In an interesting discussion on the Lord of the Rings Online forums, players wondered why the MMO never introduced randomized dungeons that you might see in other MMOs or even tabletop games. Game designer Jeff Libby responded to the post to give an insight as to why this didn’t happen in LOTRO.
“We’ve toyed with something like this ever since Moria, but it hasn’t yet coalesced into a complete thing,” explained Libby. “Part of the reason is that you have to balance the feeling of a handmade dungeon space (which is one of our specialties) with the randomization — it’s not that hard to randomize the contents of a space, but providing a random structure and layout in LOTRO is much harder.”
Interestingly, Libby said that the game’s first expansion would’ve been the best place for this sort of system: “Back in Moria the idea would have been that the caverns are so vast, and there are so many of them, that every time you entered you’d be delving into a new location, which explains why the layout is different. It was more of a technical challenge than a story-justification one!”
Source: LOTRO