Skirmishes Dev Diary 2

To sum up this second part of the Skirmish dev diary series: "Skirmishes are..." Zombie Columbus (author of the dev diary) details exactly what skirmishes are and the goals behind which they were created. In a nutshell, the War of the Ring is advancing into Eriador at the current time point we leave off the story: In Lothlorien with the resting Fellowship. However, Eriador as a persistant zone in LOTRO does not move beyond the time frame assigned to it and its quests when it first entered the game. As such, we cannot see Bree come under assault, for example. With skirmishes, we'll be entering an instanced space where we can move time forward (i.e. winter snow in Bree). And the world immersion factor isn't broken by suddenly having an assault while quest NPCs continue to direct you away from their location to fight evil.

In reality, we're not seeing much more information here than we already know. Part 3 will delve into the technology and systems used in skirmishes. This is actually the part that interests me the most. I'm very much excited about how Turbine is handling their randomization and scaling. I think these two techs/approaches can be applied in other arenas to great benefit. I won't go into detail here (save it for a separate post - gotta get my count up. Hehe.)