Filling the Gaps: following in the footsteps of the Wildwood and the Angle

[seekingerin]

But otherwise... let's stop it! Lotro will last for another 15 and then 20+ years! I refuse to believe otherwise!

Oh, I don't think the game is going anywhere any time soon, and I hope it doesn't. I just thought it might be an interesting thought experiment and a way to frame a discussion about what areas of the game we're most interested in seeing.

This is a screenshot from a screenshot. I took it from Druidfire's recap of devcom 2022, which you can see on her youtube channel. Apparently the devs showed how the worldmap has evolved over time. The "Rhovanion ring" is obviously there, and it certainly prevents that part of the world from being entirely cohesive. I can imagine connecting all those different landscapes is not an easy task, as well as not making it too similar to the Balewood in Wildermore, but it would be great to see it someday. Funnily enough, this screenshot also shows how "necessary" the Eriador zone I just talked about is.

It's interesting to note some of the areas the devs have not marked as developed on this map. There's the far north of Mirkwood, as you mention; the bit of Mirkwood west of Dol Guldur; portions in and around the Misty Mountains to the north and South of Moria; the area between Angmar and Gundabad; the Weather Marches/Goblins of Mount Gram area; even the stretch of the White Mountains east of the Paths of the Dead is unmarked. That doesn't necessarily mean we're going to see all these areas developed, but it does mean SSG knows and acknowledges them as undeveloped and may consider them in play for future development. It would have been easy for them say, nah, we've done Southern Mirkwood, or we've done Northern Mirkwood, or we've developed all the way up to the Misty and White Mountains, so we can fill in all the mountains and the northern and southern ends of the forest. We've done enough. But they haven't done that, which had to have been a deliberate choice. They've identified and acknowledged the gaps.

Yeah. It's that Loknashra character who I think leaves Forodwaith as........ still a possibility; she seemed to describe something involving the origins of Orcs going on in the farther north --- meaning north of Car Bronach.

A year ago, I would have thought it was unlikely that we would ever make it to Forodwaith, since it's such a barren land; but Loknashra's storyline is unfinished, and we've gotten some hints that there are things afoot with the hobgoblins in the north. I think a Forodwaith is very much in the realm of possibilities.

I'm just frankly hoping for more mega-zones. What makes "Before the Shadow" so exciting, at least to me, is that it's considered a "mini-expansion" content-wise that's still going to drop this....... humongous chunk of landscape. It does give me hope for us to see more zones of that scale again; Rhûn would certainly warrant it.

I'm really hoping that CardoSwan and the technologies they've been leveraging and the work Scenario has been doing in recent years mean that we might get larger zones in the future. Rhun, as you say, warrants it; so potentially do Harad, Khand, Nurn, Forodwaith, and southern Eriador. There are many places in Middle Earth that would probably have been too large, too lightly populated, or too far away to develop properly a few years ago. But I think the technology and techniques that made CardoSwan possible could also make a lot of other places possible and raise the likelihood that we may actually get to see all the far-flung corners of Middle Earth someday.