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Exclusive Interview with LOTRO's Jeffrey Steefel
Our first instalment of our two-part chat with the Executive Producer of Lord of the Rings Online. We talk combat, testing and Dol Guldur
Written by Andy Griffiths, 30 November 2009
GamerZines: Mirkwood seems so much darker than anything else we've seen in LOTRO before. Was that deliberate?
Jeffrey Steefel: Absolutely, even in the lore it's really clear that there is a polar relationship between Lothlorien and Dol Guldur. In face even in the books and the appendices there are lots of talk of how the greenland, which was once beautiful, has been completely corrupted by the Necromancer, you know the stage name before he became known as Sauron. When you first start you want to look back at Lothlorian and then you turn back and think, "Oh no...." The ability to go back and forth gives a great contrast.
GZ: How long would it take for a twelve man raid to get to the tower?
JS: I'm always reticent to answer those types of questions, because I'm always wrong. Some players will show us, we thought it was difficult, long and it would take forever, but if you've played through The Rift of Nurz Ghashu, or you know people that have, it's intended to be like that with the same sort of depth or maybe more so. It's a meaningful commitment to get to the top and fight with the Fell Beast.
GZ: If you die on the fourth of fifth floor is it a case of starting again?
JS: It depends, if you all wipe then yes but if one of your team dies they can come back. It's very much like the other ones, we've got gates as you progress, so you can't keep dying and try again. In fact you'll spent a lot of time running back upstairs trying to catch your friends, because a lot of the big monsters have the ability to knock you back and into the air which often results in you falling down several levels.
MMOZine Issue 25
For our latest Lord of the Rings coverage, click here to download MMOZine Issue 25 for free.GZ: Usually in scenarios like these players will get so far and not be able to progress due to dropped connections and issues like that. Have you tried to counteract that?
JS: We have, first of all using the beta we have a very limited closed alpha and beta test to start beating up the instances. We have a dedicated QA team, in addition to our normal testers who test just to see whether it's broken. I say just, but it's a huge job for an MMO. But we have a quality team that is a group of guys and all they do day in day out, terrible job by the way, is play a fellowship over and over and over. They give us feedback on a bi-weekly basis. They talk to the developers and say, "Here's what is going on here", and then they grade it. "This is fun, this isn't fun, this was too hard, this was too easy, this is completely exploitable." It doesn't really matter though because we'll do our first raided instance stuff and we'll change it. We've been playing for weeks and months. I think we were five minutes into our first load test and one of the QA guys was like, "They already exploited it!" There's always a clever player out there and you know these big instances are hard to do.
GZ: Combat has seen some vast improvements in Mirkwood. What was the design process for that? Was it intensive testing again?
JS: Oh yeah, absolutely! It's probably the most intensive thing in beta, something that we'll be working on until the moment we launch and probably a while after. Probably the first time we do a patch there's going to be some changes because it's so complex and affects everybody. The overall interaction between skills and balance of the combat itself hasn't changed. Behind the scenes number crunching and all that hasn't changed. What has changed is the way the animation is playing, especially with auto attack. The way that it worked before was that if you tried to fire off a skill, it would work after whatever animation auto-attack was in the middle of performing. It was kinda what gave combat it's sluggish feel. So now auto-attack is completely interruptible and when you activate a skill it just plays, some of the animation is compressed and part of it is from back in the ancient times, when one version of this game was being worked on. It was very important that the animations were very fluid, beautiful, convincing and realistic which is great, but if you do too much of that then it can slow things down so we've given the option to the player. The default now is for some of the animations to be less complex and play more quickly and snappy. But if you miss that kind of feel, you can actually go into the options and adjust the way animations are played, so you can have your own balance between how fast and how fluid you want it.
GZ: Giving players a choice of how combat works is very new to MMOs.
JS: Just because there's a lot of people saying they want it to be faster and snappier. Some just like it the way it is and we don't want to take it away from them.
GZ: It must be impossible to keep everyone happy though.
JS: Pretty much!(laughs) So you keep as many happy as you can, figure out who are these groups want and recognise that their wants change. The audience we have today isn't the same audience we had three years ago. It's definitely not the same as the audience we had for the game's launch six years ago and it'll probably change in twelve months time as well.
Lord of the Rings coverage available in MMOZine Issue 25 - click here to download it for free!
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