During a panel hosted at San Diego Comic-Con 2025, Free Range Games and North Beach Games announced Durin's Folk, an expansion to the survival game The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. Not many details were revealed at this point, except for an expanded end-game story, 'exciting' new game mechanics, and many more yet-to-be-revealed secrets.
As you might recall, The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria launched in October 2023 for PC and PlayStation 5. Initially, it was a console exclusive for Sony's console and a PC exclusive for the Epic Games Store. That changed in August 2024, when Free Range Games released it on Steam and Xbox Series S|X with cross-play between all platforms.
Earlier this year, The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria was updated to optionally support dedicated servers. They can either be rented for a fee from a third-party provider or hosted by users. Owners of a dedicated server can then tweak specific settings to their liking, such as:
Difficulty Settings
setdifficulty - sets all of the server's difficulty settings to use a preset
- setdifficulty story
- setdifficulty solo
- setdifficulty normal
- setdifficulty hard
- setdifficulty custom
setcustomdifficulty [name] [value] - sets the specified difficulty setting [name] to the given value. Eg. setcustomdifficulty [combatdifficulty] [verylow]
- Names:
- combatdifficulty
- enemyaggression
- survivaldifficulty
- miningdrops
- worlddrops
- hordefrequency
- siegefrequency
- patrolfrequency
- Values:
- verylow, low, default, high, veryhigh
- Not all of the named settings have the same range of values - some don’t have verylow, veryhigh so if those value are chosen, it will be set to low or high instead.
If the Durin's Folk expansion is truly to launch soon, the developers may try to match the second anniversary of The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, which is in around three months from now, on October 24, to be exact. Anyway, we'll keep you updated on any official announcements from Free Range Games.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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