A Letter from Orion – July 2025

Hello from The Lord of the Rings Online team! We are halfway through 2025 and we hope that the year continues to treat you well, and that you have plans to enjoy the upcoming months and also visit Middle-earth throughout its summer! This third letter and update finds us at the mid-point of the development year, and we remain very excited about our plans and the future. 

Our 18th Anniversary has come and gone, and we are swiftly moving toward the release of Update 45: Allies and Adversaries. Update 45 includes a number of changes specific to the Monster Play portion of our game. These changes are far-reaching and aim to alter the gameplay in the Ettenmoors by providing a large number of fluid events that can influence and tip the scale of battle. We have added more mechanics in the form of rewards for taking and holding the towers of Lugazag and Tírith Rhaw, new relics and buffs in a new area called The Underseaths, accessible by controlling a forward camp on the landscape of the Ettenmoors, and new vendors with buffs available once you take control of outposts. This is one of the largest changes made to the game play flow of the Ettenmoors in several years. 

Update 45 also extends the Birding hobby introduced last year further into the game world. New regions are available for bird-watchers to practice their hobby, and new rewards are available to make your home more cozy! 

Sadly, due to some unforeseen difficulties arising from the changes we are making to the Kinship System, we did need to push the release of the changes to the Fishing hobby until Update 47, expected very early in 2026. We do, however, want to give you a little insight into what the changes to fishing will be, trap fishing! The idea is that you will be able to lay traps at waterways across the game world. Leave them for a time and return to them to discover a massive catch! 

We are pleased to announce that the first major kinship feature update coming to the game in some time will be the release of a modifiable Kinship Calendar arriving between the release of Update 45 and the expansion pack later this year. This feature, long requested by the player base, will provide kinship leaders and those with proper privileges with the ability to create and maintain events, with descriptions, sign-up lists and much more. This is the first of many updates we hope to make to the Kinship System over the course of the next year and beyond. We will provide more details on this new feature as it gets ready for its close-up throughout the summer. 

We are also working on a new use for Embers. Embers gained through end game content can now be used to purchase a new Tracery Upgrade Scroll from the barter vendors offering incomparable top-level gear at locations throughout Middle-earth. The Tracery upgrade Scroll allows you to upgrade a tracery of any rarity to the next. The scroll will cost 7500 Embers and will need to be used within 24 hours of acquisition. In addition to the new Tracery Upgrade Scroll, Tomes of Defence are available from the same barter vendors. The tomes will have a cost of 275 Embers for a single Tome, and 1000 Embers for four. 

Work on the expansion pack continues as well! We can confidently state that the expansion is slated to have four new zones, ten new levels, a full instance cluster, a new raid, hundreds of new quests, missions, and deeds accompanying the next chapter of The Song of Waves and Wind for The Lord of the Rings Online.  

You will notice in the roadmap graphic that we are including some of the features we expect to see as part of the first release of 2026. These features are still six months out, but we feel confident enough about their inclusion that we are providing a small sneak peek. Without further delay, here is the update to the roadmap for 2025. 

As the summer wanes and we start to bring the expansion into focus, we will deliver our last update to the 2025 campaign and continue seeding information for our 2026 campaign. While we already know where the story will head, we want to make certain our efforts and continuing work continue to move at the pace we are moving.

We hope you enjoyed this update for the second half of the year. Be on the lookout for information on updates to kinship, the expansion, a possible new housing zone, and a new monster play class throughout the summer and certainly in the next letter to the players near the end of September. Until then, we want to thank you for your continued support and love of the game.

Orion