The Lord of the Rings Online Free-to-Play Interview

Ten Ton Hammer has slapped up their own interview with Turbine’s Kate Paiz and Adam Mersky about their newly announced plans to make The Lord of the Rings Online a free-to-play MMORPG.

Ten Ton Hammer: How similar is the change with LotRO to what Turbine has done with DDO?

Kate Paiz: We learned a lot with DDO and we’re not looking to fix what isn’t broken. There are a lot of similarities with the way the store interacts with the game and the categories of items we offer. There are certainly differences, especially around the content models. LotRO is such a different game in the moment-to-moment game play, it’s only appropriate that we customize it differently.

Like DDO there will be two purchasable classes. For us, it will be the Warden and the Runekeeper which were part of the Moria expansion, which can now be bought as part of the Moria pack or individually. New players will have all of the Shire, all of Breeland and all of Erud Luin to play completely free. That content lasts till about level 22.

Then from 22-50 you have all of the epic story to play free. There are region packs that will be available. Those are the optional quests in that area which you’ll be able to buy from the store. You’ll walk up to an NPC. That NPC will tell you all about the quests they have available, and there will be a “Buy Now” button instead of an Accept button. If you click “Buy Now” it will open the store window where you can buy the region pack and you’ll get access to the 80-200 quests for that region.

So it’s definitely a different experience than the way content is offered in DDO just due to the natures of the games, but we felt it was important for players to be able to walk all the way from the Shire to the Misty Mountains without any barriers or penalties in their way. They can kill monsters on the landscape and experience the epic quests to their heart’s content.