Lord of the Rings Online players looking for an inside scoop are in for a treat today, as Destructoid visited Standing Stone Games’ offices and wrote up a pair of interviews talking about the game’s status and its lore. One vote of confidence for the game’s future came from LOTRO’s design team, which said the MMO has “a good 20 years here” of possible storylines and regions to explore.
Designer Ryan Penk hinted at some of the possibilities for future expansions in the game, saying, “We’d love to go to Harad (the desert region in the southern part of Middle-earth), Umbar, Núrn, Rhûn, you name it.”
When pressed about Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings MMO, Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini assured fans that LOTRO will be just fine: “Like everyone else we really don’t known anything about this new project, and everything is going great for us, and we intend on supporting the game for as long as possible, hopefully forever!”
In regards to LOTRO’s lore, the small team of expert writers say that it has to get creative to work around some of the rights limitations that are in place. “It’s basically big-picture stuff that we need to get approval for,” Chris Pierson said. “We almost never get denied. I can think one time where we were: When we were building Orthanc (the tower within Isengard), they said it was too close to the films, so we had to change that. In the end we’re our own strict critics. We want to get it right.”
A small patch, Update 25.0.2, is going live today in LOTRO with various adjustments to Minas Morgul.
