Steam announced today they now offer the LOTRO Mac client for download and play through their system. There should be no difference at all between this client and the Mac client Turbine released a while back but if you are one who loves using Steam, I thought it might be worth mentioning.
New Starter Pack: Steely Dawn Pack
In other Steam news, we have a new starter pack that was introduced with the new client announcement.
Steely Dawn Pack
Cost: $19.99 USD
Included in the Pack:
- Steely Dawn Cosmetic Armor Set: Prepare yourself for adventure with the Steely Dawn armor set. This cosmetic set pairs bright white armor with dark grey trim for a very cool look.
- Evendim Quest Pack: Explore the ruined city of Annúminas on the shores of Lake Evendim and aid Aragorn in re-forging Narsil, the Blade That Was Broken!
- Five 100% XP Boosts: Build your legend even faster with these five boosts that grant you 100% additional experience on quests, monster kills, and more for 60 minutes.
- 500 Turbine Points: Customize your experience in Middle-earth with 500 Turbine Points. Buy cosmetic gear, rare mounts, experience boosts, buffs, and more.
This is not client specific and you do not need to play LOTRO through Steam to buy and use this package. Buying this package through Steam will grant you a key code you apply to your LOTRO account.
Steely Dawn Cosmetic Armor Set
Our friend @rwfrk on twitter shared the following screenshots from in-game of the set (thanks Crell!) It is a five piece set: helm, hauberk, gloves, shoulders, & boots. The sets are not able to be dyed.
Note: The cloak is not included in the set (that’s just the cloak he had on).
Ketani has sent in these photos of someone a little taller. She adds that the outfit would look nice with the Steam horse from the previous starter pack.
Value of the New Bundle
Let’s try to look at the value of this set using roughly $1.00 USD for 100TP. These are approximates and your mileage may vary based on how/when you bought your Turbine Points but it can give us a ballpark.
- Evendim Quest Pack = 595 TP ~ $6.00
- Five 100% XP Boosts = 600 TP ~ $6.00
- 500 TP ~ $5.00
Approximate total: $17.00
Now I didn’t include a value for the cosmetic set. These items won’t be in the store so I don’t have a value to give them but let’s try to find something similar. It has five pieces (no cloak) so lets go with the Annuminas cosmetic gear set they sell for 1495 as a comparable item.
That would bump up the value of the package to a value of approximately $32 USD if you cared to include the cosmetic value (or needed leverage to get your spouse to let you buy it).
Goldenstar’s Impression
- I’m not super hot on the cosmetic set but that could just be my personal tastes
- Evendim is a great zone and I do suggest it is something players pick up but you can buy it separately without this pack.
- You really don’t need XP boosts. Especially as a starter pack as those early levels go by pretty quick.
- Turbine Points is always nice. Might have been a more attractive bundle if a bigger pot of points.
Overall, I’m not super impressed with this pack and I do not plan to pick this up nor do I think I would be recommending this to friends of mine wanting to start up in LOTRO.
Old Starter Pack Gone
The old steam starter pack which was introduced just in June of last year appears no longer available which is unfortunate as that 68% speed account wide horse is awesome. Hopefully you had picked it up already!
It was more expensive than the new pack so perhaps they’re trying out a starter pack with a lower price point. I know I only picked up the steam starter pack when it was on sale for 50% off.
Still it was way more attractive a starter pack than I think the new $20 pack is!
December 7, 2012 at 3:50 pm
The Steely Dawn armour is actually pretty cool, in my opinion. I’m not buying the $20 started pack just to get it, though. Oh, well.
December 7, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Power Rangers Robot Force?
Looks silly :/
December 7, 2012 at 3:59 pm
I think I want the boots.
I wouldn’t pay $20 for this, but if it goes on sale during the Steam Holiday sale, I’d buy it for $5 or $10 for the TP and boots.
December 7, 2012 at 4:21 pm
Well, glad I bought the old starter pack in time.
That will maybe make the Noble Grey horse/pony a not so common collector one (I don’t see much of them on Estel).
That was actually a very usefull 68% speed steed.
December 7, 2012 at 4:52 pm
I saw that armour months ago with the plugin Compendium :3
December 7, 2012 at 5:28 pm
I paid £4.99 over here in UK for the new Steely Dawn pack. Either steam made an error or CSTM did? BARGAIN!
December 7, 2012 at 8:59 pm
I can’t see it in pounds or euros or anything but USD as far as I know. I would have no knowledge of other country costs.
December 7, 2012 at 5:35 pm
I think the price is listed wrong here. When I check the website the price is listed as £4.99, which in US currency is roughly $8.
December 7, 2012 at 6:14 pm
The price on the Steam page is $19.99. That may be an error, but the price is correct here even as of now.
December 7, 2012 at 7:14 pm
And the price in Euros is 18,49€.
December 8, 2012 at 8:01 am
Ah! Someone must’ve forgotten to put the 1 in before the 4 when placing the set. Lucky, lucky!
December 7, 2012 at 5:59 pm
Great… I’ve been waiting ages for this armor set to be released since i saw it in compendium.
Nice to know i’ll never get it now
December 7, 2012 at 7:55 pm
Just checked and its definitely 4.99 sterling, making it not a bad buy. Gutted I didn’t get the superior former starter pack when it was on sale the other week.
December 7, 2012 at 8:08 pm
I’m thinking that I’m in agreement with GS on that armour set. It’s just not catching my eye at all. I actually laughed when I first saw it and said to myself, “Really!?!”
Pricewise, I don’t think it’s a very good value at all. Evendim you can earn ingame doing your deeds faithfully. XP Boosts, meh. Bottomline, CHEESY armour and 500TP….$7-$8 value at most.
I think that whoever is over there at WB/Turbine coming up with these wacko prices really needs to get out of wishful thinking mode and get back to reality.
December 8, 2012 at 10:05 am
Steam showing it in the UK as £4.99 still.
f you’re in the UK and either want 500TP (£4.99 for 600 in store) and a little extra, or Evendim, or the 5 XP boosts, which had their points value worked out originally, then buy this before they realise they have the price wrong!
Best wishes!
December 8, 2012 at 11:55 am
Firstly, I agree that although the cosmetic is fine, it is not as good an option as ther original Starter Pack from Steam.
Secondly. Mac LOTRO on Steam is great! for Mac users.
The existing client is beta and they did say that it would come out of beta before being added to Steam. The article with quotes from Craig Alexander on this is here;
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/10/31/lord-of-the-rings-online-gets-a-mac-client/
But the current 8.0.1 on Live still has all the known bugs and there has been no Mac client to test U9 on Bullroarer.
So I guess we will see.
The other point to note is that the Mac Steam client is a HUGE! 29.6GB download. The existing Mac beta client download from Turbine is 17.73GB as a compressed disk image. The installed and updated beta Mac client is 21.23GB.
So I have no idea where this extra 8GB+ is coming from unless it is perhaps a radically altered version and updated to 9 with new content? Compared to the PC Turbine folder at a ‘weedy’ 17.6GB this is something of an enigma and also a real consideration for those with lesser connections (I have a 2MB giving 264Kb/sec max. download it will take 31 hours min.)
Upside is that it should be a more stable download option for those that had some issue with a single 17BG+ disk image download.
December 8, 2012 at 11:56 am
Forgot to add, if you are interested in the Mac install then there is a thread on the LOTRO Mac Technical Support forum for more detail and help with any issues with this of Mac things generally here;
forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?491718-STEAM-Mac-Client-now-Available-on-Steam&p=6562533#post6562533
December 8, 2012 at 12:19 pm
With the recent push of store stuff I’m not too surprised that the decent steam starter pack has vanished. Compared to others like the mithril edition or the new samwise one it was just too good.
XP stone is now a handful of scrolls. (timed or bluebar xp buff?)
Sexy mount is now bland armour.
qpacks dropped by 2/3rds
TP’s halved and given the current state of the store there’s soon not going to be much you can buy for 500 tp after you sort out a riding skill.
They’ve still not learned that with cosmetic armour like this the option to dye it would increase sales to players that aren’t new but are cosmetically inclined.
Price for the TP’s is (more or less) the same now as if you’d bought the first on sale for the UK at least, 500 for £5 vs 1000 for £10
Really not something I’d be pointing people towards. Original was a great promo pack this new one isn’t.
Might consider if I need 500 tp and it’s on sale otherwise nay chance.
December 8, 2012 at 3:16 pm
Sadly STEAM’s list of system requirements are on the ridiculous side for both PC and Mac downloads — 2-4GB of memory has been WIDELY known for several years now to be the minimum amount of memory needed to run without massive lag issues, especially in places like Bree and Festivals.
It is also quite interesting that the disk space requirement for the Mac is 70GB! I haven’t done the Steam download yet, but the basic .dmg file is a 17.74GB download, expanding into a 20GB .app file. — so why Steam is saying TWICE that amount is beyond me. The only possible explanation is that Steam is including the Bullroarer Beta Client as well — I’ll let you know when the download finishes.
December 8, 2012 at 4:03 pm
LoL… Steam initialized with an estimated download time of 21 Days 17 hours at 20KB/s … for 36640 MB. (36GB)
Fortunately, it came to its senses shortly afterwards and revised itself to roughly 3 hours at 2.5 MB/S. for 29.6GB.
Hmmm… Now to try to figure out where Steam is downloading this to… not to Downloads or Documents.
December 8, 2012 at 7:24 pm
Steam on pc downloads into steam/steamapps/common with the starting location varying by where you installed it to begin with. May well do the same thing for mac.
20kb/s is still better than pando
December 8, 2012 at 10:06 pm
As WM Magill will no doubt confirm, the reason the Steam Mac client is so huge is because they have actually included the entire PC client in with the Mac one ^^, with all the .dat files downloaded twice etc. Needless to say, best to avoid this download until Turbine/ Steam get it sorted.
It appears once working that it is the same beta Mac client we already have so no further fixes etc.
December 8, 2012 at 11:59 pm
Every time I see people talking about this I keep reading it as the “Steely Dan” starter pack. lol
December 9, 2012 at 1:03 pm
Doesn’t it look just like this set except in a different color?
http://az218388.vo.msecnd.net/content/global/images/screenshots/slides/7.jpg
December 10, 2012 at 2:12 am
if im not mistaken it is that set indeed, might even be able to Dye it the way Steam offers it… with some White dye!!
F.
December 9, 2012 at 3:56 pm
I bought this pack this morning because I am quite smitten with the cosmetics. However, the pack never gave me a CD key. I ran through Steam’s troubleshooting steps if your CD key is missing, however still nothing showed up. When I right click LOTRO in my Steam library, the only relevant option that comes up is “View Downloadables” and tells me that I have bought the Steely Dawn set – but gives to key to input into my Turbine account.
So here I am, having spent $20 on the pack and unable to use it. Sent Steam a support request. Hopefully they get back to me soon…
December 9, 2012 at 6:09 pm
I just want to post again to say that I found a solution for those who cannot access the “View CD Key” from their Steam Library. Try entering “Big Picture” mode (upper right hand corner). Navigate to LOTRO through that interface and click on ‘Links and More’. “View CD Key” should be an option in there. Worked for me, hopefully will work for others.
December 10, 2012 at 7:14 am
Even being a Lifetimer and already having the previous Starter Pack, I decided to get this one for the cosmetics only (and the 500 TP).
While I agree that the previous Steam Starter Pack was a better deal, I honestly think it was extremely underpriced for the 168% mount only. This one is more in sync with the current Turbine/Lotro Store prices (Not that I agree with the current pricing tables, but I still think is a decent deal.)
Also, for not having to pay a monthly fee, I think I’m more inclined to get these promotions and packs and I know that will not be the case for everybody.
I’m just waiting the game servers to come back from today’s maintenance to show off my new outfit.
One more thing important of note is that recently Lotro became region restricted on Steam, so while that does not affect those who have it already installed, it is not available for new players for some countries but those can still be gifted by a friend who is in US or another country were the game is available.
December 10, 2012 at 2:04 pm
Well looks like the UK folks have had the price adjusted. It’s now £14.99 so congrats to those who bought it for a fiver.
Just knocked it off my recommended list.
December 11, 2012 at 3:55 pm
Well, looks like I won’t be buying it unless Steam puts it on sale for 75% off.
December 15, 2012 at 5:59 am
Was going to say the price has gone up. Now totally and utterly not worth it.
December 14, 2012 at 9:05 pm
Steam has posted (more or less) corrected “System Requirements” for the Mac Client.
Turbine has not yet posted any. Thanks to Gaspard Lalune for pointing them out… over on the Mac Technical Support Forum:
http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?492436-INFO-Mac-Client-System-Requirements
December 28, 2012 at 9:56 am
hello
I activate the pack steely dawn but I is not found or is Steely Dawn Cosmetic Armor Set. you know where it is? please
December 28, 2012 at 10:02 am
I would guess it would appear in a box or package you have to open in your inventory. If you do not see it, try logging out and logging in. If you did not receive it, you need to contact Turbine. We’re just players like you and can’t help with in-game issues.