Hold Your Horses: LOTRO's Rohan Expansion Delayed

Horses! They go fast. Except when they don't - for instance, while asleep or carrying a very, very large person. And then, of course, there's the most common horse sloth cause of them all: beta tests of MMORPGs based on the most culturally pervasive mythology ever to be written by a man with an irrational hatred of cars. The latter has claimed yet another victim today, as Lord of the Rings Online: Riders of Rohan has officially been delayed into October.

Executive producer Kate Paiz explained the hoof-stubbing stumble in a post on LOTRO's official site.

"Thanks to some great efforts from beta players, we’ve identified issues that we think need to be addressed before we can launch. In order to address those issues and meet our expectations for quality we’re going to need more time. As a result, we’ve elected to delay our launch to October 15th. We understand that many players have been looking forward to joining us in Rohan as soon as possible and will be disappointed by this news. As a token of our appreciation for your patience we are granting a gift to all pre-purchasers of Riders of Rohan."

And while we're not exactly looking at the One Goodie Bag To Rule Them All here (it's simply a garden variety assortment of boosts and scrolls), it's a nice gesture nonetheless. In the meantime, Turbine's been impressively upfront about its development process, so there's a heaping stack of literature devoted to each class if you're feeling so inclined.

I've also sent along an email to Turbine asking for more detail about what needs tweaking - if only because grafting an entirely new combat system onto a five-year-old game could cause hiccups of many exciting and new flavors. Those of you in the beta, have you hit any particularly egregious stumbling blocks?