Shores of Evendim dated

By Robert Purchese Published 5 June, 2007

LOTRO update next week.

Codemasters Online Gaming has sent us a fat little Hobbit spouting news that Book 9: Shores of Evendim will be available on 14th June.

This is the first of many free content updates for The Lord of the Rings Online, which will add various fantastical bits and pieces to the game. There's the brand new area of Evendim, for starters, which was roughly 100 miles north of The Shire last time we checked. Although it's been a while.

Here you can gaze out over the enormous Lake Nenuial, or help forgetful Aragorn reclaim a lost jewel in the ancient city of Annúminas. Over 100 quests are waiting for you to sink your teeth into, including a 24 person raid encounter on the Misty Mountains where Thorog the dragon awaits.

On top of all this, budding composers can now revel in a notation system to compose tunes offline then upload them to their characters in game. Bound to impress. There's also seven new sets of epic armour to swan around in, each flaunting progressively better bonuses the more pieces you collect.

The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game that was released at the end of April. It scored big points with us thanks to its polished launch and sturdy line-up of features, and has topped both European and American charts.

We also recently caught up with executive producer for the game Jeffrey Steefel for a chat about how things were going, and what we could expect in the future. Head over to our The Lord of the Rings Online interview to find out more.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (14) Latest comment 5 years ago

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  • spliffhead #1 5 years ago

    Yey!

    Now my Hobbit can blow the horn of man within a full octave!

    Keep up the freebies guys and you can keep my subscription, funnily enough my Vanguard sub ran out today as well.

    What a coincidence ;)

  • Bertie Verified Senior Staff Writer, Eurogamer.net #2 5 years ago

    The date's been changed to the 14th. Sorry to mislead you, but we were mislead ourselves.

  • Darren #3 5 years ago

    I'd like to think that the developers will finally fix the irritating hitching I and others are getting with this game... until they do I'm steering clear and sticking with World of Warcraft. I'd gladly give the game another chance if Turbine get round to addressing it...

  • FWB #4 5 years ago

    Bree is a nightmare during any traffic period.

  • Krusty #5 5 years ago

    Damn, better get on with the other books then eh?!

    Offline music is a good idea...

    I don't have many lag problems but have noticed the 8800 hitching problem.
    You can lessen its frequency by using a config file that someone uploaded to a forum though.

    Great game, if sapping a little too much time at the moment =)

  • TheUnionFrag #6 5 years ago

    Time to press on with all four of my characters if I want to make the most of Evendim then - I was kinda counting on a later release . . . like after my exams - but I can live with it.

  • Wendelius #7 5 years ago

    No hitching here except light occurrences when in Bree. But then again, I'm playing pretty much maxed out (high res textures, high view distances, lots of environmental frills, shadows, AA, ...) on a 256Mb NVidia 7900GS. I'm sure a lot of it is texture swapping (it must do that a lot with lots of players in Bree) and I believe LOTRO would barely hitch at all in Bree if I got a 512Mb card.

    It's light enough that it doesn't affect play at all. So not going to do that though.

    Wendelius

  • Macross #8 5 years ago

    lol mate seriously it would hitch if you had a card with that much memory, as the hitching problem is the worst (ironically) on higher end systems.

    I have a computer that (no offence) could eat that for breakfast but experience bad hitching on occasion still (altho its been a bit better since i upgraded my ram).

  • Wendelius #9 5 years ago

    "lol mate seriously it would hitch if you had a card with that much memory, as the hitching problem is the worst (ironically) on higher end systems. "

    Good to know. I play on a Core 2 Duo 6700, 2Gb of DDR 6400 RAM a nice ABit motherboard and my "wait and see" 7900GS card. As I said, the hitching is not an issue at all. Based on your comments, it will remain wait and see for quite a while longer. :)

    My wife is using the same config, except with a 256Mb 8600GT and her performance is pretty much identical, as I expected. She doesn't experience more hitching.

    Yay for low memory cards then. :)

    Wendelius

  • Macross #10 5 years ago

    gah ok wendilus i admit defeat on the processor, yours is a bit nicer then mine (and by bit i mean much :p). sorry if i sounded like a bit of a cocky prick there.

    i guess i meant that upgrading to my 8800 with 650 megs of ram made no difference to the hitching issue at all, it all seems to be in the ram or the game engine not loading textures the video card properly or somesuch. which only seems to occur on the higher spec ones according to my experience and posts ive read on various forums.
    Edited by 1 at 06/06/07 @ 12:13

  • Darren #11 5 years ago

    I have a dual-core Athlon64 X2 4200+, 2 GB of RAM and a 512 MB GeForce 7900 GT graphics card and run the game in XP... no matter what settings I use the game hitches whenever it loads new textures/graphics... it's very offputting actually as it doesn't happen in any other games, including World of Warcraft. I suspect it's an engine issue myself as I remember having the same kind of issue with Half-Life 2 when it came out but Valve eventually fixed it fortunately.

  • Wendelius #12 5 years ago

    No problem Macross. I actually took your post for what it was: An interesting warning on how more video card memory doesn't help. :)

    Wonder if all the people experiencing hitching also have 2Gb of RAM and a defragged hard drive. Nowadays, my guess would be that they do. But those are definitely 2 important factors.

    Speaking of that, and since I assume you have 2Gb, have you noticed the LOTRO setting allowing you to load more data into memory (it's kind of a memory cache size option. Can't remember the name). I've set that one to .65 or .7, I think, so there is less disk trashing.

  • Macross #13 5 years ago

    Yeah the extra RAM made the biggest difference, it was unplayable at times on 1GB but on 2GB its usually ok although i still get it occasionally.

    I havent spotted that option though! I will go fiddle with the settings as soon as i get home :)

  • Wendelius #14 5 years ago

    The option is:

    Settings... Advanced Graphics Settings... Texture Cache Size

    Hover over it for a description.