Blog: RtM - A Year of Improvements

2024/08/02

crossposted from Steam

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Return to Moria will be arriving on Steam after delivering on nearly 10 months of our roadmap. This includes quality-of-life improvements, bug fixes, new features, additional content, and tuning changes. Throughout three major updates, our dev team has worked diligently to listen to our community! Join them on Discord‍

If you haven’t checked out the game since its release, now is a great time to start playing with the upcoming Steam version.  Let's go through the major changes from the 1.0 launch in October 2023 to the Steam version:

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Crossplay

That's right, the Steam version includes crossplay with Xbox, PS5, and Epic Game Store players. Check out this article for more details - Crossplay Blog

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Sandbox Worlds

Now there are two ways to play. Campaign worlds offer an authentic, mostly linear adventure that tells a new Lord of the Rings story. Sandbox worlds provide a more procedural, non-linear generation of Moria that is narrative-lite but rich in freedom. Play either one, but we believe Sandbox plus Hard difficulty makes for a great NewGame+ option.

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All New Map

A completely revamped map makes it easier to understand where you are and where you need to go, plus we’ve added color blind options.

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Improved Combat Feel & Rewards

New sound effects, visual effects, and tuning improve the previously floaty feel of combat, making it more grounded. We’ve also adjusted the frequency of combat encounters (it was WAY too often in 1.0). Additionally, we’ve added many new unique drops to orc fights, ensuring you always get rewarded for taking out a patrol or camp.

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End Boss Fight Overhauled

No spoilers, but our first major update back in December overhauled the final boss fight to be more satisfying and less buggy.

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Difficulty Settings

The game was often too hard for solo players and too easy for groups. Now, players can adjust everything from combat difficulty to resource drops. Fine-tune it for your group, or just play for the story.

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Inventory and Storage Quality-of-Life

You can now sort your inventory, use ‘deposit similar,’ and hold the pickup button to grab everything you see. Plus, we’ve added new chests and increased stack sizes.

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Building is Much Snappier

We’ve not only re-tuned stability and building part snaps, but we’ve also overhauled major sections of the world to make building easier. Both the feel of building and the creative possibilities have significantly improved.

Updated Cooking

This fall with the upcoming Steam release, we’ll update the cooking system. Check this out for more details - Cooking Blog

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Core Loop Tuning and Exploration Rewards‍

Ten months of playing, observing, and reading feedback has led to a lot of iteration. We’ve adjusted many loot drops, crafting costs, and spawn rates—too many to list them all! We’ve also added more items to collect and craft as you explore. Check this out for more details - New Stuff Blog

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Pause the Game

One of our most requested features is the ability to pause while offline. It's a game-changer for solo players who really do need to take the trash out—no more asking twice!

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More Background Music

It’s not The Lord of the Rings without a sweeping score. We added more music for roaming around, combat, and relaxing by the hearth.

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More Content & Environments

We added dozens of new weapons, armor variants, helmets, shields, base decorations, building parts, and lighting options. It's easier than ever to kit out your Dwarf to look unique and live in their own Dwarf home. Many locations in the game are now more diverse, with new nooks and crannies to discover.

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Stability and Quality

On top of all this, we’ve also fixed over 1,200 bugs, including improving our multiplayer network code and save systems.Explore Moria like never before and experience the enhancements we've made. We look forward to seeing you in the mines!  To see all of our blogs, updates, the latest news and information about Return to Moria, check out https://www.returntomoria.com/news

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The Steam and Xbox versions of The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is coming this Fall. New items mentioned above will be part of our third major update also due for release in fall on all platforms. Join our Discord and keep an eye on the dev-updates channel for more sneak peaks of what's to come in the next update and choose the Forge Fire role to recieve alerts when we post in that channel!