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Exclusive LOTR: Siege of Mirkwood Interview - Part 3
The concluding part of our interview with Turbine's Jeffrey Steefel, Executive Producer of Lord of the Rings: Online
Written by Andy Griffiths, 22 October 2009
Today we have for you the final part of our exclusive interview with Turbine's Jeffrey Steefel and we've saved the best until last. This time we talk about what fan's can expect when they finally play the forthcoming expansion for Lord of the Rings: Online, Siege of Mirkwood.
GamerZines: It seems recently that betas are being used as a marketing tool. What do you think about this?
Jeffrey Steefel: That's an age old discussion in online games- the marketing department wants it as a vehicle to get the word out and developers want it as a vehicle to learn about the game. Those things aren't in agreement with each other, as developers the way we find out what we need is to break the game during beta so that players can't break it. It's not a new conversation but beta first and foremost is for feedback about the game. We could have the best QA department in the world and test it any way possible but it doesn't matter until you get players on real servers. However there's no doubt that an open beta is an event to let people communicate to others that a game is cool, which is why there's constant discussion about closed and open betas.
GZ: How does the new mount system and combat enhancements feed into gameplay?
JS: We always knew that there were certain things about mounts that weren't as good as they needed to be. Now riding a horse is fully integrated into the game- I can talk to NPC's, trade with vendors, travel, emote etc. It means that mounts are integrated into gameplay and will be more compelling to use. The combat changes are a response to feedback we've gotten since launch, that it could be more responsive. It's due to some of the early discussions which wanted to make combat elegant because it's Tolkien. Some of the animations are very grand - you might not see it- it's very subtle, maybe three or four extra frames. To wind up nice elegant arcs when using your sword and not letting your interrupt that animation because it would look unreal. We've now changed that so auto-attack is interruptible with skill animations that work faster. We've removed some of the show from the animation to make it feel more responsive. It's an example of us going back and making it better whether it's visuals, content or gameplay. Whatever it happens to be let's just keep improving the game because the genre is increasing every day and peoples expectations are increasing every day.
GZ: What are the challenges of expanding the level cap, like you're doing in Mirkwood? Why do so many expansions do it?
MMOZine Issue 17
For our latest Lord of the Rings coverage, click here to download MMOZine Issue 17 for free.JS: Players expect because they are on a path of continuous advancement and accomplishment. In a level based game that is the clearest indication of advancement, hitting level sixty it's easy to communicate. It's what players expect and that's why other devs do it and we are doing it in Mirkwood. You can never perfectly build a game at the beginning that you can continually advance forever, so that's the challenge. If you keep adding more uber skills and gear it gets to a point that you invalidate what has happened before it. There's also an issue of people working really hard for gear that suddenly become useless which we've tried to address with the item enhancement system, or legendary items so at least you can upgrade them with new runes or legacies.
GZ: This is the end of Book 2, how is the story going to progress from here?
JS: We will always be driving the epic story forward, it's the central part of what we are doing, it's really a part of how that weaves into gameplay and the scope of the story. What's interesting about Tolkein is that he wrote an incredibly rich world which has so much going on in it. It's the most evergreen and recognisable fantasy property of all time. What's really interesting is that if you go through key moments of the Tolkein lore, it's finite. The number of Gandalfs and Aregons that exist in all of the lore are limited and that's intentional because it makes them more special. It means that we have to be really careful when laying our out epic story so that we don't cluster this big icons too closely, or go too long without them occurring.
GZ: Do you see skirmish mode as a way of recreating those epic events?
JS: The system that we've created is the perfect vehicle. The whole point of skirmishes is to put you in the 'War of the Ring' and make you feel part of the smaller battles that are occuring through middle earth. There's a reason we take you back to familiar places, even in Mirkwood. We take you back to Shire and Brie which are both familiar and part of the lore. A lot of work is figuring out how this becomes the basis for larger skirmishes that are more familiar like going back and seeing the Balrog released in Moria. It's easy to say we want to go to Helm's Deep and we want 300,000 players roaming around on the screen but that's not really the right thing. Which is why we are using skirmish now, and we want to get lots of experience with it before we get into things that are more complicated. We've already said it may be good ground to stage PvP battles.
GZ: Is waiting for technology or even gamers connection speeds to get better, ever a factor?
JS: It's more about lets make sure the progression fits the story and the game. It would be great if technology is exactly where we need it to be when the time comes, but we've demonstrated we can utilise our own technology and design to portray whatever we wish. I don't see an MMO environment of 100,000 players running around for a very long time. There's a couple of elements at work, tech is one of them but the other is gameplay. There's a reason why we have three, six and twelve man skirmishes and not twenty-four, forty-eight or beyond. There's a certain point where it's not fun any more where there's too much for a player to focus on. From that point you're trying to make an RTS where you need to deal with units and not players. Then it starts to go against the concept of a MMO game, which is having as many people as possible portrayed by actual players. When we originally started out ten years ago, we though that MMO meant lots of players occupying the same space at the same time. Very quickly we learnt it was about interacting with a group of friends amongst players or enemies in an environment that is populated by lots of people. You want to have a sense of a giant war raging around you, but the bigger challenge isn't how do you get 500 players on the screen but how do I create an environment that feels that vast? There's a lot of interesting way that we can accomplish that but not yet.
Lord of the Rings coverage available in MMOZine Issue 17 - click here to download it for free!
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