How do we sum up the entire year of Lord of the Rings Online? That’s always a hard task, but if I had to give a label to this MMO in 2024, it would be “mixed, shows potential, needs more work.” That’s a bit of a downer coming off of a spectacular 2023 during which this MMO won game of the year here at Massively OP, but it’s also the truth.
LOTRO felt a little off-kilter this “recovery year,” swinging big and often missing. Features like birding or the crafting events were added but half-baked, while others like the promised kinship revamp went MIA. The servers are getting better but still see tech issues, and we did get our first 64-bit realms that show future promise. Some nice content updates arrived, including an expansion, but the most attention this game got was starting all the way over with fresh legendary worlds.
As I like to do at this time of the year, let’s trace the course of this game through 2024, starting with January. The Ill Omens event made a return after an absence of many years, and the development roadmap came out with many projects that happened but some that did not. We were able to buy River Hobbits with store currency starting in February, and the spring event schedule got reshuffled enough that some compensation was needed.
The LOTRO team made an appearance at PAX East in March, and Update 39: Arenas of Conflict — the first big content patch of the year — arrived with a trio of dungeons, a raid, and more epic story. March ended with an unexpected three-day downtime, for which players were compensated with a free horse.
The game’s 17th birthday arrived in April with something something hamsters, and the Mariner class and Corsairs of Umbar became available for LOTRO Points in early May. Update 40: Beneath the Surface added a whole subterranean region to Umbar on May 15th along with plenty of additional quests. The studio also began rolling out a weekly Tales of the Kindred quest series that month, and the Treebeard server went into Gondor and level 100.
Christmas returned in June for some reason, and a pair of new legendary servers on 64-bit architecture was announced. Update 41: On the Wing arrived in late July with the new Birding hobby, the coorperative crafting event, the ability to unlock a fourth crafting profession, a PvP bounty system, and the Lore-master revamp.
This was almost immediately followed by the launch of the Angmar (US) and Mordor (EU) legendary worlds on August 1st — along with SSG making Before the Shadow completely free for VIPs. That mini-expansion was eventually given to everyone for free at the end of the month along with a new “Before the Dragon” instance.
We entered expansion season this fall, with pre-orders for Legacy of Morgoth going live in early October, although the expansion came under fire for not advancing the level cap or having a special system. To answer this, SSG added free level boosts in all versions of the expansion.
Update 42: Legacy of Morgoth released on November 6th, becoming the 10th full expansion to this MMO. Four new zones and story were added, along with a bauble system and a questionable Elf avatar overhaul. However, the last big patch of the year would be early December’s Update 42.2, which made a lot of changes to Mines of Moria as the Angmar and Mordor worlds moved up into that expansion (and Treebeard went to Far Anorien and the Wastes).
This is also a good time to round up all of the LOTRO Legendarium posts from the past 12 months in case you missed any or wanted to do some nostalgic browsing. Thanks for reading!
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.
