A couple pieces of news today – Rohan confirmed and then un-confirmed ;), and more on the skirmishes.

As Tony over on mmeow.net posted, there’s an interview by Gamerzines (Link to article) with regards to the next steps for LOTRO.  For me, nothing terribly earth shattering here as Book 9 wraps up Volume 2, so naturally Volume 3 would be following rather soon.  I guess the good news here is that we won’t have to wait that long for Volume 3 and that Rohan is planned for next year.  Which falls into the “1 expansion per year” plan that we’ve heard before. Like I commented on Tony’s blog – it is encouraging that this timeline is being confirmed, but nothing really exciting here for me.  So now that everyone is scrambling to unconfirm the Rohan part, this really isn’t all that exciting at all 😉

The other news bit is regarding Skirmishes as Turbine has released another Dev Diary on the stories behind skirmishes.  Again, I didn’t really get too much new info from this but overall the system hold a lot of promise.  I really like the concept of bringing war to Middle Earth as it gives us players a better feel for the role we’re playing in this story and ties our story to the ring quite well for me.  I already mentioned my thoughts on ties to the epic lines, and hopefully the instances will be diverse enough to  draw me in to replay them.  I think part of re-playability will also be tied to the reward system which has been hinted at, but not specifically talked about.  The story and rewards together will determine how much people re-do the individual instances.