Whenever we write a Lord of the Rings Online article here on MassivelyOP, it’s inevitable that someone – usually someones – will pop into the comments and lament some of the more annoying UI and tech elements of the game. Some of these problems are more than superficial; they can actually cause genuine sight problems or functionality problems on massive modern monitors – enough to stop people from running pies and following Aragorn across Middle-earth.
Well, Lum the Mad to the rescue: We happened to notice that MMO dev Scott Jennings has posted a handy tweet thread attempting to solve several of the most irritating tech issues with the game.
The first problem? “Lossless scaling,” he says. “LOTRO is almost 20 years old, and while it has gotten touch ups over the years, it was designed for a maximum screen size of 1920×1080 and is unusable on modern 4K monitors.” To solve it, he uses a $5 tool from Steam (apparently it’s free sometimes, so maybe check back for the next sale, or try a different freebie version if you’ve got an NVIDIA card).
The second solution is actually for the game launcher itself, and everyone may benefit from this. “LOTRO’s native launcher, aside from, again, being almost unusable on 4K screens, is slow to actually patch the game,” he says. “OneLauncher is an open source program that fixes both of those issues, along with integrated support for plugins and UI skins.”
Jennings isn’t a LOTRO dev, but we’re thanking him for sharing all the same. Let us (and him!) know if any of these ideas worked for you!
