The Lord of the Rings Online: Echoes of Angmar
Much to my surprise I recently discovered that there is a private server currently in development, based upon an early iteration of The Lord of the Rings Online. Called Echoes of Angmar, this is a version of the popular Middle-earth based MMORPG as it was in late October 2007. The team that is managing this project, which recently completed alpha testing, wishes to make available a free version of LOTRO based on original code from the time. Echoes of Angmar will include all content upto and including Book 11: Defenders of Eriador. Hence there will be no cosmetic items, no quest tracker and no streamlined levelling. The level cap will be 50. PvMP will not be available upon initial release but will be implemented later. Echoes of Angmar will therefore be a very different experience compared to LOTRO as it is today on the current live servers.
Thoughts on “Classic LOTRO”
Cordovan (AKA Jerry Snook), Community Manager for the MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online, stated in the last Developers Live Stream that “the idea of a formal classic (server) is never off the table”. Naturally, this comment has led to a lot of speculation on the official LOTRO forums. Many players by inference have concluded that the original code does exist for the game as it was at launch or immediately thereafter. As you can imagine this has resulted in much debate as to whether a classic LOTRO server based upon the original Shadows of Angmar release could be created. Assuming that this is the case and technically developer’s Standing Stone Games can do this, it raises the question of whether they should or not. Because a classic server is a different beast to the previous legendary progression servers. 14 years has seen a great deal of change within the MMO industry and with LOTRO as well. Let us take a moment to reflect.
LOTRO Classic
In the last month or so, I’ve spent some time perusing the official forums for the MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online. It suffers from many of the shortcomings you find on fan driven gaming forums, insofar as it’s monopolised by a small cadre of partisan minded players that are not an especially broad cross section of the LOTRO community. However, a wide range of thoughts and ideas about the game are discussed on these forums. Sometimes, if the planets are in the correct alignment, staff from Standing Stone Games will even deign to reply. Recently, a particularly interesting question that has frequently been raised by players finally got addressed by SSG developer Jeff Libby (AKA MadeOfLions). Namely, will there ever be a release of LOTRO Classic? An “old school” server with the game as it was when it launched in 2007. The fact that they actually answered is the main surprise here. Everything else about the actual reply is par for the course and embodies everything that is wrong with SSG and their community relations. Here is the original question and the subsequent answer.