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Shores of Evendim dated News

PC News by Robert Purchese

5 June, 2007

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.

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Comments: 1-15 of 15 in total

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spliffhead
05/06/07 @ 15:36
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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 [staff]
05/06/07 @ 15:49
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The date's been changed to the 14th. Sorry to mislead you, but we were mislead ourselves.
Darren
05/06/07 @ 15:55
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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
05/06/07 @ 16:29
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Bree is a nightmare during any traffic period.
Krusty
05/06/07 @ 16:54
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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
05/06/07 @ 21:33
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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
06/06/07 @ 08:09
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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
06/06/07 @ 09:03
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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
06/06/07 @ 09:48
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"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
Batbat
06/06/07 @ 09:49
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keep em coming because many people will be level 50 then what?

Macross
06/06/07 @ 11:11
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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 1 times, most recently on 06/06/07 @ 12:13
Darren
06/06/07 @ 11:41
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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
06/06/07 @ 11:43
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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
07/06/07 @ 08:34
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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
07/06/07 @ 18:13
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The option is:

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

Hover over it for a description.

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