Siege of Mirkwood

[Geirrodur]

For those of you who are as excited about the upcoming expansion as I am, here's a video of some of the new content.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/74019

[Svensson]

I was able to watch a demonstration of the Siege of Mirkwood at PAX, but Turbine wouldn't let us play it (presumably because it was so early in development). Some of the more interesting bits is that the guy demo'ing it sounded like they were acknowledging the lack of end-game content was hobbling their game, and their strategy was to try to do what Blizzard did, which was tie in a lot of new content with stuff that already exists, as to try to get the player base to have incentive to group and meet new players.

The other interesting things were I saw Bree-town in a "siege" mode, where it is under attack from the forces of Sharkey; the buildings were burned and ruined, there were war banners everywhere, and a quest they demo'd was to defend the Prancing Pony. Waves of enemies attack, and based upon the size of your fellowship, you and your soldiers need to defend the inne.

As implied, the other new feature is characters get "soldiers", customizable pets that you can summon and use in the new quests; almost like a fellowship in your pocket. The pet they demo'd was an archer pet with a Warden controlling it, but in the early development it looks just like the Captain archer pet. I'm not sure how many you can have out at once, but the character had three different pet buttons but the developer only used the archer.

Lastly, as Kohrem pointed out on my Facebook video; doing these skirmish quests lets you earn Bright Emblems of the Nimrodel, so you can get First Ages by doing the skirmish quests (in beta at least).

We also saw some of Mirkwood, but it was really just terrain and there was nothing in it.