Wednesday, October 24, 2007

LotRO housing patch today

Today Lord of the Rings Online adds the content patch officially known as Book 11: Defenders of Eriador. Inofficially it's known as the patch adding player housing to the game. Which is definitely a step up from the last content patch, known as the "chicken play" patch. :) LotROLife has a LotRO housing guide up, that explains how it all works.

I haven't played LotRO since July, since before my holidays. But I guess this weekend I'm going to download the patch and have a look at housing, if I can find enough money on my characters to buy at least the smallest kind of house. 1 gold, I think I have that. I did like the free placeable housing in UO and SWG, but was less enthusiastic of housing in AO, FFXI, and EQ2 with their fully instanced housing. Apparently LotRO will be somewhere in the middle between those concepts, having individually placed houses, but in instanced housing zones. That is probably the best way to do it, I wouldn't want to see housing spring up in the Lonelands or other spots which by lore shouldn't be heavily populated.

The only bad news is the lack of rentable NPC vendors, the ability to turn your house into a shop. I've never been big on decorating, that is not the main feature of player housing for me. LotRO houses have storage functionality, which is good, but they don't have the possibility to sell goods from your house, which is not so good. But apparently Turbine is planning to expand housing functionality in later patches, so all is not lost.

I'm still happy that I took that lifetime subscription. While Lord of the Rings Online was a bit thin on content when it was launched, the speed in which Turbine is adding new content is quite nice. And the lifetime subscription enables me to take hassle-free "holidays" from the game and come back whenever I want.

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