
PvP is limited and optional, and the focus on a united PvE against the minions of Sauron has helped fuel the community’s reputation for helpfulness while WoW has long dealt with complaints of toxicity. You’re given a role that feels supplemental to, but crucial to the success of, the Fellowship’s odyssey, and so you’re encouraged to pay attention to why you’re doing what you’re doing beyond the fact that you’ll get a new tunic for doing it.

There are also many quests that exist solely to inform you about the world rather than challenge you, like an early chain that sees you playing messenger between two elven brothers debating whether the time has come for them to leave Middle-earth.


In keeping with the gravitas and lore limitations of its source material, LOTRO is a restrained experience - there are no cartoon pandas riding giant scorpions, but there are reams of quest text that provide historical and socioeconomic context for even simple missions like killing eight boars. But the game is very different from its more popular cousin. LOTRO has always dealt with WoW comparisons, an inevitability given its era and core gameplay loop. So what’s kept a game that launched in 2007 popular enough to still receive regular updates even as so many of its contemporaries have died off? For many players, it’s not the battles or the game’s mechanics - it’s the simple joys of living in the world of Middle-earth. But LOTRO has long since dropped from the headlines even as WoW Classic briefly dominated them and rekindled an interest in yesteryear’s MMOs.
#Lord of rings online series#
As a franchise, The Lord of the Rings is as strong as ever, with a TV series coming to Amazon Prime in 2021 and a vague new MMO also on the horizon. For a while at least.ĭo you have plans on picking up the Lord of The Rings Online? Have you played before and plan on coming back? Let us know what you think in the comments below.Lord of the Rings Online recently launched its seventh expansion to a complete lack of fanfare outside of its fanbase and a few hardcore MMO sites. Personally, as a 14-year on-and-off veteran, I will be sticking with LoTRO for the foreseeable future and it gives me hope that the publishers are willing to invest in updating the game. So, there is a lot for Tolkien fans and gamers to look forward to.
#Lord of rings online Pc#
There is also the platform-based ‘The Lord of The Rings: Gollum’ scheduled to release on PC and next-gen consoles sometime this year. Interestingly, there is also another Middle Earth based MMO being developed by the Amazon Games Studios the fact that it is Free-to-Play and that it is set a couple of hundred years before the events in LoTRO are all that we know about that title at the present time. Plus, when you factor in the possibility of new-to-the-franchise fans (thanks to the TV series) looking for a gaming fix based in Middle Earth, bringing the aging MMO up to date makes serious commercial sense. It is currently Daybreak’s third biggest title (behind DC Universe Online and PlanetSide 2) with 108,000 monthly active users, 41,000 of whom are paying subscribers bringing in approximately $9.9m per annum. To some, it may seem strange to start investing significant time and money into a game that is fast approaching its 14th anniversary but if you look at the numbers involved, perhaps it will seem less so. No explanation for the communications black out was forthcoming. It was also announced that Daybreak had, in fact, obtained the publishing and licensing rights for SSG’s titles LoTRO and Dungeons & Dragons Online, both relative veterans on the MMO market. When EG7 declared that they had acquired Daybreak Games in December 2020, the mystery was finally laid to rest. While there were rumours that Daybreak Games were now in the driving seat over at Standing Stone Games nothing has ever been officially announced. The subject of who owns the publishing and licensing rights for LoTRO has, for some inexplicable reason, been something of a mystery for a few years now.

#Lord of rings online update#
The update announcement also alluded to next generation consoles so it looks as though the game will finally be making its way onto those platforms (PS5 and Xbox Series X/S). According to the presentation given in December 2020 to its investors by Enad Global 7, the Swedish games conglomerate, Daybreak Games is planning “visual and technical updates” for LoTRO so the game will be looking fresh following the release of the Amazon series perhaps in the hope that it will be reaching a whole new legion of fans. Coinciding with Amazon’s hotly anticipated $500m TV series set in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Daybreak Games, formerly Sony Online Entertainment and the current publisher and rights holder for Lord of The Rings Online, recently announced that the long-standing MMO will be getting a significant update by 2022.
