LOTRO Legendarium: Should all LOTRO expansions include ‘special systems?’

It’s been an exciting week for Lord of the Rings Online as full details and testing for this fall’s expansion, Legacy of Morgoth, arrived in earnest. While I’m not much one for desert zones, I am intrigued with this storyline and excited to continue my high-level characters’ adventures further into Harad.

However, the official expansion announcement and pre-order packages came with some degree of controversy. One of the sore points — as addressed by Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini — was that Legacy of Morgoth won’t include a “special system” or tentpole feature. Personally, while it didn’t faze me (I’m here for the content, mainly!), it was a concern for many. So today I want to tackle this question: Should all LOTRO expansions include special systems? Does lacking one mean that it isn’t an expansion?

What is an MMO expansion?

To address this, we have to take a step back and try to get our definitions in hand. What is an MMO expansion? There’s no industry standard regulated by some sort of worldwide agency, so what an “expansion” is tends to be defined by the studio that slaps this label onto it. It’s certainly a label that’s been tortured and abused when applied to what are clearly mere content updates.

While acknowledging that there’s no rigid definition out there, I’d say that generally, an expansion is seen as a significant amount of new content for an MMO, usually in the form of additional zones and stories. In ye olden days, it was something big enough to be packaged and shipped as a separate retail box.

There’s no promise or mandatory regulation for an expansion to contain, well, anything in particular, especially new systems or features. Yet there are expectations that they should because over time, this is how the industry developed. Most MMO expansions included some sort of tentpole feature as a way to get noticed and stir up excitement. This holds true today, as those features become the big talking points and a way to draw more people to the game.

So new features: Mandatory, no; expected, yes. Generally. Usually.

What special systems did each LOTRO expansion add?

I find it helpful for this conversation to go back over the past nine LOTRO expansions and look at the special systems that came with each:

• Mines of Moria: Rune-keeper and Warden classes, goat mounts, legendary items
• Siege of Mirkwood: Skirmishes
• Rise of Isengard: Nothing
• Riders of Rohan: Mounted combat
• Helm’s Deep: Epic battles, trait trees
• Mordor: Allegiances
• Minas Morgul: Stout-Axe Dwarf race
• Fate of Gundabad: Brawler class, legendary item revamp
• Corsairs of Umbar: Mariner class

Looking over all of this, we see that there’s really no standard whatsoever for this MMO. Mines of Moria clearly had the biggest amount of cool features, although how many of those were baking before the game’s launch, I have no idea. Rise of Isengard didn’t do much in the way of any sort of special system. Siege of Mirkwood always got criticized for being too small to be an expansion. Some of these have systems that didn’t really matter over the long run (mounted combat, epic battles, allegiances).

However, there is a trend over the past three expansions to include either a new race or class. So if we’re just limiting our view to the past five or six years, yes, SSG has established an expectation that an expansion includes a universal option to enjoy the game in a new way.

Is Legacy of Morgoth shorting players?

That brings us back to some upset players and Rob Ciccolini apologizing for/defending the lack of special systems for this expansion. Again, I’m not worried about it. New systems are fun and do ramp up that hype factor, but at the end of the day, I want more adventures in Middle-earth, period.

Plus, it’s not exactly true that this expansion lacks anything new. There’s the bauble system, which will take inventory-clogging toys (and fireworks) and put them into a collection to use as skills. Ciccolini also pointed to the Elf avatar overhaul, which looks to be coming with Update 42 as well. And there are smaller design elements of the expansion, such as including sandstorms as a weather system, that push this MMO into new territory.

Other than the Elf visuals, it is true that there isn’t going to be anything here to excite or interest lowbie players. My suspicion here is that 2023 was such a great year of new additions to the game while 2024 has been rather… lackluster so far. Thus, it makes sense that there might be heavier expectations put upon this expansion to make up for that disappointment. This would’ve been the perfect time to, say, roll out a huge kinship revamp — something that would impact vastly more players.

Yet four new zones isn’t nothing. I am really pleased with the fresh design and approach that the story and art team is taking with Umbar, and I trust that I’m not going to be let down by the journeys to come.

In the end, it’s your call whether a lack of a terrific tentpole feature is an expansion deal-breaker or not. It’s not stopped us from enjoying several past expansions, and once the dust on this announcement settles, I don’t think we’ll mind as much either.