In 10 days, Mines of Moria, the first expansion pack for Lord of the Rings Online, by Turbine Inc. goes live. I've had the great good fortune to have a pretty solid relationship with Turbine through the years since Asheron's Call was only just starting a beta cycle, and it continues into the Alpha test stage for MoM. I was actually surprised to receive an invitation to the alpha - I've got pretty good contacts around the MMORPG world, and even I didn't know that testing had already started. It was quite a bit sooner then I'd expected. After a truly massive download, I understood why. The expansion is *huge.* I can't even hazard a guess as to how many weeks of development time had already gone into it. There'd been a lot of prattle in the LOTRO forums, mostly by the under-educated, preaching doom and gloom about how free content patches were going to suffer after the announcement of the expansion. I can safely say that the expansion work was started well before the last scheduled free update. It was one of the most polished alpha's I've ever seen, possibly even surpassing that of LOTRO:SoA.
The Mines of Moria Expansion is at least equal in size to the current game when it launched. But that description really doesn't do justice to the fact that this is Moria, in all it's glory - dark, deep, and gloomy. When you look at the flat map of the mines that has been circulated by the gaming mags, you don't relize that it represents depth as well and breadth. Moria h
as some of the most breathtaking views in the entire game - getting to somewhere like Dolven-View and look down at the orc camp below gives you some hint of the sheer scale of the mines.Can you see the player character in the picture? Here's a hint, he's glowing...
That alone gives you some hint of how far down I'm looking. :-)
Aside from adding a lot more space to the games playing field, this expansion has allowed the deveolpers to revive at least one feature that was mentioned very early on in the LOTRO development cycle, but which was subsequently cut. Since it was a feature that I was really looking forward to, I'm glad to see it's introduction now. That feature? Item Advancement. In its current form Item Advancement is almost a collage of some of the features that had been planned for LOTRO's initial launch - namely, Item Advancement, a Legacy system of inheritance of properties, socketted weapons, and upgrades to the crafting system.
I'll start off my Item Advancement segment by talking about the one aspect of it that dissappointed me: There are no low level IA items. I think there should have been. Extemely rare, and not of the calibre of later Items, but it should have been available. It's supported in Lore - Sting, for instance, when Bilbo found it, would have been such a low level IA weapon, that eventually, through 2 owners, managed to drive off Shelob.
However, the Powers That Be decided to start them at level 50, and so be it. Your first IA items will start at Item level 1, and they will *very* rapidly progress to 10 and beyond. I'm not going to delve too much into the mechanics of IA items, more into the "Lore" background of them. You'll find that there is a new control panel for your IA weapons. This allows you to track the status of up to 6 IA items - the most you're allowed to own at once. With this panel you can see the "Legacies" of the weapon - Legacies are the "traits" of the weapon. They can be increased by spending item points on them. Legacies include things like DPS, skill bonuses, and special attacks. Reforging a weapon as required every 10 levels can reveal new Legacies. These represent forged in special characteristics of the weapon, so they can't be changed or removed, other then the fact that you can increase their effects through spending item points.
Besides Legacies, each IA weapon has 3 Relic slots, 1 each for Settings, Gems and Runes. Relics can be socketted into an item anytime, and unsocketted any time the item is reforged. If you want to replace a Relic between reforges, you can, but the existing Relic in that slot is destroyed. Relics add things like skill bonus modifiers to your item.
You aquire new relics in basically 2 ways - by deconstructing IA items that you have no use for, or by relic forging - combining 5 relics to produce a number of new relics of a higher tier. There are 8 tiers of relics. This is where inheritance of properties comes in - you deconstruct one legendary weapon, remove it's relics, and the traits represented by those relics can be used on a new IA weapon.
With the upgrades to the crafting system, it will also be possible for crafters to create IA weapons, once they satisfy certain prerequisites in their craft. These are IA items just like those found hunting, they follow the same rules.
This whole system is incredibly complex. Turbine has created instances specifically geared towards supporting IA, they've upgraded crafting to support it. They've created quests that will allow your IA item to gain titles, and creature killing bonuses, as well and different damage types. All in addition to the main Moria storyline. The number of combinations of Legacies, and Relics is staggering - it should be more then simple to customize an item that will be unique from every other of its type. An item that is, truly, your own.
8 days and counting ...
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