The lands of Middle Earth are very vast, which is both good and bad. Good because getting "lost" is a perfect excuse to spend more time with a lady elf friend. Bad because people could really get lost unintentionally through their travels.

Thankfully, the introduction of the Google Maps makes it so much easier to complete quests and plot out your next moves in the game.

The maps can be accessed through The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadow of Angmar Lorebook. It is a Wiki connected to the game itself which contains information on nearly every quest, item, creature, NPC, class, and race in LOTRO. The addition of Google Maps should make it easier for players to illustrate paths and directions to objectives and quests.

Since it is a Wiki, some of the newer players will still have to wait for the more seasoned explorers to post their maps using the extensive toolset provided.

So adventurers rejoice, soon you won't be getting lost, at least not intentionally.

Jeffrey Steefel, the executive producer of Turbine's upcoming MMORPG epic The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, has a pretty lofty goal in mind for the game. In an interview with SPOnG, Steefel revealed that Turbine's intention with the game is to "expand the whole social experience of Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar onto the web."

The in-game map system used in LotRO has been likened by some people to Google Maps. Steefel said that this is all a part of the whole "web expansion" plans Turbine has in mind for LotRO. "Part of [expanding the game's whole social experience] is giving you access to interactive maps, giving you access to a full compendium of Tolkien-knowledge that’s tied into those maps."

This compendium of knowledge (kind of a built-in Tolkien Wiki) can also lead to building social networks within the game. "Imagine that you are roaming around the world and you click a button and it opens up this interactive encyclopedia... and there's hyperlinks inside that to tell you all about characters you're meeting, what's happening in the locality and so on and so forth. From this we can get blogs, player profiles... all this kind of stuff."

So a kind of MySpace with a Tolkien flavor? Sounds pretty cool. The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar is currently slated for an April 24 release in the U.S. For the full interview, click on the "Read" link below.

 

After having recently announced his community-driven MMO, Dave Perry, the former Shiny Entertainment boss, has announced that he has another project for the developer community. Develop Magazine reports that over at the Game Developers Conference 2007 Dave Perry has invited everyone in the games industry to submit markers to the Google Maps powered Gameindustrymap.com.

Just so you aren't left clueless, Game Industry Map is a wiki-style Map of  of the videogame industry. The map is set to include studios, colleges, outsourcing companies, freelancers, publishers, and even the gaming press. Perry calls this self-funded project a "gift to the industry." Perry had this to say about the community-powered endeavor:

This site picks up on two fast-growing trends – community and user generated content – the videogame industry is still relatively young and we already have a great community spirit which we hope to nurture for the benefit of industry as a whole. Plus we get to show the rest of the world just how widespread we are, employing creative talent all over the planet.

The result is that it immediately becomes the most accurate information available in the world, it will grow daily, and it’s shared to all. We expect to see everyone using it, job hunters, press, gamers, college students, investors, even agencies that would like to see just how prolific this industry is.

...As the Internet has proved, businesses grow when you connect people, and my goal is to simply help drive that growth. I’m not looking for any donations, not looking for any sponsorship, I am looking for teams (especially new ones) to just put themselves on the map.

The project currently has a team that has put up the first 1,000 markers. It is expected that the community itself will eventually fill in the blanks.

Ah, if only the user-generated, homebrew-ed world of those entrenched in web 2.0 could spread to the rest of the world. If only.

Anyhow, feel free to fill Perry's map in yourself if you wish. Our read-link below should lead to the the map. It's important to note that the thing is free and it's still in beta.

This latest development could be the last straw between reality and virtual reality: Imagine a virtual world - Elona, Plane of Knowledge, Azeroth... Ah! That last one sounds rather familiar. And we're telling you, it's about to get more familiar not only among MMO players but among non-players as well.

The fictional continent of Azeroth in the World of Warcraft now has an area that uses Google Maps API. The map, if we may add, is amazingly accurate. Accordingly, there are over 15,000 data points covering 69 resources with their exact map location in the WoW database.

Aside from that, players can also display herbs, ore, treasure, zone names, and city names. Speaking of herbs, some of the more known ones that could actually be mapped include Arthas' Tears, Black Lotus, Blindweed, Briarthorn and Bruiseweed among others.

The said development is quite important at this point because of the opening of the Outlands for the expansion The Burning Crusade. As all WoW hardcore gamers know, the mysterious Outlands has been mentioned a lot of times before but it is only until now that players are allowed to venture in it.