LotRO Ring-forges of Eregion : What is Coming With Book 14

By Darkgolem

Tomorrow, Book 14: The Ring Forges of Eregion will be released for the public for Lord of the Rings Online.  The 23 page update listed for this update is a bit daunting in it’s volume.  While Book 14 has the feel of a filler before the Mines of Moria paid expansion coming in a few months, there are a lot of great items you will want to note coming with Book 14 that you should pay attention to.  Recently I spent an evening with Cody “Micahah” Bye of Ten Ton Hammer and Turbine employees Aaron Campbell (Live Producer) and Brent Schmidt (Lead Content Designer), and will speak about some of the highlights of that time and some of the highlights of the release notes.  There are a lot of cool things to be mentioned.

New Landscapes

One thing players should pay attention to with Book 14 are the new landscapes.  The areas around the ring forges include the same architectural style you will be seeing in the Mines of Moria expansion.  The place around the Ring Forge has a feeling of years upon years stacked upon the land.  Unlike the similar brown ruins you see throughout the game, these areas have a completely different feel.

Another item that has a subtle appeal is the very elvish feel around the ring forges.  I don’t know that this will translate to the Mines of  Moria, but when you are around the ring forges, you feel as if you have stepped out of time, into a place on the border of things.  The sky has a look of sunrise or sunset, and the land has a look of accidental beauty that one would expect of such a place.

Decorations and Appearances

One of the little things I thought was kind of cool with the new book were some interesting new fishing trophies (groups of the same types of fish all mounted on the same trophy), and other things for your housing.  The new minstrel instrument looks are cool, and really add a nice touch to the game, but there are other changes to appearances in the game.  Probably the neatest of the costumes I saw was the pumpkin head mask, which is great, and will be in great demand.

Storytelling

A lot of different approaches are made in Book 14 to tell the story of Lord of the Rings Online and “bridge” the Shadows of Angmar to the Mines of Moria.  Some of them are using session play, some are using instances and otherwise.

One approach is made with the fellowship to maintain a continuous storyline with players after the fellowship departs Rivendell.  A separate instance allows one to enter a “flashback” similarly to a movie, sort of a “remember that time when I was talking to Aragorn?” flashback, allowing one to interact with the fellowship though they no longer are in Rivendell.

The fellowship leaving Rivendell is also an instance, and a cool one.  Everyone is there, and acting to their nature, even Bill the pony.  It’s a really cool scene.  There are also some new quests leading to preparation of the fellowship to depart for their quest.

There are some new approaches to session play which should be looked at.   Session play is being used as a way to telling stories you could not otherwise experience, such as the side of the Enemy or something that happened long ago in the timeline before the times of Lord of the Rings Online story.  Overall the approach to storytelling in Book 14 is sophisticated and fairly well done.  It is not easy to rewrite the end of the Shadows of Angmar story without disrupting it, and to match it to the canon of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and the developers did a good job of it.

The Little Things

The little things that are coming with the Ring-forges of Eregion are pretty neat too.  One thing I really like, for example, is being able to drag items to the item name field of the auction tab in the Auction UI, allowing for easier searches.  Horses and ponies have walking animations (which I imagine the roleplayers will like when they ride their horses very slowly around).  Monsters have some more emotes, which is interesting.

In crafting, cooking bonuses have been reworked, smelting recipes are standardized, as are refining recipes.  It gets old for ones platinum to not go very far when refined.  Scholars recipes have had new dyes added, and you can see them ahead of time in the dressing room window.  Woodworking has clubs.   Woodworking really needs these improvements, and adding clubs does that.   Another nice improvement is with fishing.  Aside from the new fishing trophies, fish descriptions say if they are used for cooking (which will make the disposal of those types of fish less common).

Overall

In general, Book 14 has a lot to offer players, aside from being a bridge to the Mines of Moria.  While perhaps not as flashy an update as others, the Ring-forges of Eregion has a more subtle and overall increase in quality of the game which is very genuine, if not so in your face as the “class improvement” books seen previously.

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