Over on the official Lord of the Rings Online forums, Ramen makes note of a this special birthday today:
Born on January 3, 1892, J.R.R. Tolkien has become one of the most famous authors of our times, influencing an entire genre of literature and, now, games. Happy Birthday, Professor, and thank you!
Happy Birthday Professor!
CNN has a story about "The Children of Hurin", a book by J.R.R. Tolkien published post-humuously today. His son Christopher, the book's editor, tried to stay as close to the original manuscript as possible in this novel. I guess we'll wait for reviews to see if it holds up.
The novel is part of Middle-Earth, but set years before the Hobbits and Elves and according to CNN, it is much darker.
More than 30 years after his death, a "new" book by J.R.R. Tolkien goes on sale on Tuesday which may well be the author's last complete work to be published posthumously.
Tolkien's son and literary executor Christopher, now in his eighties, constructed "The Children of Hurin" from his father's manuscripts, and said he tried to do so "without any editorial invention."
Read more on CNN.
Turbine has listened to the popular outcry and reversed their position on allowing people in different regions to play on foreign servers. Specifically, customers in Europe would have been IP blocked from playing on the North American servers even if they specifically ordered a copy of the game from the United States. This change in position should make a lot of potential fans very happy.
Throughout the Alpha and Beta phases of development, we have worked hard to satisfy the enthusiastic community that has risen up in support of LOTRO. We listened to and incorporated your ideas many times throughout development and our game is now stronger for it. As we prepare for launch we wanted to let you know that your feedback still matters. We have been listening and will continue to do so in the future.
Recently, some players expressed their concern about our plans to implement IP blocking. After listening to our fans, we have decided to remove IP blocking in North America.
However, we strongly encourage players to purchase and play the game in their region to receive the best game experience, connectivity and local customer support. Please note that regional clients are only operable with their respective regional services.
In closing, we would like to thank the players for your feedback. Your honest input has been invaluable to us throughout development. We are always listening to your feedback.
Enjoy Middle-earth!
Good job to Turbine and Codemasters for not letting corporate tug-o-war trump usability.
Today we get a double treat from Turbine. They've kindly shared with us an exclusive video diary on crafting in Lord of the Rings Online and a whole whack of screenshots to go along with it. Check out this sample below, then click "Read More" to see the video and all the images.
Turbine and Codemasters have announced how the service will work for international customers of Lord of the Rings Online. We've known for quite some time that Codemasters would operate the game in Europe, but today confirms that Europeans (not to mention chunks of the Middle-East and Africa) will not be able to play on the US servers.
Our own JR "razor" Sutich has a rant on what this means for guilds (nothing good) on his site. It is an understandable business move, especially for Codemasters, but seems a bit antiquated in this global culture we're supposedly all now living in.
In North America and Oceania, Turbine is the service operator. We work with two publishers to support our service - Midway in the US and Codemasters in Oceania. In Europe, Codemasters is both the publisher and the service operator.
What this means is that the version of the game you can play is determined by the service operator that supports your region. Since the service operators maintain completely separate billing, hosting, and support systems it is not possible to allow players to access both services - they're just not compatible with each other.
The full post is here.
