June 12, 2007

Turbine’s Jeffrey Steefel talks about turning a popular license into a successful MMO
By Michael Lafferty

“Our content updates will be regular part of what we do”

The books were immensely popular, the movie trilogy was immensely popular, even the real-time strategy video-game titles have been immensely popular, but bringing Lord of the Rings to the massively multiplayer market was a horse of a different color (no reference to Shadowfax). Given the linear storyline that was so well known, could the license make for a viable online title?

That was the challenge facing Turbine, a veteran developer of MMOs. And, judging by the sales and online community, it was a challenge that was met well. Lord of the Rings Online: Shadow of Angmar was one of the top-selling PC titles during it’s launch cycle back in April, and remains strong not only in terms of sales but in a community that continues to populate the world, whether to take on the challenges of battling the forces of Sauron, or just to gather in city hubs to create a little music.

The game is multi-faceted, with players able to undertake a wide variety of missions in the huge world Turbine created, or enter instanced zones to follow a book-based quest series that runs concurrent to the quest that the Fellowship of the Ring is running elsewhere. You will run into Aragorn, who will reference the fellowship, or even run an errand for Tom Bombadil. The main storyline quests trace the books, but just exploring the world will yield up familiar characters from the novels, most of whom have quests for the players.

And if you don’t want to quest, there is always the opportunity to learn a musical instrument and either gather about a campfire playing along, or joining in an impromptu jam session in one of the game’s many towns.

This week Turbine will launch a significant content update with Book 9: Shores of Evendim. Not only will this update feature new lands, quests and monsters, but the music system will be updated – adding percussion and bass instruments as well as giving players the ability to compose music offline and then upload to their characters. And there will be seven new armor sets as well.

GameZone had the chance to chat with Jeffrey Steefel, the executive producer of LOTRO, about the title.

How important was it to Turbine, as a company, that LotRO be a successful title?

Jeffrey: Was it critically important? This was the most important product to the company; it has been for quite some time. It’s taken a lot of steps along the way to change Turbine from the 75 people we were four or five years ago to who we are now. And this is the next step and so far it has gone exactly the way we wanted it to.

What did Turbine learn from both AC2 and DDO that was applied to LotRO?

Jeffrey: Lots of things and lots of things from Asheron’s Call, as well. I would say, just in general as a company, we have acquired, grown, and disciplined ourselves to have more maturity. We have more control over the situation with this game than we did with AC2. We made sure that this game went out when we thought it was ready to go out. And that was really, really important.

This was, by all accounts, one of the more stable MMO launches and one of the more stable MMO games, and that is a direct result of lots and lots of mistakes over the last 12 years.

You were building a game based on a very popular title, both from a literary as well as a cinematic standpoint. How much pressure did that put on the dev team to not only live up to the books, but to try to capture that grand cinematic feel that the movies had provided?

Jeffrey: No pressure … just kidding. A lot but it was also a huge, huge opportunity. The greater the opportunity the greater the expectations. There were huge expectations for the game, accentuated by the fact that the game, one way or another, had been in development for a very long time, across multiple developers, across multiple incarnations. There are people on our boards (forums) today, that were on our boards years ago when we were making Middle-earth Online for Vivendi. In addition to the fact that it is Lord of the Rings and people expect it to live up to their fantasy of what Lord of the Rings are; in addition to the fact that it has to live up to the great success of the movie and deservedly so. And then the last thing is I think the sense of ‘wait and see’ had turned to ‘well, we are not going to worry about Lord of the Rings right now – if it happens someday then we will take a look.’

I think the way you get over being freaked out about that is to break it down into its component parts. What is that expectation? What are people really looking for and who are those people? When we started to do that we realized that what people are looking for are a number of things – the first challenge is they want to be part of the Lord of the Rings. The movies really deliver on that; the single-player games really deliver on that.

Players can build up skills, get top-quality armor and weapons and still not be as “uber” as the upper-end NPCs, like Gandalf or Sauron. Did you feel it a challenge to create viability within the player classes while still retaining the benchmarks that had to belong to the story’s central NPCs?

Jeffrey: In a word – absolutely. A big challenge. To your point, there are five wizards in Middle-earth, there are not a lot of magicians running around Middle-earth. On the other hand, elves and Rivendell and other parts of the world have a magical feel to them and we know that an RPG absolutely requires there to be a magical class. It can’t be a sort of magical class, it has to feel like I have a powerful role to play. So how do we reconcile that? For us, it was a combination of making it really clear to Tolkien Enterprises that we understood that paradox and that we were going to wrap this magic class in a way that felt if something like that did exist in the world, it would make sense to view it in this way. It is really more about calling it a lore-master than a mage or wizard.

Tolkien Enterprises really supported us in understanding that it needed to be a great game and that sometimes things would be in conflict but at the end of the day, it had to be a great game.

Let’s talk content update – what key elements will Book 9: The Shores of Evendim contain?

Jeffrey: Our content updates will be regular part of what we do. Our goal to do significant, high-content updates. This is not something we were working on during launch and then just kind of finished up after launch. This is something we had people specifically working on for like a 10-week period. So we are launching an entire new region (with a region that equivalent in size to 10 percent of the existing territory at launch). We are adding nine new monsters, some of which have completely unique AI and function different than any other monsters in the world. We have over 120 new quests, a lot of it targeted to the 25-40 range, which is where a lot of players are getting to. We have a bunch of new instances and we have our first, full-on drop-down, drag-out 24-man raid, which is a killer. And a lot of enhancements to the monster play.

And then the environment itself, Evendim, our goal was that this should feel like a very different place from anywhere the player has been so far. It’s this big giant lake, it has lake-like creatures in it that swim.

You put a nice twist on PvP by allowing players to use a fell scrying pool to create servants of Sauron to battle other players in the Ettenmoors. How well received has that been?

Jeffrey: It’s been great, people love playing monsters and love going in (to the Ettenmoors). And I think some of the things that are exciting to people are it scratches that ‘I want to kill people’ itch, but it also says ‘I can get into this very easy … I can start doing this at level 10; I don’t have to grind my way through 40 levels before I’m even eligible to fight in PvP.’

What were your favorite elements of the books that you think made a nice transition into the game?

Jeffrey: So many things. The first thing is the world itself. It’s not just a fantasy world – and there are a lot of amazing fantasy world – but it just felt like you could walk down some path somewhere and find yourself in this world. And that is a huge thing.

GameZone's Review of Lord of the Rings Online

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