Live Today, LotRO's War Of The Three Peaks Mini-Expansion Is Already Not Well-Received

The Lord of the Rings Online's much-maligned mini-expansion, The War of the Three Peaks, arrives today and ... well, it's still being maligned, but that's only if you can find information about it. There's no splash on the front page of the LotRO site (compare with DDO's latest expansion, which is front-page news on that site), and the trailer, which we showed during the announcement, is offline. And you thought Crucible had the worst launch of 2020.

Updates: There is now a splash page on the LotRO site for War of the Three Peaks and the trailer is back online.

If you dig on the forums, though -- as usual -- you can learn a few things. There's a page, somewhere, on the LotRO site, that apparently lists the features you'll get with each of the three bundles, and fans who have discovered it aren't happy about what they include. Given the frosty reception, maybe it's no surprise that Standing Stone Games has been so coy about revealing details about the update. (Update: The expansion page is now live here.)

If you want, you can actually check out the patch notes, which is the one thing SSG is being up front about. The main story revolves around Prince Durin, son of King Thorin Stonehelm, attempting to reclaim his ancestral home from the orcs of Gundabad. Tiers one to three of a 12-person raid is part of the package, with tiers four and five coming later; the same applies to a new six-man instance. There's also a new feature, missions, which provide a new way for one or two players to level together.

All in all, it might not be a bad deal for $20, the price of the base package (even if you can remember the days when such an update might have been free), but the way SSG has gone around its announcement and information reveal is frankly embarrassing. Many of the comments on that forum thread are in the form of "I used to buy every Ultimate package, but I'm skipping this one." While that may just be typical elite-player-on-the-forums grumbling, it's hard to imagine that not being a similar sentiment among at least some significant number of players -- assuming they can get proper info about the update.