Senior Staff Writer Chris "Pwyff" Tom got to don his adventuring shoes to explore LOTRO's upcoming Update 3 instance content!

Summer is usually a lazy season for both MMO players and their developers, but it seems like someone forgot to tell that to Turbine and the team behind Lord of the Rings Online! They've been going full-speed to get their latest content patch, Update 3: Lost Legends of Eriador, up and ready to go for players to explore on May 23, all the while prepping for their upcoming expansion, Rise of Isengard, due this fall, as well as finally taking the reins of their European servers on June 1. Talk about busy!

But amid all of their sweat and toil, Turbine is still a courteous developer at heart, so when they invited me for our traditional guided tour, through Update 3 this time, how could I say no?

Getting right down to business, my tour guides Adam Mersky and Aaron Campbell, executive director of communications and live producer at Turbine, respectively, managed to bring me around on a tour of the two new three-person instances coming to LOTRO next week. Typically speaking, when developers want to introduce content that they hope will entertain players for the summer, the usual choice is to either gate player progression with specific requirements, or just make the dungeon hard enough that most players will need to gear up before they can even touch it. With the first dungeon, The Inn of the Forsaken, the team at LOTRO has chosen to move off the traditional dungeon path by introducing a riddle-infested instance that can be completed differently depending on what class combinations you bring.

In the Inn of the Forsaken, players must use their brains and their brawn to make their way through, and it's mostly due to the many riddle-doors that litter the area. Each door references a specific emote in a riddle, and players have up to three chances to get it right. If you fail, however, don't worry because the riddle will just shuffle to a new one. The Inn of the Forsaken is also a heavy test of player awareness, as there are traps coming from every angle and most fights revolve around either using these traps to your advantage or just trying to avoid getting beaned by some of them. In addition to these varied traps, there are also triggers that are class specific, most notably being levers, which enable or disable traps, and lore-stones, which stun all enemies briefly upon use. Oh, and be sure you come to master using all of these things, because the final boss is not so easy unless you're prepared!

The second and last three-person instance we got through was The Halls of Night. With this new instance, it seems like the team at LOTRO took a bit of inspiration from their other MMO, Dungeons and Dragons Online, because The Halls of Night has that great hazy 'out-of-body' feel to it that typified many of DDO's instances from their "Dreaming Dark" pack. The out-of-body experience, however, is to be expected because players can only enter the Halls of Night in their dreams!

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