The Lord of the Rings Online Interview

GameShark has posted a telephone interview they conducted with Turbine CEO Jeff Anderson about The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar.

Q: Do you see these content updates continuing to be free additions of online downloadable content or do you expect future expansions to be sold via retail?

A: You know, we’ll see both. Definitely, both of them. The free online content is a great way to help compensate people for the time and love that they’re putting into the world and their character, but down the road we definitely need to go back to retail because we’re going to be having some big features. In fact, this Fall, we’re looking at housing and housing may or may not be an expansion pack. I think we’re still uncertain whether or not that’s something we’ll charge for separately. But giving people the ability to have a player house is obviously a huge addition to the product, a whole other region is going to be coming out, a bunch of new upgrades and new systems. So, that kind of starts feeling like it’s worthy of an expansion pack.

But we genuinely want to make sure that we’re delivering on free content, so Book 9 is coming out with Evendim right now. Then we’ve got the Summer Solstice Party coming out a month or so after that. Then Book 10 is coming out free. That’s got a ton of monster play upgrades to it as well as a new monster to play. And so that’s all going to be free content as well. So then we’re going to get all the way to October before we even contemplate our first charged upgrade.