LOTRO Legendarium: Looking back at Siege of Mirkwood

What the report says


 
 
 
 
 
 After the huge effort that was Mines of Moria, Lord of the Rings Online’s second expansion felt like a serious downgrade in scope, features, and content. Actually, that wasn’t some sort of subjective feeling — it objectively was a much smaller expansion. That didn’t sit right with a lot of players, who immediately labeled it a “half-expansion” and a side detour into a single zone.This impression hasn’t been softened by time. Even though I have a soft spot for Siege of Mirkwood, it’s not a greatly liked expansion in the LOTRO roster.

But what did it offer the game, and how is its legacy felt today? Let’s take a hop back to 2009 and revisit this chapter of the MMO’s lifespan.So why was Siege of Mirkwood so small?To date, Siege of Mirkwood is Lord of the Rings Online’s smallest expansion, unless you want to include War of the Three Peaks (which I probably wouldn’t). It was something more akin to a DLC or content pack, a zone with a new system attached and five more levels added to the journey, bringing the cap to 65.

There wasn’t even a new crafting tier, nor any new races or classes.Yet if we step back, Siege of Mirkwood is bigger than that. It truly feels as though Lothlorien should be lumped in with this expansion cycle, and let’s not forget that the cycle also included the fantastic zone of Enedwaith (which came out in July 2010). Three zones come across as beefier than one, and all three are definitely connected together in the storyline.What I suspect happened is that Mines of Moria was such a huge effort that it wiped out the team and made “rebooting” into the next expansion harder than it had to be, especially with a turnaround of a single year (Moria came out in November 2008, Siege in December 2009).

Key details

And we do know that Turbine split its effort between working on the new zone, instance cluster, and storyline with the brand-new skirmish system. Skirmishes were seen as important enough to divert resources, especially if it would prove to be an evergreen feature.Siege of Mirkwood was notable for a couple reasons. First, it was sold entirely online, a shift that echoed what was happening in the larger MMO community. That move certainly saved production costs. And second, it was the last expansion before the game shifted into a free-to-play model.The Mirkwood Fan ClubThe reaction of Mirkwood was, at best, mixed skewing toward sour.

The general sentiment was that it wasn’t delightful to plunge back into a dark, foreboding place so soon after Moria. And not everyone appreciated Turbine’s then-current trend of creating thematically distinct subzones that radically shifted between looks as you crossed between them (Enedwaith would also hew to this design philosophy).Yet I don’t want to give the impression that nobody liked — or likes — Mirkwood. There’s a fan club for this zone that appreciates the storyline and sometimes fantastic spooky visuals. I’ve always thrilled to venture into the eaves of Southern Mirkwood, gradually making my way east.

I like the early part of the zone that’s its own special map before evolving into the larger region, and the Haunted Inn is one of my favorite hang-out spots where you can see ghosts if you stand in just the right spot and position the camera in a specific way.A lot of the retroactive criticism tends to overlook how significant the skirmish system was for LOTRO. The developers clearly wanted to provide replayable, expandable content for a wide range of players, and they definitely succeeded in that. Skirmishes were a different kind of dungeon, one that scaled to levels and party sizes with their own special barter vendors.

More from the announcement

Players could and did get seriously invested in leveling up their skirmish soldier and cranking out marks.Skirmishes weren’t abandoned the way that far too many LOTRO systems were, either. More skirms were added after this expansion, and skirmish soldiers eventually were summonable on the landscape for a limited duration. SSG still includes the odd skirmish here and there, but this system paved the way for the far more popular mission system that did much of the same thing with a lower time investment.