LOTRO Legendarium: The quiet failure of LOTRO’s birding hobby

The past month of Lord of the Rings Online’s operation has been one of the busier summer months in this game’s history. Update 41 arrived at the tail-end of July, there was (and continues to be) an uproar among Lore-master players for their changes, the new legendary servers arrived, the Famer’s Faire returned, and the special “Year of the Dragon” instance began testing.

With all of that, it’s easy to forget that Update 41’s titular feature arrived half-formed and landed with a wet thud. The earlier excitement this year over the promise of a new hobby was obviously rushed out of the door and proved to be a disappointment. Unfortunately, what happened with birding is an example of when studios promise big, deliver small, and hope to sweep things under the rug.

Before I get too far into this column, I want to say that I understand that birding’s success or failure wasn’t really going to change LOTRO that much. It’s a trivial side system, a “for fun” collectable hobby that was always meant to increase immersion, provide a distraction, and produce a few small rewards. I’m not looking to file a capital case out of this.

Yet we do need to look at this because it’s emblematic of how Standing Stone Games operates sometimes (and plenty of other MMO studios I could name as well). At the top of the year, SSG wanted to drive up player excitement for 2024 by listing some big projects in the works, and the announcement of LOTRO’s second-ever hobby served to spike that excitement.

The problem is, it was just an idea at that point. There were no details given about this hobby because nothing had been decided yet other than “we want to do another hobby.” Months into the year, and LOTRO devs were still publicly kicking around a few ideas without having settled on one yet.

When birding was finally chosen, the studio announced it on a livestream without any screenshots or demonstrations because there weren’t any. This situation grew even more concerning when Update 41 went into testing… without birding at all. That didn’t come until a few weeks into the testing rounds, and even then, it was only a partially formed system.

Honestly, I think if the title and artwork for Update 41: On the Wing hadn’t been done, SSG might’ve yanked birding entirely for more work. Clearly, that would’ve been the correct call to make because what ended up getting pushed to live servers was a curiously hollow system that garnered little attention and even less excitement.

If you haven’t tried out birding yet, just know it’s basically fishing on land. You just go to a random spot, click some stuff, and hope that you get a notification saying that you saw a bird. The thing is — and this is the true kicker — you don’t actually see a bird anywhere on the screen. Oh, your character says that it spots one, but there’s no visual cue.

So if you had reasonable expectations that a bird-watching hobby might involve seeing and watching birds, that didn’t happen whatsoever. It’s a case of “get something live and fix it in post.”

And don’t take my word for it; just listen to SSG’s Orion, who said, “It is important to note this is the initial implementation. This is ~1/3 of the overall expected hobby. We felt it better to get this initial version out before we furthered refinement.”

Having been in this genre for a while, I don’t expect fully functional, fully polished systems in MMOs on patch day. But I do think it’s reasonable to expect mostly functional, somewhat polished systems and not a bare skeletal frame with a vague promise to make it better down the road. Yes, birding can be fixed later on, but you get only one chance to make a first impression, and this hobby’s debut was smoke and feathers.

I admire SSG so much for producing the amount of content with general skill from a small team with limited resources. The landscape and questing tends to be top tier, but those limitations start to hurt the game when the team is attempting to crank out brand-new concepts.

Too much ambition combined with too little testing and refining has produced unforced errors this past year such as the forester event, birding hobby, and Lore-master revamp. It’s why I’m not putting much hope in the promised upcoming kinship revamp, especially as the studio has publicly stated that it can’t do anything near to what it wants to with this system.

This sounds to me like a pipeline problem, the result of too few devs more more ambition and creativity than time trying to deliver more than they can reasonably produce. In my opinion, it’s always better to produce a smaller amount of fully formed content than a lot of janky end results. Alas, with a hungry playerbase and the demands on the studio’s ledgers, the luxury of polish and refining is not one that it seems to have these days.