ByJustin Olivetti

If you got to sit down for three hours with one of the key developers of your favorite MMO, what would you talk about? That’s what happened to Lord of the Rings Online YouTuber Bludborn, who got to drill Lead Systems Designer Orion with questions and scenarios.

There’s certainly a lot of interesting backstory here covering LOTRO’s creation, including how the team once considered a card-based combat system and drew from Dark Age of Camelot for its PvP model. As for the future of LOTRO, Orion said that the next content update would contain a new storyline rolled out over time as the team did Bingo Boffin several years back. New rewards are planned for this month’s anniversary, siege equipment will hit the test servers for Update 40, and a heraldry system was mentioned as a possibility for kinships. And for that new hobby… it has something to do with a book?

Latency and lag issues were discussed, with a couple mentions of how SSG is excited about testing some changes that will hopefully make improvements to this chronic condition.

Happily, if you don’t have three hours to spare to watch this, there is a full summary by a couple fans who took the time to write down all of the key points. All hail dev stream summarizers!