It's a Christmas Miracle! UI Scaling comes to LoTRO

Just noticed this on my normal daily Reddit check in.  UI scaling is finally coming to Lord of the RIngs Online, and is already up on the test server.  You can find the full patch notes here.  Apparently the patch also includes a pretty hefty amount of new group content for an old MMO with a budget in the range of a nice public soup kitchen.

LoTRO is an amazingly pretty game considering its age.  The character models are only so so, but it has some of the most natural looking landscapes of any MMO I have ever played.  This basically comes down to two creative decisions.  First off, transitions from one ecosystem to another in adjacent zones are depicted very carefully and gradually.  Secondly, the zones themselves are scaled to such a size that it makes gradual and unnoticable landscape transitions possible in the first place.  A large regions like North Downs can take roughly the same amount of time to cross on horseback that a continent takes in some other MMOs.  For me personally, these two design choices give the wilderness areas of LoTRO a much stonger illusion of being a real place than many games it competes with.

However, for a long time the game has been held back by a UI that couldn't easilly be scaled up to modern screen resolutions.  That means that you are almost always forced to run the client at a screen resolution that would have been pretty good . . . ten years ago.  You can crank the resolution way way up to 4k of course, and it makes the game look noticably better.  However, it also reduces the UI elements to tiny boxes that are extremely hard to use.  This is an incredible welcome change.

So far as I know today is the first hint we have had that this is coming.  Likely the team had some solution in mind that they were not sure would work.  Or maybe they just wanted to give us a pleasant surprise.  Regardles, reports so far are that the feature still has some rough edges to smooth out, but overall works quite well at 4K resolutions.  

LoTRO just became a lot easier to recommend to a modern player. Hopefully the same thing will be coming to DDO soon. 

Note: I'll be adding some pictures to illustrate my points about LoTRO landscapes soon, but I still have much  to do this evening and didn't want to wait 24 hours to post to good news.  Happy holidays :-)