Amazon Studios is currently producing a Lord of the Rings television adaptation that will explore Middle-Earth before the events laid out in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book in the trilogy. In preparation for the launch of the new TV series, it seems that Lord of the Rings Online may be getting a visual overhaul.
EG7 is a global gaming cooperative comprised of over 170 game developers, including recently acquired Daybreak Games, which develops and publishes a number of popular MMORPGs like Lord of the Rings Online. In a recent EG7 investors briefing, slides from the presentation revealed the upcoming plans for a number of games in the company’s portfolio, and one of the games briefly mentioned was LOTRO.
In the slides, under the heading “Robust growth opportunities,” LOTRO was earmarked for an upgrade by 2022. More specifically, the PC and next-gen console versions of the game are slated to receive “visual and technical updates…to capitalize on Amazon’s highly publicized large investment” in the upcoming TV series. After that, the presentation moves on to other subjects and there is no mention of what these visual upgrades might entail.
This brief blurb is doubly interesting because Lord of the Rings Online is currently only available on PC and Mac. So the reference to next-gen consoles also reveals that the game may be coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X sometime in the near future.
The Amazon TV series is tentatively scheduled to launch in 2021, barring any further pauses in production due to the ongoing global pandemic. Filming of the Lord of the Rings show in New Zealand was temporarily put on hold at the beginning of the year and only received permission to resume in July.
Lord of the Rings Online is currently available on Mac and PC.