Turbine has just announced that, come this autumn, major MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online will be free to play. The game will be demoed in its free-to-play version at this year’s E3, and players wishing to get a “sneak peak” can sign up to participate in the beta program, which begins on 16th June. This excerpt from the press release explains more:

Launching this fall across North America and Europe, with Codemasters operating the game free-to-play in Europe, LOTRO will introduce Turbine’s innovative new pricing model that allows players to download the game and play for free, purchase expansions, quest packs, items, and account services a la carte from the new LOTRO Store, or join the VIP program to get unlimited access to all of the game’s content for one low price.

Lord of the Rings Online is not the first game that Turbine has begun to operate free to play, with Dungeons & Dragons Online making a similar shift from subscription-based to free to play in September of last year. By all accounts, DDO has become more popular since the change, so this may be the beginning of a new golden age for LOTRO, provided the LOTRO Store isn’t too exorbitant. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited about the chance to return to Middle-earth without a subscription to weigh me down!

Happy 2 year anniversary LOTRO! How time flies, it has been two years since this game has launched. The game has had many changes, updates and one expansion. In order to celebrate this anniversary Turbine is giving all former subscribers a free welcome back period starting April 24 till April 30th. Not only do you get to play about a week for free but you also get a 25% XP bonus for the entire time! This is a great reason to check out some of the new changes to the game as well as taking advantage of the XP bonus.
I was in the beta test for LOTRO, and loved the game at the time. I stuck with it for about one and half years. One of my big problems with the game at the time was that I could not find any quest objectives. The quests where written too obscure and would not clearly give you directions.

The funny thing is, I would ask for help and the community in the game was very helpful. Unfortunately the directions I would receive made no sense. These people were very friendly and helpful, as well as very knowledgeable in regards to Tolkien lore.

They would give me directions based on the names in books, for example; I would ask for a particular quest location, they would respond something like this, “follow the Brandywine river south to erun liund then go north at Farmer Gareth’s field, there you will find your goal” (sorry if I massacred or just made up the names it has been a long time since I played). At the time my map was not explored or I could not possibly locate the names they gave me on the maps. Bless their lore rich hearts but they were of no help.

Recently LOTRO has added a quest tracker into the game. This is a big improvement to their obscure quest writing. I had the chance try this out during their last free time event. I was very impressed with the feature. Questing was once again possible, objectives are easy to track and find.

I am looking forward to setting some time aside, dusting off the old crossbow and cloak then heading out into the wilds of Middle Earth to lay waste to evil. The world is still stunningly beautiful, the player housing is very well implemented, and the community is still pretty damn awesome. If you are a former subscriber go visit Middle Earth once again, you might like what they have done with the place.

Update: We also received a special Gollum screenshot from Turbine to commemorate the 2nd anniversary.

Yesterday Turbine announced the official date for the first expansion to Lord of the Rings online as Nov 18th 2008, just over a month from now.  While I haven’t played my hunter for about 8 months now, some of the additions to the game sound very exciting.

All the information on the upcoming Mines or Moria expansion have already been available online for many months, so I’m not going to cover what’s new,  you can read my Mines of Mora announced post for details on that.

The one new feature I will talk about are the new Legendary items.  These are weapons and class-related equipment that the player can forge themselves and that level up along with the player. Turbine was kind enough to provide us with some screenshots of these new legendary items so check it out.

Definitely a cool new feature and if I wasn’t having so much fun with Warhammer Online, I’d be thinking about coming back to LORTO once the expansion hit.