Summer in Lord of the Rings Online never seems to arrive until the old Summer Festival or Farmer’s Faire finally kicks in. Even the previous iteration of the Midsummer Festival lacked that summery feel, as it were more of an extended wedding shower than anything else.
But as of last week, LOTRO finally has a strong start to the summer with the addition of Furtherholm island to the Midsummer Festival. This is the sunny season at its finest: laid-back vacationy vibes with nary a fight to be seen. It’s not going to revolutionize the festival circuit, but it does bolster what was once a weak spot on the annual rotation.
One of the best side benefits of the Midsummer Festival improvements is taking the entire playerbase to the Shield Isles. It’s one of my all-time favorite regions in the game, and yet I know that a good amount of the playerbase hasn’t seen it because many players are still working their way up through the content.
Now everyone can get a taste of the surf, palm trees, and unique architecture of the islands as Furtherholm is level-agnostic. It does help that everything you do here is, as I said previously, completely combat-free, so there’s no worry that you have to be a certain level or whatnot.
Furtherholm isn’t a big island, yet it’s not tiny. It’s just right-sized, I guess I’d say. There’s the small harbor town where you get your quests, a path that runs a circuit up and down around the isle, some beachfront property, and even a smaller northern island to explore.
Upon arriving there, I was charmed by the addition of festival lights hanging everywhere. It’s a small thing, but it does play into the holiday and season quite well, and it looks really gorgeous at night.
Whenever I assess a festival in this MMO, what’s of supreme importance is how difficult and annoying the quests are in relation to how many times I have to run them to get desired rewards. Seeing as how everything about Furtherholm was 100% new to me — and everyone else — I worried that it might be too… fussy to be enjoyable.
Happily, the team struck a great balance here. You need to do 10 quests to get your daily wrapper done, and the island has more than that available every day. Except for one guy who sends you to other parts of the world to recruit tourists — which is optional — every other quest can be started and finished in this pocket-sized zone.
So it’s pretty easy to snarf up 10 quests and then go on a trip around the island finishing them all up in about 15 to 20 minutes. You’ll want to have a kite “pet” activated as you travel for one of the quests and frequently check your map for the next objective. But it’s really not that hard, and some of the quests can be done in mere seconds.
There’s a good amount of imagination that clearly went into theming these quests around summer and vacation. There are sandcastles to be built, swimming areas evaluated, seashells to find, lemons to pick, seagulls to chase off, an inn to straighten up, and fish to catch. There’s even a quest where you can choose to pet or shoo the many cats that populate this place.
In under a half-hour on this island a day, you can rack up a ton of tokens and other rewards for pretty minimal effort — and do so in a cute area. That’s perfect for this festival.
Players who prefer the old Minas Tirith content still have the option to do that, which might be ideal for those who’ve memorized all of those quests. I approve that SSG didn’t exorcise those quests but simply added on to the festival. More choice is always good, as long as it isn’t mandatory or overwhelming.
At the end of the day, nobody’s going to say that LOTRO’s Midsummer Festival is the crowning jewel of the game or even the annual holiday rotation. But it does make for a mighty fine start to summer and give everyone a much-needed vacation to Middle-earth’s version of the Caribbean.
Every two weeks, the LOTRO Legendarium goes on an adventure (horrid things, those) through the wondrous, terrifying, inspiring, and, well, legendary online world of Middle-earth. Justin has been playing LOTRO since its launch in 2007! If you have a topic for the column, send it to him at justin@massivelyop.com.