There’s nothing like being far away from home on a late-December vacation only to get the notice that, hey, Lord of the Rings Online dropped its 2025 roadmap! That was the situation I found myself in last week, which is why it’s taken me a little bit to comment on the reveal. But hey, I’m not complaining at all, for I remember the days when the year would be a good four months old before we got any sort of producer’s letter.
So for the last column of LOTRO Legendarium of the year, I want to dip into this letter and see what’s what — and why everyone’s freaking out about these new servers (and not in a good way).
A cagey studio
As much as I applaud SSG for being on the ball and getting us this roadmap before the new year, I can’t help but notice how extremely cagey the studio is acting here. As Orion (who penned the letter) explained, the studio is “reducing the number of details on the roadmap to provide more concise and accurate information.” I.e., the devs don’t want to promise what they can’t deliver because that riles people up and puts egg on the dev faces.
So it’s more of a vague sketch of what’s coming than a pile of solid details, which isn’t optimal for any fan or indie journalism website writer. I think SSG is trying to give itself a lot of wiggle room right now while also projecting forward momentum, and that compromise isn’t going to make anyone perfectly happy.
To be fair, we did get some pretty firm details on the next content update, which will add a raid, more Birding content (yay?), and a “refresh of the Deed Panel” by the end of February.
Weirdly, out of everything in this letter, the deed refresh is what has me the most excited. That’s a pretty core system to the game, yet it’s laden with a cumbersome interface and lack of solid explanation. I have hopes that SSG will, for starters, list all of the deeds in a zone whether or not you’ve started on one and perhaps even give pointers where to go do them.
Faint expansion hopes
Skipping over the new server thing for a minute, the rest of the letter is… fine? It’s fine. It’s fine. It looks like we’re getting a “Uniting Shâgana” content pack in Q2 with some additional instances, some sort of summer update (with the not-at-all helpful label of “system enhancements”), and a Q4 expansion pack with a level cap increase.
I don’t mind going through more Umbar through the summer, but it’s my wish — and probably not one that will be fulfilled — that we move on from this region with the next expansion. If SSG keeps us there, that’ll be three expansions over three years, and that’s starting to feel like too much to me.
The level cap increase is interesting, mostly because of the minor furor over the lack of it with Legacy of Morgoth and the faint potential to do something — anything! — to grow our characters with these additional levels beyond some small stat increases.
I’m not really seeing anything super-surprising or “gotta have right now” on this roadmap, like a new class or race. And it’s disappointing that previously mentioned features like the kinship refresh or downscaling are absent from this conversation.
The server panic
OK, let’s talk about the most-discussed aspect of this letter, which is the announcement that LOTRO is going to roll out new non-legendary 64-bit servers in Europe and North America very soon (in “the early part of the first quarter of 2025”) with the possibility of transfers to these realms.
It’s clear in hindsight (and was pretty clear at the time) that last summer’s launch of the legendary worlds 64-bit servers was a trial run for something bigger, and here we are. Those servers have run a lot better for this performance-stricken MMO, and it makes logical sense that SSG would want to bring them to everyone. It’s also great to see that Europe’s going to get its own regionally based shard.
The problem is, that in typical SSG fashion, the studio dropped this huge news on us without fully explaining it to us. MMO studios, you can’t do this to players and not expect a whole lot of confusion, consternation, and follow-up questions. Remember how Blizzard teased housing for WoW a month ago and then didn’t want to talk about it during these follow-up interviews but everyone wanted to ask them about it? Same happened here, only this one is less about excitability and more about fear. SSG tried to skate by with a “more information is forthcoming!” while overlooking the fact that this announcement was going to freak people out.
New high-performing servers are good news, don’t get me wrong. But without any details on who’s going to get to transfer to them, when that might happen, and what will happen to older realms and their established kinships and communities, one of the core pillars of LOTRO unexpectedly came under attack.
If SSG wasn’t ready to fully talk about these new servers, it shouldn’t have mentioned them at all. Period. Instead, the announcement post became a mess of questions, panic, and developer follow-ups. From the dev replies, we gathered these additional details:
- Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini will be talking about these servers in a livestream early next year.
- There are two NA and two EU servers planned.
- Details on these servers are not finalized, including preserving names, language-specific shards, and rulesets.
- “When the 64-bit servers come online we will allow free and optional transfers off existing 32-bit worlds for all players.”
- “In the weeks following the opening of the 64-bit worlds, we will also open ‘dark world’ transfers to the 64-bit servers to allow characters on those worlds to move over.”
- “At least initially, the transfers to these new 64-bit worlds will not be from our 32-bit worlds, and will instead focus on our closed legacy servers.”
The panic is understandable, because the existing servers are now facing a potential extinction event. Not only will we see a lot of people transferring over to the 64-bit worlds (and thereby draining the population from the old worlds) and fewer people rolling on old worlds, but kinships will be hard-pressed to hold together if not everyone makes the jump.
I think that the ultimate plan here is, in stages, to gradually consolidate the entire population of LOTRO down to four servers (plus legendary worlds). We won’t be seeing forced merges at first, but eventually it’s going to happen. And when it does, most likely everyone will have transferred or rerolled anyway.
Since we’ll be hearing more about this soon, I’m going to put a bookmark in my commentary on it for right now and simply wish for the best. It could be a good situation if handled right, but SSG has a shaky record of making good on ambitious plans.
For now, have a happy new year, and I’ll see you in Middle-earth in 2025!
Every two weeks, the LOTRO Legendarium goes on an adventure (horrid things, those) through the wondrous, terrifying, inspiring, and, well, legendary online world of Middle-earth. Justin has been playing LOTRO since its launch in 2007! If you have a topic for the column, send it to him at justin@massivelyop.com.
