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Lord Of The Rings Online: Shadows Of Angmar Q&A Feature
Jon Wilcox
04/05/2006
TVG chats to Turbine about their one MMO to rule them all...
There's no doubt that right now the most dominant MMO on the market is Blizzard's World of Warcraft with over six million global subscribers; however Westwood, Massachusetts based Turbine who've already developed and released key MMOs of their own in Asheron's Call and Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach, believe that they may have the next big MMO on their hands. Based on the literary works by JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar has been pencilled in for a fourth quarter 2006 launch in North American and Europe. TVG recently spoke to the Executive Producer, Jeffrey Steefel, about the game.
First off how much of a challenge has it been to adapt Tolkien's world as an MMO?
It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand you couldn't ask for a better thing to start with making an MMO because I could go out and hire the best writers, all the best designers, all the best world builders in the world and they would never have the time or the talent to come up with something that's as rich and as detailed and full of depth and complexity as Tolkien did because he had thirty years to do it. So that already gives us all kind of amazing material; it's already consistent and it already has a life of its own.
What's hard about it is that it comes with boundaries. There are something's that we have to work with. Sometimes it's just something really simple like instead of calling it 'Health', we call it 'Morale'; it sounds semantic but what it really does is make people feel more consistent and it also makes Tolkien [Enterprises] happy.
Then there are harder things like magic. There were only five wizards in the thousands of years of Middle-Earth, so you can never be a wizard in Lord of the Rings Online. That's disappointing, on the other hand we've created the Lore-Master, which has all the properties you'd expect from a magic user, it has all the kind of attacks and effects that you're used to. We've just had to be clever in some cases as to what it is; a fireball is not holding up your hand and having the fireball appear in your hand magically, it's some kind of object that does exactly the same thing to happen to your opponent.
And I guess there's plenty of Tolkien fanatics who'd probably cast down hellfire if there's any sort of difference...
Oh yeah, and we're probably going to displease those people. First and foremost this is a game, and it has to be a good game, and we can't compromise that at all. It's one of the reasons it's specialist is because it's set in Middle-Earth so therefore we don't compromise Middle-Earth too much so it doesn't feel like Middle-Earth anymore. If someone is like "No-one uses magic in Middle-Earth", it's like saying "No-one who gets defeated in Middle-Earth stands up again" or "Hobbits would never wear armour". So, it's a challenge but it's great.
How close has been Turbine been working with Tolkien Enterprises and Tolkien Estates?
Let me be more specific; Tolkien Estates is here [in the UK] in Cambridge and nobody talks to them. But the family basically put its rights with Tolkien Enterprises, that's Saul Zaentz Company, which is based in California. So we work directly with them, we hold the license directly through them. I talk to them on a weekly if not a daily basis - they're going to be at our offices next week in fact. So they're very involved, they've put together guidelines. I actually have a full-time external Tolkien consultant who is someone they've worked with before and actually checks everything that we do before it gets put into the game.
The title "Shadows of Angmar" refers to the original home of the Witch-King, how does the city fit into the overall scope of the game?
Well we checked with Tokien Enterprises to make sure that they were happy too, but this is an example of where they've been really great in letting us create new stories. It's clearly not part of the main story, but in the Second Age, Angmar played very prominently, they sacked Arnor and The Shire; Angmar has a history of being a source or people trying to take over Eridaor. So we thought wouldn't it be cool if the Witch-King rose a bunch of ghost captains who'd died there and some Wights [spectral creatures] and started creating the beginnings of a army and rebuild Angmar to create a second front for war. What that really does to the Fellowship is get them stuck between a rock and a hard place because they can't go back to Eriador, they have nowhere to go, and it's not inconsistent with the lore because it's happened before.
"...we thought wouldn't it be cool if the Witch-King rose a bunch of ghost captains who'd died there and some Wights [spectral creatures]...to create a second front for war."
So we did that, the Witch-King who fled Angmar doesn't come back, but he's managing it from afar. He shows up near there and you end up chasing him down to the Great Barrows, and all that kind of stuff. It's very consistent with the history and gives us a way of tying it in to the Lord of the Rings.
It may sound like a daft question, but why was the decision made to restrict Shadows of Angmar to the lands of Eriador?
You mean for launch? It's just a matter of density and depth. We had two choices: one is really, really broad and thin, or small in scope but more detailed. Given the richness of the material, and there was a discussion about it with people saying "It's Lord of the Rings and players are going to want to go to Moria, they're going to want to go to Rohan and they want all that stuff", but then you've thrown away the next five years of your persistent world, which makes no sense.
There's so much good stuff in Eriador, that's where everything begins. There's a lot of material there; you can look at a map of Middle-Earth and you look at Eriador and you think that's not very much, but if you zoom into all the areas and regions, and the content that we're doing then it's huge. It's a little bit of a challenge if you're looking for the dark and evil world that the movies especially had by Return of the King, but I think that's very appropriate for the elder part of the game so by the time our first set of players have matured, they're gearing up for the war and that feels very appropriate to me.
It also means that we create the great geography at a pace that's possible; there's a lot of land in Middle-Earth. I tell you what, we could charge $149 a month subscription and then we could probably afford to hire enough people to do that - let me know how that goes...
You've said that players will meet a character such as Gandalf or a Nazgul within the first few minutes of the game to help establish them into Middle-Earth. How often do you plan to do that to keep reminding players that it is Middle-Earth through the course of the game?
So the idea is that in the first ten levels you want to experience that quite a bit. There's a lot of people who are going to be drawn to the game because of the movies, and the characters in the movies so we want to deliver on that early on. But the sooner that we can get them to understand how broad and how much there is to it, the better because that's really what our game is about. In the very beginning it will happen a lot then it will begin to taper, here and there you'll encounter different people, and then by the time we reach the end of the launch product when you get to Rivendell there'll be lots and lots of familiar faces so we leave you at that.
We'll then do that same for the expansions, we'll make sure that when you reach each new regions like Lorien and Moria there'll be people you haven't met yet. So it's something that's always going to be there, but it'll tend to be that you'll have lots in the beginning then it will taper off before bringing up the frequency back up towards the end.
MMOs are sometimes criticised for being too 'Fed-Ex' in style; how have you ensured that there's a balance to stop the gameplay from going stagnant?
We have about ten types of quests whether they're Carry quests, Landscapes quests, or what we call 'Tasks', they're the Fed-Ex style quests. First of all Tasks are only going to make up a very small percentage of the game. Second is that even Task quests provide good content, so instead of saying "Go get me four of these" we try to take it one step further and try to link it to the story so it more like "Our town is under siege from the Black Riders, it's been dangerous. We're staving, can you go and kill four boars." It's still a Fed-Ex quest, but at least it has some relevance to the story. At the end of the day it's still a Fed-Ex quest, but sometimes it's nice to pick up quests along the way. You can stack quests as you go like anything, so I may be on a long quest arc but come across someone who says "Hey, can you get me some..." and I'll just get some along the way.
How much pressure has it been as one of the top MMO developers to have something like World of Warcraft out there?
What I have to say about that is that whatever Blizzard did for the industry, it's started a series of events that's opened up the market, which for us is good. Making Lord of the Rings Online is a lot of pressure because of the expectation of what it is, there's a lot more people now who understand what these games are so in some respects it's great for us.
I know that at the moment you're concentrating on Eriador, which follows events around of the time of the first book, but have you thought about the impact of Gollum as the game expands?
Well it's tricky because you always know where he is a lot of the time, whether that's in the towers in Mordor or whatever. So no, we haven't found a good solution to it yet. It might be something that we do after launch, we could start playing with time perhaps go back to the second age and see Gollum before he becomes Gollum.
Unlike other MMOs like Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft, the story of Lord of the Rings actually has a definitive end. So in five or ten years time there's going to be a point when the Battle of Pelennor Fields, the Siege at the Black Gate, and the Destruction of the Ring of Power; do you go into the Fourth Age, which is really uncharted territory?
We've talked about that a lot, and I've talked to Tolkien [Enterprises] about that. I think that when you get to that point in five of six years so many things will have happened, the game will have changed in so many different ways. Technologies are going to have evolved, our capabilities will have evolved; I think that by the time the story has been exhausted that players will be writing their own story, so maybe the thread stops but the world persists. So the destruction of the Ring happens and then things happen, and I think that Tolkien would have liked that.
There'd be little things that we could do but ultimately we'd be guessing as much as the players.
"...people [were] saying "It's Lord of the Rings and players are going to want to go to Moria, they're going to want to go to Rohan and they want all that stuff", but then you've thrown away the next five years of your persistent world..."
Codemasters are traditionally a publisher of console products; are you open to bringing Shadows of Angmar over to the next-gen formats?
Well we intentionally have the global license for all platforms so Turbine in general will be expanding our distribution. The way I look at it, it's just a different distribution platform and opens up the distribution market. MMORPGs have had a difficult time on the console space because of the amount and size of the text, with games like Everquest Online Adventures having great difficulty in doing that. Part of the issue is that we wouldn't do a port, we would have to rethink the game in some respects. The content would be similar but consoles are a different experience. DDO [Dungeons & Dragons Online, another of Turbine's MMOs) is a great game for a console because its an action, twitch based game.
Voice chat is something that we're going to start with at launch and see how people get on with that, which would be an answer for role-playing on a console. It also has to do with business models and infrastructure come along in terms of Xbox and PlayStation, and what Microsoft and Sony have in reality in terms of models and online infrastructure, but absolutely. With something like this IP it's something that's going to reach the widest possible audience so we don't want platform to get in the way.
I spent a fair amount of time at Sony working with Interactive TV, and mobile, and console, so I'm a big believer in multiple platforms. I can easily see this IP extending into those types of platforms as well. The day will come soon enough when anything that's 2D on this HUD I should be able to do when I'm sitting on the train on my phone. I should be able to manage my guild, inventory or prepare for a raid on my cellphone; and there's no need to play the 3D game on my phone that's pointless, it's the right platform for the right function.
"The day will come soon enough when anything that's 2D on this HUD I should be able to do when I'm sitting on the train on my phone."
The ultimate goal is that we have servers on which our world exists, you have your data that belongs to your character and your guild, and you have multiple points of connectivity. I'm going to want to access my character from where ever I am whether that's an internet café in Europe or in Asia, or on a console at home or whether I'm on my cellphone - we're going to get there.
That's great, thanks for answering our questions.
Sure thing, no problem.
TVG would like to thank Jeffrey Steefel, Executive Producer of Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar at Turbine for answering our questions on the game. Currently in development for a release later in 2006, we'll have more on Shadows of Angmar shortly...
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