Thanks to Ethic for bringing this to my attention.
In a LOTRO dev chat hosted at Warcry, the follow exchange happened:
WarCry: Meeko: Any chance that some of the epic instances in volumn 1 will be eased as not so many people are around to group with who are interested in doing them… or a way to hire npc’s to help complete them in future?
Orion: Funny you should ask this. Book 8 will see the first change along these lines. Chapter 11, Orthongroth is already set this way. Moving forward – post Book 8 – we are taking a different approach. My recent work has been focusing on providing both solo and group version of the Epic instances to allow players to choose the way that they want to complete the overall epic story.
Orion is Allan Maki, who I find variously attributed as a Content Designer and a Community Manager for Turbine.
I’m pretty excited about this. I’ll admit at this point I play LOTRO as a single-player game, just to get lost in Tolkien’s world when the mood strikes me (the beauty of a Lifetime Membership). I’d love to do the Epic Instances alone, where I could take my time and enjoy everything that’s happening instead of skipping through in-game cut scenes and quest verbiage so as to keep up with whatever manic group of power-levelers I happened to have PUGged with.
Bring it on, Turbine! Can’t wait for more Epic Instance to offer a solo version!
This does make a ton of sense. Group instance quests in the middle of solo chains are a logistical nightmare even before the majority of players have outleveled them.
I’d probably re-up my subscription and putter around in the world again, were this to come to pass. As you mentioned, I much prefer to meander through quests and enjoy the details and found groups to be off-putting (even guild groups).
It’s a pity you and I never found time to play together a la Anarchy Online. Remember all those times we’d go over a ridge and just stop to gape at the views and vistas? 🙂
Yup. Is it just me, or was Rubi-Ka a truly enormous world? It felt like there was always something new to discover.
Mmm… more soloable content. Big thumbs up from me.
I can’t believe I totally missed that bit when I went over the dev chat last week. Wow. That’s really cool. I love the idea of options.
Thank you so much for pointing this out. I became so frustrated with the epic quest line for this very reason. I understand if they keep the expansion quests group oriented, but I hope they continually go back and rework older ones.
The solution is to make the epic quests scale to the number of players doing said chapter and/or allow one to hire NPC’s to help out as well.
In fact I would like to see more MMO’s use this set of thinking.