LOTRO producer talks Gundabad, Brawler, and LI revamp in new stream

Lord of the Rings Online’s new producer, Oleg “Raninia” Brodskiy, is helping SSG make big strides toward becoming more communicative and transparent ever since his hire. As part of that effort, this past week Raninia appeared on an hour-long video interview with LOTRO YouTuber Louey7 to talk about the state of the game — and where it’s going in the future.

• The fall’s Gundabad expansion and Brawler class will be “tied together” and are going “reasonably well” in development. Both of these include stuff that SSG has never done before.
• The Brawler will have a tank and DPS role. It will be matched with current races, although the specific race options are not fixed yet.
• The mission system will come back for Gundabad as well as an older system that SSG is returning in a revamped state.
• Legendary Item changes are being tested on the Palantir server and should come with Gundabad as well. This system will replace the older LI system (which will be “phased out”) and intended to be easier for players to use to catch up. “It will be a lot more, frankly, playing the game and not grinding.”
• SSG is being mostly mum about its 2022 and beyond plans as the game hits its 15th anniversary. The dev team pitched years and years’ worth of potential content, but not much has been done past Gundabad just yet.
• Trait lines, crafting, and kinships are the “three biggest candidates” for future systems passes.
• Visual and technical upgrades are being planned, as per the EG7 investor report, although specifics have not been decided. It should be a “steady drumbeat of stuff.”
• A possible console edition cannot be discussed at this time.
• Multithreading is “possible” but very difficult to do with LOTRO’s older game engine.
• There are no plans at present for a level squish.
• There have been some conversations surrounding how players acquire class trait points, as it’s an issue that’s aged poorly.
• SSG would like to have an EU-based server, but there are no concrete plans at this time.
• Progress has been made on allowing players to transfer characters from closed worlds to live ones. This is in testing.
• No server merges are planned.