A Letter from Orion – January 2024

The calendar turns, and 2023 moves behind us. We welcome the New Year with grace and humility. We are about to celebrate LotRO's 17th year with no sign of slowing down on the horizon.

At the outset of 2023, we provided our first roadmap for the game and the lofty goals we dreamed of achieving. It was an aggressive set of objectives preparing the game for a long and fruitful future. We did well getting to the core elements of the roadmap. In some areas, our ambitions overreached our ability. In other areas, we surpassed our expectations. It was also a successful year as we sang shanties aboard our ships as we sailed to Umbar.

For 2024, our approach is providing more content and an additional hobby to continue your exploration and enjoyment of Middle-earth.

We want to ensure that our communication is clear and open as it can be. In the image below, you will see our quarterly roadmap with clever and tantalizing verbiage to whet your appetite for the coming year!

Winter of 2024 sees the conclusion and release of all content related to Corsairs of Umbar, the addition of delvings to the Elderslade missions, and an enhancement to the Delving system we are calling Epic Malices. Gives you the chills just reading it, right?

As we move into the revelry of spring and the celebration of 17 years of The Lord of the Rings Online, we return with a content pack featuring time-released quests as you become further embroiled with the Kindred of the Coin and their plans. We'll also make some of the landscape creatures a little more compelling to encounter and fight.

As spring turns to summer, we introduce a new hobby and provide updates to classes, monster play, and introduce the fourth profession. We are also planning an update to Elf avatars and a refresh of our VIP systems.

In the autumn, we will release a new expansion pack that takes us east of Umbar Baharbêl visiting four new zones, encountering a new culture, exploring the waste and a vast complex that serves as the staging ground for the instances and raid included with the expansion pack. Outside of the expansion, we intend to make some crucial changes to the kinship system expanding the role, importance, and value of kinships.

It is a New Year! We are all very excited about the future, what lies ahead, and how we carry this cadence of releases into the future.

As always, I remain Orion.