New LOTRO content on way

Codemasters Online Gaming will be releasing its second free content pack for Lord of the Rings Online on 21st August.

It's called Book 10: The City of the Kings, and will add a new storyline for you and your friends to become involved with. It revolves around nasty woman Amarthiel who has pinched a crystal ball from the goodies, and is using it to find her long lost ring of power. It will be up to you and your kind hearted fellows to put an end to her tyranny.

This means there will be bags of new quests to get stuck into - over 100 if you're asking - as well as lots of new monsters to stab, dungeons to explore, and items to squabble over.

You'll be able to take on the role of a horrible Troll or powerful Ranger in monster play, too, getting involved in the Ettenmoor battles for good or evil by spending your hard earned Destiny Points.

But if that sounds a bit much like hard work, then you can always enjoy the world from a different perspective - a farmyard animal's view. Yes, you can roam around the world as a chicken, with more tasty beasts to be added at a later date. Just think, you'll soon be able to say, "I spent my weekend walking around a virtual world as a chicken, what did you do?"

Developer Turbine is also introducing a new reputation system to represent your standing with various factions in the game. Help them and they'll like you, kill their chickens and they won't. Bartering has been added, too, so you'll now be able to trade trophies earned in battle for rewards like new armour or mounts.

And as if all that wasn't enough, you'll also get a polished up user interface to play around with. It's now customisable, you see, so you'll be able to make it look pretty and change the various menu sizes with new options sliders.

Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game that launched earlier in the year to critical acclaim. Pop over to our review to see why we were so impressed.