The Lord of the Rings Online: Rise of Isengard Interview

Following the announcement of Rise of Isengard, Ten Ton Hammer picked up the phone and chatted up Turbine's Aaron Campbell and Adam Mersky for this article-style interview about The Lord of the Rings Online expansion pack.
With LotRO's previous two expansions, Mines of Moria and Siege of Mirkwood, we arrived on the scene after the members of the original Fellowship had already passed through. So our first question to Aaron and Adam was: are we still a part of the Middle Earth mop-up team, or would we play (or at least feel like we play) a role in how the Isengard story progresses. Happily, Turbine is taking the (Rise of) in Rise of Isengard literally. (Clearly, in terms of story and progress, we're at the beginning of The Two Towers. We're continuing down the epic storyline, so for much of Dunland you're going to be seen as journeying with the Grey Company south.)

Since all of our RoI questions were now being met with a polite (wait and see,) we went with a purely technical question - what happened to the old Volume and Book way of describing new chunks of LotRO content? We'd heard a great deal about expansions and updates, but no handy volume and book versioning to go along with it. "The epic story continues," Aaron explained. "We're going to be doing both updates that have specific feature sets in them, and we're still going to be releasing epic books as well."

Adam explained further: "You may get updates with Books in them. We will be doing updates associated with Books, but just not every update. That way we're not holding back changes and fixes and player requests and waiting for the story to progress."