turbine’s The Lord of the Rings Online celebrating its fourth year online, the editors at Gamertell figured it was a good time to corner the team for a brief Q&A about the success they’ve enjoyed and the Rise of Isengard expansion pack they’re currently working on.

GAMERTELL: And just to be clear, you said that for Rise of Isengard you guys are planning on bringing back the 24-man raid?

Campbell: With Rise of Isengard, we have two really key things right now that have come out just from the development process. One is the that our dragon raid is going to be scaled to 24 players, which we’re really excited about. It’s a huge, very complex piece so it’s taking us some time and it’s gonna be awesome. The other thing I want to say is that as we’ve been building out the landscape ya know, the regions of Dunland and the Gap of Rohan and Isengard itself, looking at that space we said, ‘˜This really doesn’t quite fit for five levels. This is for ten levels’. So we’re actually boosting the level cap, so instead of 70 we’re going from 65-75. And that’s with crafting and all the other associated things you would expect.

GAMERTELL: Four years have passed. Where do you see LOTRO four years from now? Campbell: Oh goodness uhhhh, somewhere past Gondor? (laughs). Okay, so one thing I say about Turbine and about LOTRO in specific is that we’re always working on those core systems. We have our own game engine, we have our own team in-house that builds our engine. So we’re constantly looking to upgrade and improve that performance. This is a modern game. I challenge it to stand up to any game on PC right now, when you get it out there on modern hardware, on DX11 and get the shadows going, the trees bending in the wind and such. So we’re going to continue to focus on those things, continue to make combat great, continue to develop brand new parts of the world and expand that story and push further on and listen to our players’ feedback. As I said, we evolve. I can guess where we’re going to be in two years or three years but if it’s anything like the last four years, it’s gonna surprise me.