The Lord of the Rings Online celebrates its 19th anniversary this year, but if you've tried to dip your toes back into it recently, you may have noticed that it doesn't look great.
It's an old MMO, so of course it's visually dated, but the UI would also warp and stretch or look blurry on modern monitors, which some players went so far as to make it “unplayable”.
Text so tiny you have to squint to read it is hardly ideal, but the only solution until now has been to lower the game's resolution and make everything else look blurry. Fortunately, Standing Stone Games is finally addressing this issue.
How UI scaling works in The Lord of the Rings Online
“Update 46.1 includes the addition of a new UI scaling feature to the game,” the patch notes read. “Access these new settings from the “UI Settings” tab of the Options menu. Scaling for the cursor, over fifty individual UI elements, and global UI settings are now supported. In addition, many full-screen UI elements have been updated to support widescreen viewing without stretching, including the login screen, character creation and selection, loading screens, and map panel settings. UI MAP can now be switched between Fullscreen and UI modes.”
This is just the “first phase” in a larger plan to improve UI scaling in The Lord of the Rings Online, so we can expect even more quality-of-life updates to address bugs that make this classic MMO more intuitive on modern hardware.
However, there are some known issues as detailed in the blog post – which you can read in full here:
-
Only the main mouse cursor is resampled to the new image with a higher resolution.
-
Scaling a character panel when it is not visible can cause its contents to expand beyond the panel.
-
Resizing the Trait Tree window causes the dependency arrows to move.
-
UI scaling does not currently support LUA plugins.

- Released
-
April 24, 2007
- ESRB
-
T For Teens due to blood and gore, alcohol and tobacco use, violence
- Developers
-
Standing stone games
- Publishers
-
Daybreak Game Company
- Engine
-
Havoc
- Multiplayer
-
Online multiplayer
- Franchise
-
lord of the rings
