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The "Extreme" Misty Mountains will stand alongside the new Ettendeep upgrade to push characters along new paths, taking them deep into the Misty Mountains to hunt dangerous versions of battle worgs, goblins, and wolves. "We're going to visit some of the content from the Hobbit," Steefel said. "But we're in a different time period." On a random whim, I threw out a question concerning Smaug, since the large dragon and his hoard were the main branch of the Hobbit. While Smaug was obviously defeated in the Tolkien's work, Steefel just laughed and said, "Nope." However he cryptically added, "There will be time for that. But now is not that time..."

Does that mean some dragons are in the near future for Lord of the Rings Online? Only Jeffrey Steefel knows. However, characters will be able to visit Goblin Town and you might actually be able to meet Gollum while you're visiting the Misty Mountains.

Steefel cryptically answered our question about Smaug...

As we looked at the new zones and got the overview, Steefel showed us a few slides that had come directly from the development of the new areas. Our first particular location that we saw was the "Coliseum", a "big, huge raid area." Another area that he included was "The Rift", which was one of those "tremendous underground caves". While he was showing us these scenes, Steefel added that they've been experimenting with "immense underground areas that is technology and expertise that may come in handy when we want to develop 'other' underground areas." To extrapolate from this "lightly" veiled hint, both Phil Comeau and I were fairly certain that Steefel may have been hinting at the Mines of Moria. I'm sure you're all amazed at our brilliant deduction. I know I was... (*coughs*)

Also included in that series of images was a look at a Cave Troll with his keeper, with the immense beast towering over the "Uruk-hai-ish creature".

The Cave Troll, while impressive, wasn't anything compared to what was on Steefel's next slide:

A Balrog.

You read that right, Book 11 will feature the first Balrog to ever make its way to Lord of the Rings Online. Steefel made sure to let us know that Balrogs are not going to be extremely prevalent throughout Middle Earth, the Turbine team concluded that there would be more than one of these creatures throughout the whole of that world. They would be rare, epic creatures, but they wouldn't be exclusive to one particular instance. There is the ever popular Balrog of Khazad-dûm, but that certainly isn't the Balrog we saw at the Leipzig preview. But this Balrog was still particularly evil looking, with his horse-skullish type face, wicked curved horns, nasty whip, and splotchy bat wings.

Steefel suggested that the critter we saw in the preview would still be an amazingly epic boss mob, but he wanted to insure players that the real Balrog is lying in wait, deep in Moria. The nasty demon from Khazad-dûm will be bigger, badder, and a huge challenge for any adventuring party. "He's going to be bigger and scarier than this guy," Steefel added. We ended our discussion of Book 11 on the image of the Balrog, which only left us aching for more.

As an addition to all of our previous Book 10 coverage, Steefel wanted us to have a look at some of the higher level content that isn't as accessible to common players  Steefel booted up the game and loaded his developer tweaked character that ran around in "cloaked" mode in order to escape the wrath of the creatures that he was going to show us that came in Book 10. In Book 10, there was a large emphasis placed upon Monster Play, but the character that were already at end game also received a huge boost of content as well.

We were amazed when Steefel told us that Book 11 will feature a Balrog!

Book 10 features a few new creations from the Turbine team, including an area that is "contested", which means that players will have to fight off evil NPCs in order to access certain instances in this area. This can all be found in the previously closed off area of Anuminas. There are some truly epic areas in Anuminas, and all the while you'll be fighting off evil NPCs to gain access to it.

Other additions that we saw in Book 10 was the Reputation system and the Rep System "great hall" of the Dwarves. Venturing into the area meant traveling down another set of extremely steep stairs (ring a bell anyone?) and coming out into an underground cavern that the Dwarves had cleared out. Inside the hall characters can access Reputation exclusive quest givers and vendors. One particularly cool feature we saw was the idea of allowing lower level characters to use higher level weapons if their reputation was up to a certain point. I would love to wield a nasty two-handed axe with my Dwarf, if I can earn enough rep points.

Finally, on top of all this we also saw an example of an Epic unlockable character in Monster Play, which was a huge troll. By collecting certain "trophies" then depositing them back to an NPC vendor, players can access these huge, tweaked out Creeps for a certain amount of time to wreck havoc on the PCs in the Ettenmoors. On the other side, Freeps also have access to an "Aragorn-like" character that totally wastes normal Freeps.

With that, our time with Jeffrey was at an end, but we are going to stay in touch with Steefel to make sure Ten Ton Hammer readers get all the latest news on upcoming Lord of the Rings Online updates as fast as humanly possible.

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