A Letter to the Players – January 2026

The Lord of the Rings Online™ Team wants to welcome you to the New Year! We hope your holidays were grand, and that you are as ready as we are to jump into 2026 with renewed vigor. 2025 brought a lot of positive changes to the game and we are excited to keep building on that momentum through our 19th year and into our 20th anniversary year in 2027. 

As we enter 2026 our focus is on releasing a smaller update to the Kingdoms of Harad expansion shortly. This update will unlock the Mûr Ghala instance cluster, add more reputation rewards, address some bugs, and continue targeted class adjustments, and likely release the first round of UI scaling. 

In February, the Folly of Kings update arrives with an extension of daily questing, missions, more class adjustments, and the opening of the latest raid linked to our Kingdoms of Harad expansion. Alongside all of this, we will also be making quality-of-life changes, continued improvements to the UI, and preparations for a new update to the Spring Festival in March! 

The roadmap below provides insight into the first two major releases of 2026. As with last year, we intend to update you on the status of the game and development throughout the year to ensure that we are communicating with you as best we can. 

Quarter 1 

  • Update 47 – Folly of Kings 
  • Raid Opens 
  • Quality of Life Updates 
  • Bug Fixing 
  • Additional Missions and Quests in Mûr Ghala 
  • Spring Festival Enhancements (March) 
  • …and more 

Quarter 2 

  • Update 48 – A Glorious Hunt 
  • Quest Pack 
  • New zone 
  • New 6-player Instance (Late May/Early June) 
  • Release of Rivendell™ Housing 
  • 19th Anniversary Update 
  • …and more 

Though not specifically called out in the roadmap, there are other features and changes that we are looking to address in 2026. We are looking at expanding the work we began on kinships in 2025 to focus on kinship benefits beyond the calendar, ongoing performance improvements, continued class development, and returning the story direction back to the lands in the North. 

As with last year’s letters to the players, we intend to release a new letter about every quarter outlining the status of the game and where the next updates will take us. We are very excited for the year to come and beyond. We want to thank you, wholeheartedly, for your continued support and love for the game. We think that 2026 is going to be a great year for you and the game, and we are looking forward to seeing you travel through Middle-earth™! 

The road goes ever on; and we are all here for the journey. 

Orion