Corsairs of Umbar, an upcoming major expansion toLord of the Ring Online, is set to bring a ton of new content to the venerable MMORPG, centered around the coastal city of Umbar in southern Gondor. We got a chance to sit down with executive producer Rob Ciccolini late last month to talk about the new regions, which have never before been visually represented in any media, and he said it’s different than anything LOTRO has done before.
“It’s incredible, because it’s nothing anyone has seen before," he told us. “So staying true to Tolkien’s vision while visiting new areas that Tolkien might not have immediately described is an incredible experience. And what the team is doing with it blows me away.”
LOTRO Is Still Live And Kicking, And It’s Not Scared Of Amazon
We chat with the veteran MMO’s Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini about the future of this version of Middle-Earth.
As a coastal city, Umbar sports a lot of nautical themes, as well a healthy mix of other new art, including new takes on creatures, buildings, and even trees. “It’s because it’s so different, we’ve been iterating on it a lot to make the voice true,” Ciccolini explained to us. “So the challenges are having new art and then iterating on the new art, and saying this, ah, doesn’t look quite right, and this maybe doesn’t really feel like the voice, and then iterating on that, then building this new area.”
Fitting in with that nautical theme, Corsairs of Umbar will also be the official launching point forthe new Mariner classthat was previewed in September. A swashbuckling fighter with both DPS and support capabilities, the Mariner will have to vary their skill usage between “fore” and “aft” skills to stay balanced and at maximum efficiency.
But the new regions aren’t the only things players have to look forward to. Corsairs of Umbar sports more than 350 new quests, as shown in a new trailer posted just today.
Over the course of the past year, the team behind LOTRO has been focussing on content that can be encountered across a character’s level-up journey, but moving forward in the coming year, Ciccolini says they’re going to give the top-level players something more to be excited about, including a bump up in the level cap and a focus on raids and instances, as well as “level-agnostic” content, like three-to-ten-minute missions, festivals, and a skirmish that can be played at any level.
“The higher-level content kind of fell behind, so this year, we’re concentrating more on higher-level content and moving through endgame stuff, through eastern Gondor and western Gondor as they had down to Umbar and see how various factions are feeling the power vacuum left over from the war ending,” he said. “Some of the most compelling stories in media is post-war stories, of these people coming back and doing that, so I’m really interested in that. And so we’ll be concentrating on that.”
Also moving forward, he said the team has content planned for “years on end,” and the storyline presented in Corsairs of Umbar will be continuing for a long time. Ciccolini wouldn’t share the exact launch date for Corsairs of Umbar, but he indicated that it will be playable “definitely this fall.”
