Are you looking forward to Lord of the Rings Online expansion Riders of Rohan. If you are a LOTRO player you will be pleased to see that Turbine has been working hard to promote this newest addition to their flagship MMO. Today I want to compile all the information released over the last few months into this post to provide readers with all they need to know about LOTROs upcoming expansion.

First let’s start with the must watch cinematic Turbine has released

There is a short Riders of Rohan Teaser that show off some of the mounted combat:

There is also the Riders of Rohan Trailer that does not contain any in game footage but rather uses actors to tell the back story of the people of Rohan.

There is also a behind the scenes video showing the filming of the above trailer.

Now that you watched the videos and are excited about the expansion here is some additional information.

The release date for Riders of Rohan is September 5th 2012. There are 3 expansion editions (Base 39.99, Heroic 49.99 and Legendary 69.99). All expansion editions will come with future access to the instance cluster (to be released after the expansion) as well as an in game items and Turbine Points. Choose wisely because only the Legendary edition unlocks all the quest packs and an additional bag slot.

You can pre-order Riders of Rohan right now and view the differences about the expansions at:

If you are not planning to purchase the expansion this is still exciting news for you. That is because you will still get access to the Rohan Region as well as the Epic Story in Rohan. You will still be able to get access to a War Stead by completing a quest line. However players that do not purchase the expansion will not get access to all aspects of mounted combat (only 1 of the 3 traits).

There is a Riders of Rohan Pre-order FAQ that answers many of the questions of what you get for free and what you need to buy.

http://www.lotro.com/news/latestnews/2082-riders-of-rohan-pre-order-faq

If you are not an existing LOTRO player there is never a better time to get started. There is an excellent Steam Starter Pack that gets you a tone of free ingame items or you can always just play for free by downloading the game from Lotro.com

LOTRO Update 6 released. Includes a new area (Shores of the Great River) with 200 quests, free for VIPs, that will take the players north to Rohan in anticipation of the next Riders of Rohan expansion. Update 6 also continues the Epic story line that is free for everyone as well as Soldiers (Companions) in Landscapes. Further more several classes (Warden, Rune-keeper, Warg and Weaver) have been updated.

Read the Official Release Notes

Well it has been a week of announcements for Turbine. First announcing the new expansion and level cap increase for Dungeons & Dragons Online, now Turbine outlines their plan for LOTRO in 2012. In an interview with Massively.com Turbines Kate Paiz shares will be a new anniversary event scheduled for April 2012 to mark LOTROs 5th year (replacing last year’s broken event). The interview also discusses Update 6 as well as the new expansion called Riders of Rohan which will feature mounted combat.

It looks like on top of the new expansion LOTRO will also receive a level cap increase (from 75 to 85), and we will be able to take our skirmish companion characters (Soldiers) out to the LOTRO world.

Having spent some time playing SWTOR (with their companions) I am fairly excited about being able to take my LOTRO healer soldier on open world quests.