On top of the video Q&A we posted recently, WarCry has now posted a (textual) interview of their own. Here is a short excerpt:

WarCry: What can you tell us about that (Item Advancement) system? Will there be actual weapon XP, questlines that involve specific weapons? Are the upgrade paths going to be linear, or branching out so that players will be able to customize weapons to suit their own playstyles?

Jeffrey Steefel: Obviously there are some things that have to be pre-baked into the advancement path, otherwise you’d have eighteen million combinations … and we’d release sometime in 2020. But absolutely … the way I describe it, it sounds a little odd, but think of the weapon as almost like a pet that you’ve acquired - a full-on pet, so it has it’s own XP that it gets. It gets that XP through a lot of the ways that players do: has it been involved in a particular type of battle, has it been in a particular part of the world, has it been utilized in a certain quest, has it been utilized in a certain deed, has it been slotted with a certain type of trait, you know. … That’s all on the side of “software,” and on the hardware side, it’s “what runes or gems have I found or acquired that I’ve slotted into this weapon?” a la Diablo … So how does all that stuff mix together? The weapon has its own depth … that will grow over time. … It’s a whole other advancement path that kind of travels along with you.

The full transcript is available here, expect to look forward to a bunch more news for Mines of Moria in the coming months.

Mines of Moria is the second volume for, and expansion back to, ‘the Lord of the Rings Online’. Mines of Moria is expected to ship somewhere in Fall this year.