While work is chugging along every day, I've decided to go back to basics, and look at what really excites people about the mod. Frankly I have no clue because out of the 3,000 people who play LOME, maybe about 2 of them ever actually say anything about it.
So I've done the only logical conclusion: Put a bunch of ideas on the dart board in my basement and let fate decide. No, I'm not kidding, that's actually what I did.
The winner of my dart board ball was the Helm's Deep Remake!
Now it's true that LOME has quite a few campaigns coming down the line. One campaign is simply waiting on voice actors to submit their lines to me, and all will be ready for release! In the mean time, I've gotten to work on the Helm's Deep map! Luckily for me, the original [now] LOTR Legacy campaign has a great Helm's Deep map that I've touched up over the years. With some tender love and care, the map has seen some great strides in performance and visual overhaul!
The cinematics have gotten completely remade, using better cimeatic tricks, and better use of sound/dialogue, creating a far more interesting and less laggy cutscene.
Why remake this level alone?
Well ignoring that it was chosen randomly from a list, I think Helm's Deep is a perfect slice of content for new players to see just how ambitious of a project LOME is, without having to completely deep dive its massive repertoire of content. Helm's Deep is an iconic part of The Lord of the Rings, and using LOME's ability to output high fidelity content, I believe it's the perfect way to turn heads when it gets released. It would also be very easy to convert the map into a multiplayer scenario, in the future.
I plan to release this map by itself to the workshop in the next few weeks, if time allows for it! Recently, I've also updated the mod with two "spring cleaning" patches. These patches don't add massive amounts of content, but are aimed purely at polishing the mod state, there's never been a better time to jump in!
