We’re on the Road to Mordor

The story doesn’t end where we remember and your journey isn’t over! Adventure deep into the lost stories, dark reaches, and challenging enemies that shroud the lands around Mount Doom, and beyond.

-Mordor Expansion text

Just over a year ago, back in early July 2016, WB was telling us that Turbine, after the failure of Infinite Crisis, was transitioning into a mobile app development studio and the future of Lord of the Rings Online seemed in doubt.

Bleak times in the war of the ring.  I was suggesting people play the game while they still had the chance.

The in December of last year came the announcement of Standing Stone Games, a new studio that would be spun off from Turbine.  Asheron’s Call was being shut down, and there was some relationship with Daybreak, but LOTRO and DDO were to be the focus of the new entity.  The games seemed to have more of a future than one might have expected a few months earlier.

Still, you never know what is going to happen.  Hope is one thing, reality is another.

But we finally have something solid on which to ground hope.  After much talk, Standing Stone Games has put up the pre-order page for the Mordor expansion for Lord of the Rings Online.

We’re going to Mordor!

Mordor, we have an eye on you!

In my view this is a big deal for two reasons.

First, we’re going to fucking Mordor.  This I want to see.  You can fault Turbine for many, many flaws in LOTRO, but for all of that the place has always looked and felt like Middle-earth to me.  So to continue that out to the far end of the tale, to bring us to Sauron’s dark land, to visualize the location and bring it to us so that we may wander it is simply awesome.

Explore the landscape of Gorgoroth to find hidden treasures, scourges on the land, and get rewarded for your exploration! Only the mightiest should journey that far into the dark places.

Mordor Expansion text

Of course, I do wonder how it will actually play.  How will SSG bring us to this dark and hostile land?  What will we do there?  Will we be standing around watching Frodo and Gollum at Mount Doom?  Will Mordor be like Mirkwood and Moria, with a plethora of chatty NPC quest givers hanging around the place?

But I pretty much started off the whole LOTRO idea more than a decade back with similar questions.  We shall see.

Second, SSG is actually selling us some new content.

Not that the teams at Turbine and now SSG haven’t been adding new content over the last few years.  The game has brought us to the very front step of Mordor already.

At the Black Gate with the cool kids

But actually selling us some content at least implies that it has more value and, of course, selling an expansion generates revenue for the company.  Expansions are one of the few sure fire ways to get a game’s dedicated followers to pony up some cash.  Also, expansions to me are a sign of success.  As long as a team has the resources to create expansions and an audience big enough to buy them and make the venture financially viable, any suggestion as to the demise of the game seem quite premature.

Whatever you want to say about EverQuest and EverQuest II, Daybreak cranks out an expansion every autumn for them.  And every time Blizzard gets around to releasing an expansion for World of Warcraft, it sells like crazy and subscriptions jump.

So being able to get your act together and sell an expansion is a sign that you are still in the game, so to speak.

And so you can pre-order the Mordor expansion today.

For $40 you get the Standard Edition about which SSG says:

• Mordor Expansion
• 300+ New Quests
• Hundreds of new Deeds
• New Allegiance System
• New instance cluster with raid* and more!**
• Aria of the Valar – a level boost to Mordor!

I am big on that last item.  Despite owning all the past expansions, I am still way back in Rohan wondering what to do.  There is faint chance that I will make it to Mordor from there ever.  Boosting me straight into Mordor is my last, best hope.

Look, could you just point me towards Mordor and maybe lend me a horse? You seem to have a lot of them.

If you have a bit more loose change in your pocket though, for $80 you can get the Collector’s Edition, which has everything in the Standard Edition plus the following:

• High Elf Race
• Character Slot
• Exclusive Alliance Cosmetics:  armor, cloak, & kite
• Exclusive Title “Walked Into Mordor”
• Exclusive Alliance Mount

A new race doesn’t do much for me.  A character slot is nice however, as are the cosmetics, while a mount is cool too.  That title though.  One does not simply hand out Mordor titles.

And if you are totally into LOTRO and feeling whale-ish, for $130 you can have the Ultimate Fan Bundle, which gets you everything in the Collector’s Edition plus:

• Exclusive Mordor Cosmetics: armor, cloak, & eagle kite
• Exclusive Mordor Mount
• Exclusive Title “The Ultimate”
• Equippable XP Accelerator for all characters!
• Exclusive Housing Teleport for all characters!
• Three Relics for all characters
• Two Essence Reclamation Scrolls for all characters!
• Ten Extra Shared Storage Slots
• A code for a month of VIP Access

There are definitely some tasty bits in that stew.  However, the price is well beyond my tolerance.  With these choices I am much more likely to go with the Standard Edition than the other two.

And then there is the question of “when?”  The Mordor expansion site says that it will ship no later than August 31, 2017.

Not much time left to wait!  You can find info about the expansion packages here.

So who is set for Mordor?

High Noon for Asheron’s Call

We learned last month, the money making MMOs at Turbine have been split off to be run by a new company called Standing Stone Game.  That meant Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeon & Dragons Online would both be leaving Turbine.  That left Asheron’s Call and Asheron’s Call 2 in the lurch.

Staying with Turbine rather than being spun off with the new MMO running entity Standing Stone Games seemed to indicate a short future for the two titles, something quickly confirmed in a statement from Turbine:

It is with a heavy heart that we must announce the end of our support for Asheron’s Call and Asheron’s Call 2, and will close both services on January 31st, 2017.

This decision did not come easy, and we know this is disappointing for many of you. This game is a labor of love, and it’s not easy for us to bring it to an end.

We have had a phenomenally long run; one of the longest in the world of MMORPGs, and that in and of itself is a spectacular feat. We are proud of our legacy, and the entire Asheron’s Call team has been honored to adventure with you for nearly twenty years. We thank you very much for being a part of it.

It’s been an amazing run. You’ve done Asheron Realaidain proud.

Between now and January 31st, 2017, the game will remain available to play, completely free, for any player currently with an account. New account creation will be disabled.

Yet hope springs eternal… only to be stomped on.  In an earlier time of greater optimism at Turbine, there was talk about letting players be able to setup private Asheron’s Call servers, a promise that immediately led to, “Hey, maybe we’ll get something!”  And then Turbine came back and said no, private servers would not be a thing.

We had hoped to be able to hand off our servers to the community, so our most loyal players could continue their journey through Dereth. Unfortunately, this is something we were unable to do.

So that was that.  Turbine further clarified the end time for Asheron’s Call, saying that the game would go dark at noon Eastern Standard Time on January 31, 2017.  If this post went live as scheduled, that was two minutes earlier, so the game should be down by the time you read this.  Hopefully, if you were a fan, you got in your final look at the world and didn’t get hampered by the last minute attempt to ruin the closing.

MMORPGs are strange beasts, and their passing are always sad and strange.  The social nature and persistent world aspects of them make them different from games where you play for a session and then everything resets.  As we have gone on about, and demonstrated ad nauseum, people get invested in MMORPGs.  And Asheron’s Call, being one of the “Big Three” late 90s MMORPGs that, along with Ultima Online and EverQuest, popularized the genre, all the more so.  It was a “first” MMORPG for people in the pre-World of Warcraft era, with its own special features, quirks, and lessons.

It is hard for me to imagine the day that EverQuest goes dark.  All those memories… mostly good, since we forget or repress the bad over time… that I could no longer pretend were just a patch update and a login away.  I don’t play anymore, but I could… and that I could makes a big difference.  So I feel for those who are losing their first MMORPG today.

That said, I do wonder at hope continuing to spring up.  Some are pinning hopes that there will be an announcement of some sort about Asheron’s Call tomorrow.  As the somewhat detached outsider, it is tough for me to see the hook one can hang that idea from.

Asheron’s Call was one of the big three, but it was the smallest of the bunch, topping out at half of UO’s numbers and a quarter of EQ’s subscription peak, so it doesn’t have the legacy of success that the other two had.  Furthermore, in the pantheon of Turbine titles, Lord of the Rings Online is their big success.  For Origin and SOE, their first MMORPGs remain their most popular, while Turbine has long neglected AC in favor of the two games that went with Standing Stone.  And then of course, there is Turbine, a shell of its former self, and WB, a media company from which one can expect no favors.

So while I don’t want to stomp on anybody’s dreams, I haven’t seen anything that would make me think there will be a post-closing announcement.  But we shall see tomorrow I suppose.

But whatever happens tomorrow or in the future, today we mark the end of what once was.

LOTRO Headed for the Grey Havens?

Turbine is transitioning into a free-to-play, mobile development studio…

-Warner Bros. PR statement to Massively OP

Well fuck.  It has not been a good… erm… few years for Turbine.

We were so optimistic back in 2007

There was this moment of optimism a while back.  They were going to bring back Asheron’s Call 2, they were going to let you run your own Asheron’s Call server, the Lord of the Rings Online contract situation was good for a couple more years and we seemed on the way to Mordor, Dungeons & Dragons Online was chugging along, upbeat and getting new stuff, and they were going to take on the hot new MOBA market with Infinite Crisis.

And then plans started falling apart.  Infinite Crisis was cancelled, the Asheron twins were put on life support with what seemed to be a DNR notice, and the company was left with two somewhat long in the tooth free to play MMOs to carry things forward.  LOTRO has already called out raiders.  Dirty laundry was being aired.  And even LOTRO’s plans seemed subdued, with server merges and fixing long standing bugs being key part of one producer’s letter.  Even the upside bit, the upgraded servers, turned into a problem for a while.

But things seemed to be settling down.  The servers became usable, new content was being added to the game, and a new baseline routine seemed to have been reached.  And now this.

Of course, Warner is telling people to remain calm:

The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons online games will continue to operate as they do now.

But they HAVE to say that.  Those two games are the only income generating assets Turbine has now, and to say anything else might adversely impact that income stream.  And it is likely true for the short term.  But what happens next?

Warner could let the two games run on as before, with even less support and unlikely to get much in the way of substantial updates.  Given their new focus, that does not seem like sticking to the plan.

Warner could close the games down or, in the case of LOTRO, let the contact with Tolkien Enterprises run out in 2017 and not renew.  Both LOTRO and DDO, being licensed properties, likely have monthly minimum payments required to go to the rights holders, so an immediate shut down would leave Warner with bills to pay.  But at contract renewal it might be the time to walk away.

Or Warner could sell off the MMO part of Turbine to somebody like Perfect World Entertainment, where the LOTRO and DDO might each get a longer, if somewhat different, life going forward.  That would keep things going, provided that either game is a viable, money making venture that Warner can hand off to another company.  Anything with the name “Asheron” in the title seems to be doomed no matter what route Warner takes.

Anyway, it feels very much like we are waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one, that Warner has a long term decision to make… or announce if they have already made it… that will affect the fate of those two titles.

Play the games while you have the chance, as the future is more uncertain than usual and nobody is likely to make a game like LOTRO again.

Others on the topic:

• Bio Break
• Endgame Viable
• Level Up Haffle