You can almost hear Jeffrey Steefel, executive producer of Turbine’s Lord Of The Rings Online, straining at the leash as we probe him for details on the encounter everyone’s anticipating in the upcoming Mines Of Moria retail expansion. "You will be encountering the Balrog during the game in Moria..." A pregnant pause ensues as Adam Mersky, Turbine’s head of PR, silently makes his presence felt, "...we’re just not talking about how yet."

But then Jeffrey throws us a bone, "Some of that relates to the epic story and when it is that you’re in Moria, and the encounter will be unlike any other encounter in LOTRO today. Period. In fact, that was my instruction to the dev team. That’s really the point of Moria in general, which is that this place needs to feel like something that you’ve never experienced in LOTRO before and that you’ve never experienced in an MMO before. Ideally, if we really get it right, one you’ve never experience in an RPG, or computer game before in terms of scope, magnitude and vastness of it. It’s a tall order but the guys here have had tall orders before."

Tall order indeed if Moria is to live up to our expectations: Tolkien’s literature describes the dwarven kingdom of Khazad-dûm as the "Greatest of all the mansions of the Dwarves," an underground kingdom with a staircase that stretched from the peak of the Misty mountains to the ‘deepest dungeon’ and as wide as it was high, while Peter Jackson brought us a deeply atmospheric and epic vision of the ancestral home of the Dwarves, in the first two episodes of the film trilogy. The Mines Of Moria would have to be a suitably grand and moody expansion to LOTRO to justify its heritage. But, given the attention to detail so far, it’s not the quality or depth of Moria we’re afraid of... rather, the creatures within.

"Our work is always modelled directly on the books and our licence is for the books. In places like Moria and Rivendell where things that are more iconic are described in more detail by Tolkien, there’s obviously a strong resemblance to the things Peter Jackson did in the film because we’re drawing on the same source material. But we have the advantage in the persistent world environment to go a lot further than they [Wingnut Films] could have possibly done, simply because they didn’t want to make a 40-hour film. So in the films you’re basically treading a path through Moria from one door to the other, up and down a few staircases and it was a very, very cool part of the movie. But it’s a very straight, narrow path that they tread and the books give you a sense that this was an entire civilisation underground in the height of its heyday when it was built. Some of it has fallen to ruin, some of it is still grand and all of it has pretty much been overrun by evil. Orcs, goblins, the Balrog and all the other nameless things below..." Other things – like the Watcher, the Kraken-like tentacled creature that stalks the water outside the entrance to Moria? "Exactly. You’ll encounter the Watcher, in fact this will be a fairly significant instance encounter with the Watcher, which is going to play quite a prominent part in your experience of Moria. He’s gonna be very cool – and a little bit tough! The biggest place of opportunity for us is in the nameless deep of Moria, it’s an opportunity to create some powerful and also strange creatures in a way that’s hard to do in other parts of Middle-earth."

As much as we enjoyed the thought of playing the role of Frodo and venturing directly into the depths of Moria from the newbie playground of Bree-Land, that’s sadly out of the question. Moria fills out the end game of LOTRO with a raised level cap and well-stocked hunting grounds for high-level fellowships, "Most of Moria is high-level. We’re introducing levels 50-60 in the expansion, so you’ll be in the 45-60 range in Moria, mostly. There are places around Moria, in Eregion that you’ll be able to go to at lower levels but there’s a lot of content that you’ll want to be with other folks in. However, over the last year we’ve learned that you need alternate types of content, so we’re gonna have large, group encounter-type things that you would expect in a place like Moria, but we’re also gonna have small, two or three-person instance encounters that we found people really love. In fact in other MMOs that’s where players have migrated when they’re not doing the big raids to get the big loot. Continuing the motif that we’ve had shortly after launch, we’ll make sure there’s solo material everywhere, especially when it comes to the epic story, so that you can encounter some of the epic story in the cool moments in LOTRO."

As the debut expansion for LOTRO, Turbine has aspired to offer a little more to high-level characters than an increased experience cap. The legendary item system gives even level 60 avatars a goal far beyond the usual pursuits found at the highest echelons of MMORPG gaming: “The important thing to begin to understand about the Legendary item system is that it is a whole other area of advancement to the game. All the other items that you get now, the high-level items that are gonna drop, this is really a system that layers on top of everything. You do have to get to a high level – we’ve not decided what level yet – to begin to participate in the system, for the same reason we do a lot of things like that: because you don’t want to present a game to the newbie that’s way too complex. We like them to get to know the basics before we get them off the training wheel. Legendary items are a whole other advancement path that are a combination of a high-end slotted item, a pet, a herald that you have by your side and your own travelling quest hub. Basically, once you begin building this item it has a life of its own. It has XP that it gains over time for the battles it’s participated in, whether it’s armour or weaponry. It has XP that it gains for some of the quests that it’s participated in. It is also something that’s physically a Diablo crafting/slotting style and you collect different items around the world through questing or raiding, buying or selling or whatever, which you can then slot into this item. So it’s not only gaining XP but it’s gaining its own equipment. So the item becomes more and more powerful on a number of dimensions and then it has its own set of stats that modify your stats. So it’s gonna become a significant part of elder play for players of a high level."

In a nutshell, you can reach level 60 and begin to advance the items in your inventory, rather than your character. Furthermore, you’ll know a character with high-level legendary kit when you see them, “It’s a combination of effects and just the appearance of it itself. It also depends on what tier of item you’re at. So the lower tier Legendary items will really be more about stats and modification, and people can examine your weapon to see how powerful it is. Then as you get into the higher tiers, then there will be different visible effects." So with the question of endgame covered, we moved onto what’s in the expansion for new players, as well as old players with new characters. There are two new classes, the Rune Keeper and Warden, which are poised to make up the deficit of healing and buff classes in LOTRO. We wanted to know if we decided to make a new character with one of the new classes, we could still wander over to Moria and take a peek. Jeff’s response verged on the jocular, “You can try! Again, what we’re trying to do here is provide a challenge for all gamers. The first 50 levels are for people who are new to the game – they are the same great 50 levels that there were before. They have not depreciated at all for those people. So we’ve two audiences to satisfy, the people that we launched with, for them there’s Moria. For people that are just coming into the game who are at a lower level, we believe LOTRO stands for itself and there are certainly classes and other things that add to the gameplay at lower levels. So it’s almost like we’re building a couple of different games: the early game that needs to remain engaging for new players and the elder game that need to be more engaging for elder players, and opportunities for them to mix. We’re certainly gonna be making changes to the first 50 levels to make sure that part of the game remains competitive as other games come out. Whether it’s just a graphical update, we’re going to be enhancing the impact of DX10 for people with those cards, or the balance of the game and the way certain features work."

Going beyond Moria, there’s far more LOTRO to be explored yet. Jeff chucked us an arbitrary figure: eight per cent. That’s the total of Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings literary content Turbine has covered so far. Considering Book 13 and the Forochel area of Middle-earth was constructed out of several paragraphs, we’d imagine Turbine could stretch the remaining 92 per cent quite far. Jeff concurred: "I’d say we’ve used up about eight per cent... I made up that number, but there’s a long list of things we worry about all the time – one thing we never worry about is available content. We’ve just extended our licence through to 2014 with the right to extend it beyond that to 2017. I’m sure if things are going well we could go beyond that. I have no doubt we have enough content to last us until then, and even if we didn’t, then we have the opportunity to explore the outer edges of Middle-earth and the Fourth Age, all kind of things that are alluded to but not really described. Honestly, you look at the map of Middle-earth and you look at what we’ve covered and what’s left: it’s huge."

It doesn’t take a massive stretch of the imagination to see Lord Of The Rings Online lasting another decade either. While it is a long way behind World Of Warcraft in terms of subscriber numbers, it’s proved a hugely popular MMORPG since its launch last year and the draw of seeing the licence recreated online is a strong factor in the sales. But Jeff thinks there’s far more to LOTRO’s longevity than what Tolkien has given it, "We’re the next-gen MMO, we’re highly polished, high-quality, triple-A, not broken… it sounds trite, but people ask me what I think is one of the biggest features of World Of Warcraft or Lord Of The Rings Online, and I say that it’s because we ship the games finished. Not broken. This sounds like it’s not a big deal, but it is because of the scope and scale and complexity of these games. So that sounds unimportant, but that’s the threshold you now have to pass to even be a successful game. We are telling a story in a persistent environment in a way that is compelling that people feel they can become a part of, that continues to evolve in a world that evolves and you feel part of that evolution. We have [instances] early on in the game and we have some in Moria where you go through an instance experience and things actually change: walls crumble and new parts of the dungeon open up, buildings burn down – whatever, and that becomes a persistent part of the world for you going forward."

And finally, there was one burning question about the Balrog that we had to ask Jeff: does LOTRO’s version of this ‘demon of the ancient world’ have wings or not? "Well, read the books very thoroughly and whatever the description of the Balrog is, you can be absolutely certain that will be what it’s like in our game!" Well, that clears that one up then...

Ben Biggs