Lord Of The Rings Online: Shadows Of Angmar - Jeffrey Steefel Feature

It's been a long road, but Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is now just weeks away from a simultaneous launch across North America and Europe. Published by Codemasters Online Gaming (which will undoubtedly be hoping for greater success with this incarnation of JRR Tokien's work than it has with localised imports such as Archlord), Shadows of Angmar will be the first part in an epic MMO that both developer and publisher have openly stated will be a serious rival to that almost omnipotent game, Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

TVG first spoke with Turbine's Jeffrey Steefel during summer 2006 about the game, and we recently had the chance to speak again with the Executive Producer on Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar, and review some of the questions posed the last time we met...

When we last spoke, you said that the most difficult group for Turbine to please would be the Tolkien nuts; what has their reaction been now that some have been able to play the beta of Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar ?

Pleasantly surprised, honestly. There are some people who you'll never be able to fulfil whatever they had in their head, but overall a lot of the people we know and have been following for years have been saying, "I was in The Shire, and I came across a Black Rider - and he started to chase me. My God, I really feel like I'm in Middle-earth."

And what's the response been from Tolkien Enterprises, we know that you worked very closely together with them during the development of the game. Have you also heard anything from Tolkien Estates and what they think?

Tolkien Enterprises has been amazing, you're supposed to say that about every partner (and I've worked with a lot of Intellectual Property licensors in the past), but they truly have. I think partly that is because over the years we've found a mutual respect for each other, I think that they feel like we are serious about this IP, and that we really want to bring it to life. They've been very supportive of this being a game, and they're very excited about the game.

As for Tolkien Estates, we've had no contact from them - that's the sole reason for the existence of Tolkien Enterprises. It's behind stonewalls - we talk to them [Tolkien Enterprises] and they talk to the Estate - Chris Tolkien et al.

Shadows of Angmar comes three years after Peter Jackson's adaptations and fifty years after the release of the original books. Since the movies brought the story into the mainstream, do you feel that after that amount of time, you've lost some of the impetus?

If this was a game based on a movie IP that had come and gone, then I would be very concerned. But the interesting thing about Lord of the Rings is that it's evergreen. It's part of not only North American and European canon, but worldwide where it's a book that everyone has and everyone has read. It's completely evergreen.

Could you talk about the idea of Dread and Hope in the game?

Dread is a force that exists in the world that you encounter almost like radioactivity, which happens when you come close to something particularly evil in the game world. I may end up in Angmar and approach this big gigantic troll boss who, as I get closer and closer to him, things get a little complicated. The world gets a little muddy, the audio goes a little strange, and my maximum morale/health will get smaller and smaller. But it's carefully balanced though; what we don't want is a situation where every time you approach a really difficult challenge it's like approaching the speed of light, and you can never get there because the closer you get to your objective the harder it is - which is the purpose of Hope.

It's just another game mechanic - how do I get past this boss? Well, I have to have hope, or somebody in my party has to have a high level of hope. It can be a thing, it can be a monster, or it can be a place. It's not something that's a vital per say, but it's something that you can track so up in your interface there's a thing that tells you how much or hope you have.

What have been some of the hurdles that you guys have faced since we spoke to you last summer?

There's always a number. First is the decision as to whether it's done, is the game ready to bring to market. It's difficult in a market where it takes a long time to make this kind of game and the market is continually evolving, the industry is continually evolving. You're continually playing this game of chase. We had to get to a point where we said "You know what, we have a game that is very competitive now, which fulfils the IP, and it's time."

It's very difficult for designers to admit that and say, "Guys, we're finished - we're going to stop. We're going to stop inventing now; what we're going to do now is polish and stabilise, and finish." One of the things that Blizzard did the industry a favour with is by demonstrating that consumers really do want polish; consumers really do want a finished product, so we spent a lot of time on that. Another thing is getting into Beta, it's always a great learning experience; what's it like when you get lots and lots of people in your world? Stabilisation and balance, and finding out what happens when one hundred and fifty people are all trying to speak to Elrond at the time - things like that.

Another big thing is learning over the last year how broad an appeal this title is going to have, and recognising the fact that we need to optimise the game so it can reach the widest possible audience in terms of graphics and hardware - that's been a significant effort in the last six months.

Sure, looking at what we've seen today, it's a really good looking game - will it run on a standard rig? What benefits will people with higher end machines get?

You don't have to have the "Oh my god, gamer enthusiast" model. We've made sure that for somebody with that kind of rig that they'd be glad they did, because there's just extra crazy things going on. For DX10 eventually there'll be things that we do that aren't in the game right now - you can get a basic machine that you can play for £400 or less that will play the game wonderfully quite high, and then it scales right the way down to low. Our engine is pretty good at doing that, we've been doing this for some time, so the game still looks good and is very playable even on the low setting - you're just not going to get all the fancy reflections and all of the stuff like that. The aim is for normal people to play our game.

Obviously World of Warcraft continues to do well, especially with the release of the Burning Crusade; NCsoft has the likes of City of Heroes & Villains and Guild Wars, while Turbine also has the Dungeons & Dragons Online title. Where do you think the a saturation point for the genre is, and are we close to reaching it?

I think what you're seeing is the MMO market, or whatever it will be called - because I think it will be called something else because it's broader than that - has really expanded. I was there when Everquest was launched, and we were looking at figures of 500,000 player market and saying, "It's reached the saturation point, it can never grow!", and part of that was the industry's own reluctance to 'mainstream-ify' the genre. I think WoW and Guild Wars, and other games, have demonstrated that there's a lot of headroom - and I think Lord of the Rings gives us another opportunity to show one more time that there's a huge audience that's out which hasn't been tapped yet.

No more than any movie - as much as a big blockbuster doesn't want other blockbusters out there, they wouldn't want to be the only movie out there, because if they were, there wouldn't be an audience out there. We're confident that this is going to be good.

One of the conundrums that you still had last summer when we spoke to you, was the role of Gollum in the game. Regardless of whether he'll make an appearance in Shadows of Angmar or in the future expansion, do you now know how he'll feature?

We know when you'll be seeing Gollum now.

Alright, because the issue before was that his whereabouts are always known in the book.

We have solved that problem, and we have some exciting stuff coming up for when you'll be encountering Gollum.

And is that something that'll happen in Shadows of Angmar

It's not in the launch product.

But it would be in an update rather than the next expansion?

Absolutely, it's something that will be unveiled during the next year, but probably sooner rather than later.

The end game takes you through to the War of the Ring, and the battle at Pelannor Fields - how is pre-production coming along with the future expansions?

We try to look at the expansion of the game as a continuum; the model's changed a bit. I don't think it changes the way the player looks at it so much, but it's the way we're thinking about it. Instead of "We launch the game and then every year we do a big, gigantic expansion pack, and then we do a little bit of content in between," we're saying that we're going to launch the game and we'll be continually evolving and growing the game.

Sometimes it'll be free content, and other times it'll be retail content - depending on what we're seeing players need in the game, and secondly the way in which the market is headed. The market is going through a shift in the way consumers want to involve themselves with us - look at Guild Wars, it's a different model. So we will have retail product, and we will have very frequent updates that are free and blended. We have a plan for the next twelve months on where we're headed.

Another thing that was in your presentation was that you saw Lord of the Rings as a serious contender for World of Warcraft, so where do you see it at in twelve months from now?

We try not to do direct comparisons - we think that there's a huge audience out there and we think that this game can appeal to that audience. We're reaching out worldwide on day one, we're reaching out to ten or twelve territories from day one. We think that this is a big international title - our crystal ball isn't any better than anybody else's.

Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar will be released on PC on April 24th; TVG will have more on the Tolkien-based MMO shortly...